UAW's Williams leaves with a clouded legacy

DETROIT — UAW President Dennis Williams will retire this week after more than 40 years with the union, including a contentious, yet productive, four-year term as its leader.

A straight-shooting Midwesterner, Williams rose through the union's ranks without ever being a vice president. Instead, he was its secretary-treasurer — a nontraditional path to the top post.

Williams, 65, was expected to be a more disciplined, business-oriented leader than his predecessor, Bob King, who was at times too idealistic for his own good.

But Williams' legacy likely won't be what many expected when he was elected to lead the union in June 2014.

Nearly every one of his achievements was followed, or overshadowed, by tumultuous contract negotiations, failed organizing efforts and a federal investigation.

Those setbacks, along with an increasingly frustrated membership after years of stagnant wages and the union's first dues increase in nearly 50 years, made it difficult for the union to highlight many of Williams' accomplishments.

And there were accomplishments. Williams restructured the UAW's regions, cut costs, instituted budgets by departments and balanced the union's books. This week at the UAW Constitutional Convention, where his successor will be elected, he is expected to report that for the first time "in recent memory" the union is operating in the black.

"The strategies have been working," he told reporters last month during a quarterly roundtable discussion — another nontraditional tactic he and his staff employed to be more transparent with media and membership.

UAW membership under Williams grew by 27,405 from 2014 to 2017, led by diversification and a healthy auto industry, even though the union's home state of Michigan became a right-to-work state in 2013.

The union reports more than half of its organizing efforts were successful in the last four years, though it missed the big-ticket items: VW (aside from a small group of skilled-trades workers) and Nissan. Both were high-profile losses for the union.

Another, possibly larger problem for the union is still playing out. Federal officials continue to probe the UAW as part of a multiyear, multimillion-dollar corruption scandal that initially focused on a joint training center between the union and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.

The investigation has led to resignations, firings and allegations by investigators that illegal payments were made to union officials to take company-friendly positions during collective bargaining with the Detroit automakers.

Williams hasn't been named or charged in the case. Last month he reaffirmed he had not been indicted or interviewed by federal officials in connection to the investigation.

The case initially focused on events before Williams' tenure as president but has since expanded to include the period under his reign.

Williams, who plans to move to San Diego, described his last eight years in Detroit as "a huge challenge... but also very, very rewarding."

Even as he heads into the sunset, the story of those eight years is still being written.