April 2025

Happy spring Lansing Labor News readers, I want to take some time to start the conversation about the 2026 UAW elections.  We as members have a bit of work ahead of us as it relates to the topic.

In 2020 the former International UAW leadership and the United States jointly filed a proposed consent order concerning the lawsuit brought by our government.  Part of that consent decree included a 2021 referendum election where the members would decide the process for selecting the IEB.  The agreement is far-reaching and mostly beneficial, but has also potentially added cost, bureaucracy, and sometimes runs up against our UAW Constitution, but that conversation is for another article.

The work that needs to be completed for the 2026 elections was born out of the first-ever direct elections in 2022 and the run-off elections in 2023.  These elections occurred due to the results of the referendum election.  An election where roughly 14% of the members decided on how the institution would be run.  Why the low numbers?  Again, we’ll save that for another article.  However, one of the issues we will cover is the membership list and the rough condition it was in. 

Historically the UAW didn’t necessarily need to focus too much on who was a member, but instead how many members.  This becomes an issue when you are now required to mail a million ballots to your members.  There was an effort before the election to clean up the lists, but the time frame was too tight for the task at hand.  Particularly for part-time Financial Secretaries or Financial Secretaries from small to medium locals such as ours.  This time around the alarm bells have sounded earlier and the International UAW is trying to better assist the locals.  With a new Membership Department and outside assistance from Alix Partners, I am keeping my fingers crossed for a better outcome.

So, what do the members need to do?  Well, most importantly, vote.  Let’s not waste dues dollars on bad postage or normalize such low turnout numbers.  Secondly, keep your contact information up to date.  Most locals have agreements with employers to share limited amounts of data, including mailing addresses.  So, if your contact information is current at your employer, it should be correct at the local.  Thirdly, make sure that during any bargaining the CBA includes language for not only union security and eventuality clauses but also the sharing of contact information.  Lastly, our retirees should ensure that their contact information is current with the UAW.  This is one of the more difficult data sets to keep current because it’s up to the member to manually update.  Even for those retirees with defined benefits, the advent of direct deposit has cut off any information sharing with the locals because a correct address is no longer needed to mail a check. 

Now, the retirees of Local 652, about 6,000 of them, need not rush to call the local and update their address.  Since the 2023 elections, a lot of work has been done to correct the addresses from returned ballots, many of which were retirees.  And to be frank, the local doesn’t have the secretarial resources it once had to handle such a task.  We have created a tool on our website that will allow Local 652 retirees to more easily update their mailing information.  If you are retired, have moved since 2023 and didn’t update the local, and want to be included in the IEB elections, you can visit www.uawlocal652.org and click “change of address”.  If you are a non-retired member, please keep your contact information updated with your employer.