This Man Wants To Lead a New Workers’ Movement

In the United States, unionist Shawn Fain has just started a fight with the bosses of multiple automobile companies at the same time. For him, it has long been about more than just a few dollars.

Who is Shawn Fain? And what are his intentions? These questions must be keeping the heads of the Detroit automobile manufacturers quite occupied at the moment. Until recently, most Americans had no idea about the man from Kokomo, a town of 60,000 in Indiana. Fain, who looks more like an accountant with his 1950s glasses, is the head of United Auto Workers, the powerful 400,000 member-strong American automobile union. He is currently leading 13,000 UAW members in a historic strike. The union has never simultaneously struck against all of the Big Three major American automobile manufacturers: Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, formerly Chrysler.

Fain announced a drastic expansion of the strike prior to the weekend. Now, workers at 38 General Motors and Stellantis suppliers will also stop work. Fain has spared Ford for now because the company appears to be willing to negotiate.

The union boss has put ambitious demands on the table. raising hourly wages by 40%, shortening the work week and reintroducing a guaranteed company pension. However, Fain mainly wants to eliminate the two-tiered system. This was introduced in 2007 and means that newly hired employees not only receive significantly lower entry wages, but are also not entitled to the same compensation and benefits as their colleagues hired before the cut-off. This was apparently the only way Detroit automobile manufacturers could compete with foreign manufacturers whose staff are not unionized.

Toyota, as well as Daimler and BMW, specifically chose locations for their factories where the UAW traditionally had no chance to organize the workforce. For Fain, who was working as an electrician in the Chrysler plant in Kokomo at the time, that amounted to collective bargaining suicide, as he wrote back then in a letter to UAW leaders and leaked to the media. If the union were to allow these cuts, he said, then “you might as well get a gun and shoot yourself in the head.”

UAW Reformers Are Given a Chance

Fain, who likes to show off the pay slip of his grandfather who also worked at Chrysler, was the union leader of Local 1166 at the time, which was responsible for the Kokomo plant. When he got his members to vote against the collective bargaining agreement, it was an act of rebellion. Back then, the UAW had long been caught in a strictly hierarchical system, in which union leaders largely negotiated agreements with company leaders in secret.

Fain’s rise within the UAW was therefore anything but straightforward. Sometimes the union bosses tried to placate him through promotion, sometimes he was taken down. What badly damaged the UAW benefited Fain: The previous UAW bosses turned out to be highly corrupt. It involved millions in luxury villas and expensive vacations. The Department of Justice investigated. Not only were two UAW presidents immediately convicted, but the court placed the union administration under government oversight. This was enormous humiliation for the once proud union.

In the course of the investigations, internal communications from Chrysler accountants also came to light recommending that union bosses should be kept “fat, dumb and happy.” The scandal ensured that the reformers, who had tried in vain for many long years to clean up the organization, had a chance. There was an important new rule that allowed members to elect their top representatives directly. That’s how Fain won the election as president last year, if only barely.

An End to Corporate Greed

Fain’s friendly accountant-like appearance is deceiving, as corporate bosses are now learning. He demonstratively threw the first counter offer from Stellantis in the trash. “We’re all fed up with living in a world that values profits over people. We’re all fed up with seeing the rich get richer while the rest of us just continue to scrape by,” Fain said recently. The 54-year-old says he and his unionists will fight “like hell” to end corporate greed.

Fain, a devout Christian, likes to draw from the Bible. (He carries his grandmother’s old Bible with him almost all the time.) However, he also quotes Black Panther leader Malcolm X.* For him, it’s about more than raising wages; he makes that clear. He’s following the tradition of Walter Reuther, who led the UAW from 1946 to 1970. For Fain, like Reuther, it’s not just about a better collective bargaining agreement for his members, but about leading a broader American workers’ movement.

In the 1950s, automobile workers rose to the middle class thanks to the postwar boom and Reuther’s collective bargaining agreements. In recent years, they have increasingly needed to say goodbye to the middle class.

Fain Has Yet To Face His Greatest Challenge

The UAW’s demands sound drastic. However, the Big Three’s profits have risen by more than 90% between 2013 and 2022 — by $250 billion, as the union-adjacent Economic Policy Institute calculated. Compensation for the Big Three CEOs rose by 40% during that period, and the payout to the shareholders amounted to $66 billion. In contrast, the average wages of construction workers have fallen by 19% since the concession by the UAW in 2007.

Fain’s greatest challenge is converting his industry from the combustion engine vehicle to the electric car. Far fewer workers are necessary to achieve this. In order to have a say on the conditions for new factories, the UAW would have to organize new factories and workforces. The legal conditions alone make this a difficult undertaking. It’s no coincidence that only 6% of employees in the private sector in the United States belong to a union. This, too, makes the current fight for collective bargaining so important for the UAW. It will require a good outcome to prove that it would be advantageous for people working in plants without collective bargaining to fight for membership.

In this sense, Fain likely has Tesla and Elon Musk, the CEO of the electronic vehicle manufacturer, a man who is notoriously hostile to unions, in his sights as well. Speaking before he was elected UAW president, Fain said, “It feels like we’ve gone so far backwards that we have to fight just to have the 40-hour work week back. Why is that? So another asshole can make enough money to shoot himself to the moon?”

*Editor’s note: Malcolm X was a leader in the Black Power movement but he was not a member or leader of the Black Panthers. Malcolm X was assassinated a year before the Black Panthers formed in 1966.