On Saturday, April 25, I introduced the following resolution at a meeting of UAW Local 677 in Macungie, Pennsylvania, the local that includes the Mack Trucks plant where I work. The meeting was attended by members of the local apparatus. In order for resolutions to be presented at the upcoming Constitutional Convention, they must first be approved by local unions.
When the vote was taken, the resolution was voted down 7–1, with my vote being the only one in favor.
This outcome stands in sharp contradiction to the sentiments of rank-and-file workers. There is enormous opposition among autoworkers and workers throughout the UAW to the war, to the attacks on democratic rights at home, and to the diversion of trillions into militarism while living standards are slashed. But the UAW apparatus has aligned itself with the war drive of the government and the corporations, enforcing nationalism while workers are told to “sacrifice” for policies that benefit only the financial oligarchy.
I urge workers to read, print, and distribute this resolution widely in your workplaces, present it at your local, and use it to organize discussion and action independent of the bureaucracy. The fight against war cannot be waged through the officials who support it. It requires the conscious mobilization of rank-and-file workers in every plant, every workplace, and every local.
UAW Convention Resolution
Against the US-Israeli Imperialist War on Iran — For the Independent Mobilization of the Working Class
WHEREAS, on February 28, 2026, the United States, acting in concert with Israel, launched “Operation Epic Fury” against Iran — a war of aggression carried out without a declaration of war, without authorization from Congress, and in violation of the United Nations Charter — and has since prosecuted this war through sustained bombing, naval operations in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, and direct attacks on Iran’s civilian infrastructure including bridges, power plants, petrochemical facilities, steel factories, and universities; and
WHEREAS, the launching of a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, established as such by the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945–46 in the trial of the Nazi leaders, where the prosecution of aggressive war was identified as “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” — a principle subsequently affirmed by the United Nations General Assembly and made binding upon all states; and
WHEREAS, on April 7, 2026, President Trump publicly threatened the destruction of an entire civilization, declaring that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” — a genocidal threat directed against ninety-three million Iranian people, the heirs of one of the oldest civilizations of human history, accompanied by demands for the “complete demolition” of Iran’s power plants and bridges and threats to bomb the country “back to the Stone Age” — threats which Amnesty International has characterized as “apocalyptic” and which constitute incitement to atrocity crimes; and
WHEREAS, this war is the culmination of decades of imperialist aggression by US capitalism against the peoples of the Middle East — from the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iran’s elected government, through the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, the destruction of Libya and Syria, and the ongoing US-armed Israeli genocide in Gaza — all waged for the domination of oil, markets, and strategic territory, and all paid for in the blood of the working class at home and abroad; and
WHEREAS, this war has already killed thousands of Iranian civilians, devastated Lebanon, killed and wounded hundreds of US service members, and threatens a catastrophic regional conflagration drawing in Russia and China, raising for the first time since the height of the Cold War the immediate and concrete danger of escalation to nuclear war — a war that would threaten the survival of humanity itself; and
WHEREAS, the prosecution of an open-ended war against a country of ninety-three million people, in a region in which the United States has already committed forty thousand troops, makes inevitable the demand for far greater numbers of soldiers, and raises the imminent threat of the reimposition of military conscription — a draft that would fall, as every draft has, on the sons and daughters of the working class while the children of the rich are exempted; and
WHEREAS, the war abroad and the war on the working class at home are inseparable parts of a single offensive: the same government that bombs Iranian cities has unleashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection against the immigrant working class within the United States, deploying militarized federal forces to American cities, carrying out mass raids in workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods, and constructing — through the $170 billion authorized for the Department of Homeland Security and $45 billion specifically for ICE detention — the largest immigration prison system in American history, with more than seventy-three thousand people held in detention and capacity now being expanded into converted industrial warehouses described by lawyers and human rights observers as concentration camps; and
WHEREAS, this domestic war has already produced mass incarceration and death: in 2025 at least thirty-two people died in ICE custody, the deadliest year on record; in the first months of 2026 at least seventeen more have died, including at least one ruled a homicide; federal agents have shot and killed US citizen protesters, including Renée Nicole Macklin Good in Minneapolis on January 7 and Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an ICU nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital, on January 24, 2026; thousands have been arrested under “Operation Metro Surge” in Minnesota alone, in the course of which a federal judge found ICE had violated at least ninety-six court orders; and
WHEREAS, the Trump administration has demanded a record $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget — a 42 percent increase, larger than the next thirty-four countries’ military budgets combined — together with a $200 billion emergency war supplemental, while simultaneously demanding $73 billion in cuts to housing, education, energy assistance, health research, and community services, and pursuing further attacks on Medicare, Medicaid, food assistance, and unemployment insurance; and
WHEREAS, President Trump has openly stated the class character of these priorities, declaring at a White House event: “We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care. It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare — all these individual things”; and
WHEREAS, the war is already being felt in the daily life of the working class through rising fuel and energy costs, food and housing inflation, and disruptions to global supply chains, while the defense contractors — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman — and the financial interests behind them reap record profits from the slaughter; and
WHEREAS, the auto industry itself is being drawn directly into the war economy, with proposals advanced to convert auto and auto parts production capacity to the manufacture of munitions, drones, missiles, and military vehicles — a course that would subordinate the jobs and labor of UAW members to the war machine, deepen the dependence of working-class communities on permanent militarism, and integrate autoworkers, against their interests, into the production of the weapons used to kill workers in other countries; and
WHEREAS, the war is accompanied at home by an intensifying assault on democratic rights — the militarization of police, the surveillance and prosecution of antiwar protesters, the deportation of immigrant workers and students who oppose the war, and the preparation of further attacks on the right to strike, to organize, and to dissent — measures that take dead aim at the historic gains of the labor movement; and
WHEREAS, the Democratic Party has joined with the Republican Party in funding and prosecuting this war, with leading Democrats supporting the strikes and Senate war powers resolutions failing repeatedly — demonstrating that the working class can place no confidence in either capitalist party or in the institutions of the capitalist state to end the war, and must rely on its own independent strength; and
WHEREAS, the membership of the UAW — autoworkers, parts workers, logistics workers, graduate workers, academic workers, healthcare workers — has no interest in this war, has every interest in the lives and livelihoods of workers in Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, and throughout the region, and possesses, through its position in production, transportation, and the universities, the social power to halt the war machine;
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that the UAW denounces the US-Israeli imperialist war on Iran as a criminal war of aggression — the supreme international crime as established at Nuremberg — demands its immediate cessation, the immediate end of all bombing and military operations, and the withdrawal of all US military forces from the Middle East; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the UAW condemns President Trump’s threat to “end a whole civilization” as a public incitement to genocide, condemns the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure indispensable to the survival of the Iranian people, and warns that those who order, prosecute, and justify such crimes bear personal responsibility under the precedents established at Nuremberg; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the UAW warns the working class of the imminent danger of escalation to a wider war involving nuclear-armed powers — a war that threatens human survival — and of the imminent danger of the reimposition of conscription to feed this war, and pledges to oppose any draft and to defend any worker or young person who refuses to fight in an imperialist war; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the UAW recognizes the unity of the war abroad and the war at home — that the same state that bombs Iranian civilians cages and kills immigrant workers within the United States — denounces the killings of Renée Nicole Macklin Good, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, and the seventeen and more who have died in ICE custody this year; demands the immediate disbanding of ICE and CBP as agencies of repression, the immediate release of all immigrant workers from detention, an immediate end to all deportations, and the closing of the detention warehouses and concentration camps; and defends the right of every worker, native-born and immigrant, citizen and non-citizen, to live and work without fear of state violence; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the UAW demands the cancellation of the $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget and the $200 billion war supplemental, opposes all cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, food assistance, unemployment insurance, education, housing, and energy assistance, and rejects categorically the demand that workers “pay for war”; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the UAW opposes the conversion of auto and auto parts production to military output, rejects the integration of the union and its members into the war economy, and affirms that the labor of autoworkers must be devoted to socially useful production — to mass transit, to the transition away from fossil fuels, to housing, to infrastructure that meets human need — and not to the manufacture of the weapons used to kill workers in other countries; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the UAW expresses its solidarity with the workers and oppressed peoples of Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, and the entire Middle East, who are the immediate victims of US and Israeli imperialism, and rejects every attempt to divide American workers from their class brothers and sisters abroad, or to divide native-born workers from immigrant workers at home; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the UAW recognizes that the war will not be ended by appeals to Congress, by lobbying the Democratic Party, or by reliance on capitalist politicians of any stripe — all of whom have either supported the war outright or proven incapable of stopping it — and that the war can be ended only by the independent mobilization of the working class, in the United States and internationally, in opposition to the war and the social order that produced it; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the UAW calls upon its membership to actualize the demands of this resolution through the formation of rank-and-file committees in every local — committees independent of and not subordinate to the union bureaucracy, composed of trusted workers elected directly by the rank and file in open membership meetings, accountable solely to the workers who elect them, subject to immediate recall, and charged with the active oversight, enforcement, and implementation of every demand contained herein; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that these rank-and-file committees shall have as their tasks: to take this resolution into every workplace and convene the membership to discuss and act upon it; to organize the defense of immigrant coworkers against ICE raids and deportations; to oppose any move to convert auto production to military output; to oppose the reimposition of conscription and to defend any worker or young person who refuses to fight; to establish direct lines of communication and coordination with rank-and-file committees in other UAW locals, in other unions, and with workers internationally, including in Iran; to convene assemblies and prepare the membership for industrial and political action up to and including work stoppages and strike action; and to report back regularly and openly to the membership on the progress of these tasks; and
BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED, that the UAW affirms that the implementation of this resolution cannot be left to officials, staff, or apparatus, but rests with the membership itself organized through these committees — that only the conscious, organized, and independent action of the rank and file can transform the words of this resolution into the deeds required to end the war, defeat the attack on the working class, and answer the crimes of imperialism with the united response of the working class internationally.
