To many supporters of American unions—indeed, to many in the meeting room—the conflicting accounts, palpable animosities, and vituperative attacks launched during the February 2024 meeting of the United Auto Workers’ International Executive Board (IEB)—the union’s topmost policymaking body between its quadrennial conventions—came as a shock. That this rift persists, and that it may lead to a bitterly contested election campaign for the union’s top posts later this year, only deepens those supporters’ confusion and dismay, particularly since the union has, from the outside, amassed a stellar record of victories in bargaining and organizing of late.

At stake is the future of the institution that did more to build the broadly shared prosperity of mid-20th-century America than any other. At stake is the future of the union that was the anchor tenant in the house of postwar American liberalism, providing crucial funding to the civil rights movement and early iterations of the women’s and environmental movements. At stake is the future of a union that for the past 40 years has borne the brunt of the downsizing of American manufacturing, of the foreign competition and hostile trade policy that both winnowed its ranks and compelled its members to give back some of the gains their predecessors had won.

But also at stake is the historic revival that the union has experienced under its new leadership in the past three years, and its ability to build on this dynamic success, which depends in part on the union—its leaders and staffers most particularly—ceasing to act as a house divided against itself.

When the IEB convened in early 2024, an outsider might have expected the meeting to be both celebratory and focused on organizing strategies. It had been only four months since the union had waged its innovative “Stand Up” strikes and bargaining campaigns against General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler), winning members their first decisive victory since the 1980s. The strikes, which saw selected UAW locals walk out of crucially important plants on a timetable that the Big Three automakers could not plan for, befuddled and alarmed the companies. The campaign also built member excitement (and, crucially, public excitement) through social media, where rank-and-filers attested to their struggles and demands, and the UAW’s new president, Shawn Fain, broke with tradition by continually updating the progress of negotiations, which had previously always been closely guarded secrets until settlements were announced.

What’s more, the February meeting took place amid what would become a landmark organizing victory, not just for the UAW but for the entire labor movement. Less than two months later, the UAW would win the right to represent workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tennessee, factory by a 73 percent to 27 percent margin. For decades, European, Japanese, and South Korean automakers had been opening factories in the right-to-work states of the American South, where the power elite’s mobilization of long-standing anti-union sentiment had doomed nearly all the labor movement’s efforts to persuade workers to go union. But on the heels of the record contracts with the Big Three, which had been so widely publicized that many of the South’s non-union factories immediately announced major wage increases lest their workers take it into their heads to unionize, the UAW was throwing everything it had into the Chattanooga campaign, among several other plants in the South.