UAW Vice President Cindy Estrada, who heads the union’s Stellantis Department, will retire when her current term ends later this year.
Estrada, who informed members of her decision in a letter Monday, becomes the second current UAW vice president to make such an announcement. Terry Dittes, who heads the union’s General Motors department, announced last week that he would retire this summer.
Both announcements come as the union gears up this year for changes in how it picks its top leaders in the fallout from its corruption scandal. During a referendum election last year, members chose direct elections for members of the International Executive Board, which includes the vice presidents, over the traditional process of having delegates select the leaders at UAW conventions, although the conventions will continue to play a role in the process. The next UAW convention is scheduled for July 25-28 in Detroit.
Estrada is in her third four-year term as a UAW vice president, now heading the Stellantis (formerly Fiat Chrysler Automobiles), organizing, higher education and women’s departments. Her term ends on Dec. 31, so her successor would start in January.
Estrada said this is the right time for her to make a change.
“The work is not done, but I believe the time has come for me to make space for the next generation of leaders of our great union. … It is a difficult decision to leave our UAW, a union I love and to which I have dedicated much of my life. However, I am very confident in the direction of our union under the leadership of our president, Ray Curry,” Estrada said in her letter to members. “As I look back over the past 26 years as a member, organizer, staff and International Union UAW vice president, I am proud of the work that we have done together.”
Estrada’s tenure included leading the UAW’s GM Department before Dittes. She was the first woman and first Latina to do so, her UAW bio noted. She shifted to oversight of the then-FCA Department in 2018, the year Gary Jones became president. At the time, Jones said the move would give Estrada more broad experience.
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Jones later became one of two former UAW presidents caught up in the corruption scandal that led to convictions against more than a dozen ex-union officials and former FCA executives. FCA also pleaded guilty for its role in the scandal.
Estrada said in her letter that for the remainder of her term she would continue work on “strategic national organizing campaigns” in the electric vehicle sector “to demand that new EV work be union built and existing members in the traditional technologies are not abandoned.”
Her bio notes that Estrada, widow of the late UAW organizer and retired administrative assistant Frank White, earned a degree in education from the University of Michigan and had planned to become a teacher but shifted her focus after organizing with the United Farm Workers union during an internship.
Among her early accomplishments was helping organize workers at Mexican Industries in 1995, “resulting in one of the UAW’s largest victories among Spanish-speaking manufacturing workers.”
More recently, as head of the Stellantis Department, Estrada was involved in negotiations in 2019 on the current UAW contract with the automaker that resulted in the largest profit-sharing checks that the company or it predecessors had announced in 35 years.
Workers this month are potentially in line for profit-sharing checks before taxes totaling $14,670, the highest total among the Detroit Three. In a statement when the check amount was announced, Estrada noted that the UAW bargaining team “fought hard for an enhanced profit-sharing formula that more fairly distributed profit earnings based on the company’s unique structure.”
Contact Eric D. Lawrence: elawrence@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter: @_ericdlawrence. Become a subscriber.