At the UAW convention in Detroit in July, Daniel Vicente wasn’t shy about expressing frustration.
Delegates in the convention’s closing hours, after many others had already left, had reversed a vote to boost strike pay, a key push by many reformers, taken only a day before. Vicente used words like disgust to describe his feelings about a situation he said showed how the leadership could flex its muscles when it wanted.
“It lit a fire under me something fierce,” Vicente, who was a delegate representing Local 644 in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, said this week, explaining that he has a different vision of unionism.
That convention was when Vicente’s campaign to lead his UAW region, headquartered in western New York, became official. This week, as voting continued in the UAW runoff election, unofficial results for Region 9 showed him beating Lauren Farrell on a vote of 4,347 to 4,025, making him the latest dissident to claim a seat on the union’s International Executive Board as part of the UAW’s first direct election of top leaders. The board, incidentally, opted just last month to move forward with a strike pay increase to $500 per week.
On Thursday, Vicente, who ran as part of the UAW Members United slate, described a different range of emotions from what he’d experienced at the convention, when he learned he’d won on Wednesday.
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“I had my whole family with me at my house and it was … overwhelmingly just like a beautiful moment. I had my mom and my wife and my kids and we all just shed a tear of happiness, and I’m just ready to go,” Vicente said.
Vote counting, which began Wednesday, isn’t over. A vice presidential seat and the union’s presidency are still up for grabs. It’s not clear how many more days the counting could go, with numerous regions still to be tallied.
The independent UAW monitor reported that 141,548 ballots had been received by the deadline. Although it’s not clear how many of those are eligible, it’s an increase from the 106,790 received during the initial election last year.
For Vicente, 33, who was born in Philadelphia, loves to read and is a big Eagles fan, his new role will mean major changes, including looking for a new home in the Buffalo, N.Y., area. He plans to move his wife and four children, ages 1-12, from their home in Chester County, Pennsylvania, after the school year is done.
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He planned to work a final 10-hour shift Friday at his plant, operated by Sweden’s Dometic, which makes steering control cables for boats. Vicente operates plastic extrusion machines, which wrap wires and coat them in plastic.
Vicente credits his current union job with changing the trajectory of his life, providing insurance and other benefits. He’s had other kinds of jobs, too, including as a nonunion dishwasher and short order cook, “working crazy amounts of hours to get by.” Vincente was in the Marine Corps in 2008-12 and said he had a “rough transition” back to civilian life.
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But it was the brushoff Vicente said he received from a local union official at his current job after he’d been exposed to chemicals and had to take a trip to the hospital which Vicente said pushed him toward elected union office.
Although it has been a challenge campaigning while holding a factory job, it has also proven beneficial because Vicente said he understands what workers are facing and it helps him connect with them, knowing “exactly what you’re talking about because I also work the floor.”
Vicente said he has heard regular complaints from those he has met about not seeing union leaders, and that “rank-and-file people feel forgotten by their union.”
Vicente said he intends to travel the region, which covers western and central New York, New Jersey and most of Pennsylvania, and meet with as many local members and their leaders as possible to see what he can do to help them access resources. Educating new members on unionism and building connections across facilities in an area that used to be a “manufacturing powerhouse” are among his goals.
“The race is done so now the hard part begins,” he said.
Contact Eric D. Lawrence: elawrence@freepress.com. Become a subscriber.