What if UAW workers were to divest their labor from the construction of weaponry? What if the union tried to bargain over who employers sell their products to, or what products employers choose to make?

There is no legal precedent supporting the right to bargain over such issues, and reason to believe courts and the National Labor Relations Board would look skeptically at or outright reject such a claim. However, the purpose of this post is to argue that there is a path for unions to engage in such bargaining within the framework of the National Labor Relations Act as it currently exists, although pursing it will require certain ideological compromises. More specifically, I propose that unions can appeal to the concept of “moral injury” to make their complicity in the military-industrial complex a mandatory subject of bargaining, and thus justify at least a partial divestment of their labor.

In recent years, certain unions—represented most prominently by the teachers’ union strikes in 2012 and 2019 in Chicago and in 2019 in Los Angeles—have attempted to expand the scope of bargaining issues by pursuing social justice unionism. “Social justice unionism” is a model of labor militancy whereby workers demand structural changes to the institution in which they work and strike on behalf of the concerns and needs of community members who are their clients or neighbors, not their coworkers. Social justice unionism differs from both professionalist challenges (i.e., attempts by professional employees to bargain over self-governance or duties) and protectionist challenges (i.e., bargaining about “economic” department closures) to the scope of bargaining because it seeks to bring a set of third-party beneficiaries to the labor contract. Social justice unions are not interested in just exerting greater control over their workplaces, but in transforming the political and social formation of the union into a vehicle for exerting power in a broader policy realm that intersects, but is not coextensive with, their work and place of employment.

Applied to the context of a stereotypical UAW worker, a factory employee would experience moral injury if told she or he must help construct a tank that the worker knows will be put to use to carry out genocidal acts, or be terminated from their position. In the tripartite framework of First National Maintenance Corporation, the decision to make a chassis not for a truck but a tank is focused on “economic profitability,” but also has a “direct impact on employment” inasmuch as the worker assigned to make this new product will suffer emotional and psychological distress as a result. An employer’s decision to take on such a client would thus fall within the third category of employer decisions. Unions could then argue that the benefits to employees of being able to negotiate over the process for assigning employees to such products and employees’ right to refuse such work outweigh the burden placed on the employer.