Balancing Rights and Responsibilities in Remedying Union Corruption: The Case of the United Auto Workers (UAW)

The recent UAW scandal implicating the union’s highest-ranking officers raises questions about how to remedy such misconduct. Designing appropriate remedies requires understanding the rights and responsibilities of unions and their members in relation to each other. We examine the nature and scope of this scandal, whose tentacles emanated from the UAW’s joint administration of training centers operated with the Detroit 3, to illuminate the adequacy of the various remedies, including penalties, imposed on the union and the FCA (now Stellantis). Our analysis addresses the extent to which the remedies serve the delineated rights and responsibilities as well at meet the practical and principled criteria used to evaluate their effectiveness. The paper proceeds to provide a progress report on the implementation of the full complement of remedies inclusive of those proposed by the court-appointed Monitor. We find that the reforms are extensive in terms of addressing financial controls and incorporating a more rigorous ethical regimen but fall short in fundamentally altering the flawed culture which gave rise to wrongdoing. Further analysis of the relative costs and benefits of the remedies in terms of addressing the evaluative criteria needs to be done over next several years before firm conclusions can be reached.