Friends,
Shawn
Fain is leading the Labor Movement into the Promised Land. Kagiso, Max
Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
The Moment It All Changed for UAW President Shawn Fain
Steven Greenhouse
September 22, 2023
Politico
In
2007, Shawn Fain was a little-known union official at a Chrysler plant in
Kokomo, Indiana, having gone to work there a dozen years before as an
electrician. What happened next set Fain on the path to where he is today:
president of the UAW and the key figure in a historic strike with no end in
sight.
That year, Chrysler (now part of Stellantis) was sliding
toward bankruptcy and insisted that to avoid going under, it needed deep
concessions from the UAW, including sharply reduced starting pay and a two-tier
wage structure in which pay and benefits for future workers would remain
permanently below those of workers hired before 2007. The UAW’s leaders decided,
unenthusiastically, to agree to those concessions, with Ford and
G.M. demanding similar provisions.
But Fain wasn’t ready to go along. As a committeeperson at
Local 1166, he led his local union to vote against ratifying the contract. It
was a rare act of defiance from rank-and-file workers amid the high-profile negotiations,
and Fain wasn’t at all reluctant about making his defiance public. He loudly
denounced the givebacks at a council meeting, saying, “Two-tier wages have no place in this union.”
And in a letter to UAW leadership that reached the media, he said that in
approving those concessions, “you might as well
get a gun and shoot yourself in the head.” It was a remarkable public break with his union’s
leadership and an important inflection point in Fain’s career.
With
that defiant step, Fain declared his independence from the political group —
known as the Administration Caucus — that had run the UAW for six decades. And
the move also set him up for a higher position — for years in staff jobs at UAW
headquarters in Detroit, then later to be catapulted into the union’s presidency.
Throughout, Fain was known for his unremitting opposition to
concessions, a stance that has directly led to today’s walkout in which the
UAW, for the first time ever, has struck all three Detroit automakers at once.
The strike has sent shock waves throughout the auto industry, inspired workers
across the U.S. and sent President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump
rushing to demonstrate who can show more support for the workers.
Fain, 54, had a bumpy ascent within the 400,000-member UAW.
Sometimes union leaders “moved him up in the hope of shutting him up,” said one
friend of Fain’s, Scott Houldieson, a Ford assembly plant worker in Chicago and
long-time UAW dissident. Other times UAW leaders grew irate with Fain and
demoted him. Fain’s official union biography says, “Many times… he was ostracized for speaking up.”
The UAW didn’t make him available for an interview.
Being a prominent dissident put Fain in a good position to
run for high union office after an embarrassing crisis hit the UAW in recent
years. Prosecutors unearthed a huge corruption scandal in which a
dozen UAW leaders, including two former presidents, were ultimately
convicted of embezzling more than $5 million in funds for luxury items and
travel, from hotels and golf trips to cigars and liquor.
Fain raised his hand to run for UAW president last year only
after the union’s members voted to hold direct elections for top UAW leaders
for the first time in the union’s history. That made it possible for a
dissident like Fain to have a chance to win, because the Administration Caucus
would no longer have total control over who would be chosen president.
“After 75 years of iron-fisted rule by the Administration
Caucus, people were reluctant to step out and challenge the ruling group,” said
Houldieson. “Shawn had the courage to do that. Not many others did.”
There’s somewhat of a paradox to Fain. On one hand, Fain, a blunt-talking and
compelling speaker, comes across as a traditionalist, talking of his God and
faith and three grandparents who worked in auto plants. He carries around an
old, well-worn pay stub from one grandfather who went to work for Chrysler in
1937, the year of the famous sit-down strike that unionized G.M. At the same
time, Fain comes across as a militant, channeling Bernie Sanders as he bashes
“the billionaire class.” He sometimes quotes Malcolm X and says “we have
to be willing to stand up and get our demands by any means
necessary.”
Fain ran for UAW president as an insurgent, and one of his
main talking points was “no concessions.” Throughout his campaign, he belittled
previous UAW presidents for not being tough enough towards the automakers.
After eking out a narrow victory in March, Fain promised
that in this summer’s contract talks with GM, Ford and Stellantis, he would
demand that they roll back some of the detested concessions dating to 2007,
especially the two-tier pay structure.
Fain has repeatedly argued that at a time when Detroit’s
automakers have racked up record profits, they should reward their workers,
particularly because auto workers’ pay has fallen so far behind inflation (by 19 percent since 2008,
according to one think tank).
In making these arguments, Fain,
like the legendary UAW leader Walter Reuther who led the union from 1946 to
1970, has framed this fight as one to help not just auto workers, but America’s
entire working class.
“We’re all fed up with living in a
world that values profits over people,” Fain said earlier this
month. “We’re all fed up with seeing the rich get richer while the rest of us
just continue to scrape by. We’re all fed up with corporate greed and together,
we’re going to fight like hell to change it.”
Also much like Reuther, Fain has roiled the White House at
times. He castigated Biden for not doing
enough to ensure that the new electric vehicle battery plants
being built with federal subsidies will pay high wages. Some Democrats have
voiced fears that Fain’s harsh words for Biden will push some UAW members into
backing Trump or staying home in November 2024.
“He’s taking a very militant line and acting very different
from past union presidents,” said Harry Katz, a professor and former dean of
the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “He tore up a Chrysler
contract offer and threw it in the trash. He benefits from acting
unpredictably. He keeps the companies off balance.”
United Auto Workers members, including President Shawn Fain,
center, march past General Motors headquarters in Detroit on Friday, Sept. 15,
2023. | Paul Sancya/AP Photo
“The very existence of billionaires
shows us that we have an economy that is working for the
benefit of the few, and not the many,” Fain said. “It feels like we’ve gone so
far backwards that we have to fight just to have the 40-hour workweek back. Why
is that? So another ###hole can make enough money to shoot himself to the
moon?”
Marick Masters, a business professor at Wayne State
University in Detroit, said Fain deserves credit for changing the narrative
about workers and their role in the economy. “Going back decades, we’ve
approached negotiations as, ‘What can labor give to help us be competitive?’”
Masters said. “But with Fain, it’s more that labor is entitled to its fair
share and it’s time to address all the inequality.”
The UAW strike has been getting
huge publicity and public support — one poll found that 54 percent of Americans
support the walkout, while 18 percent oppose it.
That’s even as Fain has pushed a huge and ambitious list of
demands: raises of more than 40 percent, a cost-of-living adjustment, a 32-hour
workweek, ending the two-tier pay structure, restoring reduced pension and
health benefits, creating a jobs bank for laid-off workers, and converting
temporary workers to full employees with full benefits after 90 days on the
job.
“Shawn has been very tough to date. That has caught the
companies off guard,” said Harley Shaiken, a UC Berkeley professor and former
auto worker who attended a three-day bargaining strategy session that Fain led.
While the automakers have blanched at Fain’s many proposals,
saying they’re exorbitantly expensive, some Fain supporters say he was merely
putting forward the demands that rank-and-file workers wanted.
Frustrated with Fain’s long list of demands, Ford CEO Jim
Farley said, “You want us to choose bankruptcy over
supporting our workers.”
Masters said that by making so many
ambitious demands, “Fain may have painted himself in a corner that he can’t get
out of without losing some face.” In other words, even if Fain wins, say, large
wage increases, a cost-of-living adjustment and an end to two tiers, some union
members might nonetheless be angry that he didn’t also win on a
32-hour-workweek, improved pension benefits, a jobs bank and improvements for
temporary workers.
As for politics, it’s also possible Fain has fumbled things.
He has railed against Biden and said that his traditionally Democratic union
was withholding any endorsement from the president, at least for now — moves
that Fain hopes will pressure Biden to do more to ensure high wages at new,
federally subsidized battery plants. But some longtime labor watchers fear that
Fain’s harsh words and non-endorsement will push some UAW members into Trump’s
camp.
“It was a big mistake for Fain to criticize Biden so rudely
and hold off on endorsing,” Katz said. “Biden has been the most pro-union
president of our lifetime. I think Fain, by using that language, fuels support
for our fascist former president, and I’m scared about that.”
Trump is trying to seize on the
opportunity, saying he will go to Detroit next week to speak to union members.
In response, Fain laid into Trump: “Every fiber of our union is being
poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that
enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers.”
Ultimately for Fain and his union, it all depends on how the
strike concludes.
“He can have a real victory here,” Shaiken said. “But there
has to be an end game, and nobody is clear on his end game.”
Read more: Record Auto
Profits Should be Used to Address Inequality and the Climate Crisis by UAW
President Shawn Fain and Congressman Ro Khanna
Steven Greenhouse, a senior
fellow at the Century Foundation, is a former New York Times labor reporter and
author of Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of
American Labor.
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Source URL: https://portside.org/2023-09-24/moment-it-all-changed-uaw-president-shawn-fain
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