Shawn Fain won the runoff to be president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) in March 2023, and the union he was elected to lead was in free fall.
The standard of living for unionized autoworkers had once been the aspiration of blue-collar workers everywhere. But after decades of concessions, the lives of new hires at Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis now resembled that of their nonunion peers at Toyota, Honda, and Mercedes.
A wide-ranging federal corruption investigation had sent a number of high-ranking UAW officials to prison, including two previous presidents. The UAW’s Detroit headquarters, affectionately named “Solidarity House,” served almost as a physical allegory for the union. At the time of Fain’s victory, it sat vacant, having been gutted to the studs and completely rebuilt following a highly suspicious fire several years before.
And Fain was inheriting a deeply divided union, having won the runoff election for president by only a few hundred votes. The day Fain was sworn in, the outgoing president Ray Curry handed him a single sheet of paper with a few barely legible, hand-scrawled notes. That was the entirety of the transition.
The very next day, Fain presided over the union’s Special Bargaining Convention, a monumental conference held every four years to lay out the union’s big picture bargaining goals — particularly for negotiations at the Big Three, which were set to kick off in a mere six months. The conference was mostly attended by union delegates from the Administration Caucus, the internal leadership organization that had essentially run the union as a one-party state for the past seventy years, and that Fain’s Members United Slate had just given a shellacking. The reception could not have been chillier.
Fain’s upset victory in the UAW, much like Zohran Mamdani’s election in New York City, speaks to a simple truth: militant reformers don’t typically come into power when things are going well. We win because…
Auteur: Chris Brooks
