But rank-and-file members are wondering at what point the UAW’s promotion of the car companies will mean the neglect of their own concerns. The union received a seat on the boards of GM and Chrysler as part of the VEBA arrangement, and the person who holds that seat at GM was recently named a vice chairman at the company. Gregg Shotwell, a retired GM worker and a co-founder of Soldiers of Solidarity, the largest of the UAW’s many splinter groups, sent me this news in an e-mail with the header “Can you say, ‘CONFLICT OF INTEREST!!!’” Shotwell believes the problems with the union’s ownership stakes are self-evident. As he told me, “What’s best for VEBA, what’s best for company stock, isn’t always best for the average worker.”

When I spoke to UAW President Ron Gettelfinger inside the Cobo Center, he sounded as boosterish about the car companies as did the industry executives who were pitching their new models in the adjoining showrooms. He had just finished addressing foreign press in a conference hall overlooking the Detroit River and the casinos on the opposite bank. He urged me to see an “inspiring” infomercial that Ford had aired on ABC the night before, and he predicted great things from a Fiat-led Chrysler. “Sergio has a way of building off his strengths,” he said of Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne. Gettelfinger is retiring in June, after navigating the union through one of its most tumultuous periods. At the auto show, he summed up his attitude with a simple mantra: “If you’re not an optimist, you’re a pessimist.”

Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University, explained that the UAW is now unlikely to take any action that might harm American car manufacturers. “The UAW sees GM as its future. You don’t argue with your future,” he explained.

The union did organize its own rally outside the auto show later that week. Its target was not GM or Ford, but Toyota. Ten workers from Toyota’s only unionized U.S. auto plant, a factory in Fremont, California, that had long operated as a joint venture with GM, were flown to Detroit to help lobby against the facility’s closure. Despite this protest and others, Toyota shuttered the plant in April. But last year, when GM abandoned the partnership, the UAW had remained silent, and it has done little to publicly oppose recent closings at dozens of Big Three factories.

Bob King is expected to be elected the union’s new president. He has already said that he intends to make the organization more transparent and improve its public image. With membership down to about 355,000, from a 1979 peak of 1.5 million, the UAW King inherits must also attempt to organize different sectors of the economy and form alliances with other unions. Additionally, it must overcome the growing distrust within its own ranks. As the UAW’s lead negotiator with Ford, King tried to persuade workers this past fall to accept concessions similar to those made at Chrysler and GM. Along with Gettelfinger, he argued that Ford was wallowing in debt and needed the concessions to remain competitive. But at the same time, the company was touting its return to profitability. The concessions were overwhelmingly voted down. When King stumped for the contract changes at a Dearborn, Michigan, truck plant, workers shouted him off the stage.