‘We fight the good fight and continue forward’

The UAW strike begins and UAW President Shawn Fain talks to picketing workers at Ford-owned Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Michigan the night of September 14, 2023. (photo: Anna Liz Nichols)

United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain used biblical imagery to characterize the vote by Mercedes-Benz workers in Alabama against joining the union .

“This is a David and Goliath fight. Sometimes Goliath wins a battle. But David wins the war,” said Fain, someone who has spent decades slinging figurative stones in defense of the union movement. “… The UAW will continue to lead the fight against corporate greed and runaway inequality. And through that fight we’ll change the nation and the world for the better. While this loss stings, these workers keep their heads held high.We fight the good fight and continue forward.”

While the failure to win over Mercedes-Benz workers in the May vote was a setback to the UAW’s organizing efforts, it did come just a month after the union won the right to represent approximately 4,330 workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn.— marking the first time that southern autoworkers at a foreign car company had done so.

“We saw the big contract that UAW workers won at the Big Three and that got everybody talking,” said Zachary Costello, a trainer in VW’s proficiency room. “You see the pay, the benefits, the rights UAW members have on the job, and you see how that would change your life. That’s why we voted overwhelmingly for the union. Once people see the difference a union makes, there’s no way to stop them.”

When the UAW committed $40 million in February to organize non-union automobile and electric vehicle battery workers over the next two years, it was a marker of a changed landscape, not just for the organization itself, but the union movement in general.

“This is our generation-defining moment,” Fain told the Michigan Advance in an exclusive interview. “It’s not just about the UAW. It’s not just about union workers. It’s about workers that need that justice. I mean, non-union workers, they’re employees that have no rights. The company has all the control, and the only way to get that control back is by forming a union.”

The money, approved Feb. 20 by the UAW’s International Executive Board, fulfills a pledge Fain made in November after leading the effort that won new contracts last fall with General Motors, Ford and Stellantis (a.k.a. the Detroit Three) to expand organizing efforts of the 400,000-member union to new frontiers.

Wresting back control is a key theme in this critical election year, not just for the UAW, but for the entire labor movement. As the automotive industry attempts to successfully transition to electric vehicles, the UAW’s focus is on doing more than just keeping its members’ heads above water, but ahead of the current, especially as it pertains to nonunion autoworkers.

And whoever occupies the White House on Jan. 20, 2025, will go a long way to determining whether that’s a pipe dream or a realistic goal.

“We don’t just win when we get a raise,” Fain said. “We win when workers at Toyota, Subaru, Honda, Hyundai and other companies see what we’ve achieved and get ready to stand up for themselves. We win when the corporate media, the billionaire class and their political allies start taking us seriously as a force to be reckoned with.”

However, there have been some bumps in the road since the union’s victory, with slower-than-expected sales that forced GM to abandon its goal of building 400,000 electric vehicles by mid-2024. Meanwhile, Ford is scaling back its $3.5 billion battery plant in Marshall, cutting planned employment from 2,500 jobs to 1,700 jobs.

Earlier this year, the union threw its weight behind President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign.

“It’s not about who you like, it’s not about your party, it’s not about this bulls–t about age. It’s not about anything but our best shot at taking back power for the working class,” Fain declared .

But now Biden is facing political headwinds after a weak showing against former President Donald Trump during the first debate on Thursday, with many pundits and Democratic strategists saying he’s not up to the job and should step aside.

And Fain is grappling with some challenges of his own. An independent UAW monitor — as the union is under federal oversight — is investigating both he and Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock amid a leadership shakeup.

“Taking our union in a new direction means sometimes you have to rock the boat, and that upsets some people who want to keep the status quo, but our membership expects better and deserves better than the old business as usual,” Fain said in a statement.

But the probe comes just a few years after an embezzlement and bribery scandal rocked the UAW, culminating with several top union leaders and auto executives going to prison. Fain — the first union president selected by the direct election of members — was supposed to be a reformer who offered a fresh break from the UAW’s recent sins. And it’s not clear how this investigation will impact the union’s quest to grow its ranks.

Ending the tension-filled two-tier system

On Sept. 15, 2023, the UAW launched its “Stand Up Strike” against all three domestic automakers that would drag on for seven weeks. Not all workers hit the picket line at the same time — by design. Instead, UAW leadership called up workers at plants at various points to walk out as part of its strategy to win back many of the concessions the union had made in recent decades.

The strike grew to include plants in more than 20 states, including more than a dozen facilities in Michigan — more than any other state. But one by one, the companies agreed, by and large, to the UAW’s terms and the last tentative deal was struck with GM on Oct. 30.

The contracts with Ford, GM and Stellantis, which resulted in a 25% wage increase and an end to the two-tiered compensation system, came after a nearly seven-week strike last fall that was the longest in UAW history.

Days after the tentative Detroit automaker agreements were reached, Toyota and Honda announced pay hikes for their U.S. hourly employees in an attempt to stave off UAW union drives, which the union launched anyway.

The tiered pay structure, in which workers with lesser seniority earned significantly less than their more senior counterparts, was agreed to by the UAW in its 2007 contract with the Detroit Three, whose executives said that was necessary to stay competitive as Michigan was mired in recession.

Just two years later, the federal government approved an $80 billion bailout of General Motors Chrysler (a precursor to Stellantis) and parts suppliers. That saved 1.5 million U.S. jobs, as well as $105.3 billion in personal and social insurance tax collections, according to a 2013 study .

But through the years, the two-tier system has been a much-despised remnant of a union leadership that rank-and-file UAW members felt was more aligned with the needs of automakers than those of the workers they represented. The unequal pay system also caused divisions in the workplace.

“You know, there’s too many times I think the union and the company [have been] too close together…,”  we gave up things years ago and it’s time to get some back,” Curt Cranford, 66, of Northville, 38-year GM employee, told the Advance in October.

When Fain was elected UAW president in March 2023, rooting out corruption in the union’s management and halting more than 15 years of wage-and-benefit concessions were top priorities.

But ending the two-tier wage structure was the main issue Fain campaigned on in what was the first direct election in the UAW’s 88-year history. Prior to that, the union had been run by what was known as the Administration Caucus in which leaders at both the regional and national level were selected through a delegate system.

That ended following a December 2020 consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice that was imposed after a corruption scandal resulted in criminal convictions against 11 top UAW officials, including two former union presidents. Part of the mandated reform was allowing each union member to vote whether they wanted to keep the delegate system or move to a direct election model, also referred to as “one member, one vote.”

Nearly two-thirds of union members opted for direct election.

Fain, a 30-year member of the union who started as an electrician at the Kokomo Casting Plant — which was then owned by Chrysler — said it’s not an exaggeration that his election as president is due to that structural change.

“Definitely, it’s why I’m the president,” he said. “If it wasn’t for all those fed-up UAW members that pushed for the ‘one member, one vote’ initiative, I wouldn’t have had a prayer being president. The convention system did not work for the members. The convention system was all about control and the Administration Caucus controlled the entire convention. They controlled the delegates. They knew the outcome before the convention ever happened.”

Fain said the old process meant that the union’s leadership was not accountable to the membership, so that objections to the two-tiered pay system went unheeded for years. In fact, they went unheeded in 2007 when Fain, then a Kokomo skilled-trades committeeman for UAW Local 1166, told leadership that by approving the deal, “You might as well get a gun and shoot yourself in the head.”

That kind of blunt talk has been the hallmark of Fain’s leadership of the UAW, which many rank and file members have cheered as a breath of fresh air.

But Fain insists it isn’t an act.

“I understand where the members are because I’ve been there and I’ve lived there,” he said. “I’ve lived where they’ve lived and I wanted this union to change. I know what this union can be.”

Fain said past UAW leadership often ignored the media, something he is determined to rectify.

“The corporations and the wealthy are out there putting their narrative out there, and we weren’t fighting back,” he said. “I’ve seen that my entire career and that’s something I definitely knew needed to change. So you can guarantee I was hellbent on when I was elected, talking to the media and getting our members’ issues out there front and center.”

During last year’s strike, the UAW also launched an aggressive social media campaign with videos and eye-catching graphics reminiscent of the presidential campaigns of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who headlined a Detroit UAW rally in September.

Fain also did weekly updates for members and the public on Facebook live, replete with confrontational flourishes like donning an “Eat the Rich” shirt and chucking company offers in the trash.

The UAW’s renewed brash style seemed to get under the skin of some Detroit Three executives. In an Oct. 16 news briefing , Bill Ford — the company’s executive chair who’s also the great-grandson of founder Henry Ford — insisted that “Ford is the strongest partner the UAW has ever known.” He called for an end to the strike and urged the union to work with the company against the threat of foreign automakers.

“The UAW leaders have called us the enemy in these negotiations. But I will never consider our employees as enemies,” Ford said.

But Fain was, quite characteristically, unmoved by the appeal.

“The days of the UAW and Ford being a team to fight other companies are over. We won’t be used in this phony competition. We will always and forever be on the side of working people everywhere. Non-union auto workers are not the enemy. Those are our future union family,” Fain said.

“We’re not going to partner with Ford in a race to the bottom. And we’re not going to partner with the big three to match the low standards of the non-union automakers,” he added.

Less than two weeks later, Fain announced that Ford and the UAW had agreed to a tentative deal ending the strike.

“There was a time when it was hard to wear this wheel,” said Fain as he pointed to the UAW logo on his shirt and referring to past corruption that tarnished the 88-year-old organization. “And like many of you, I walked a lonely path. What we have accomplished has turned this wheel around. When I see that wheel, I no longer see a union on defense, in decline or under threat.

“When I see that wheel, I see power.”

Watchdog’s investigation

While Fain remains popular within the UAW, and his administration has generally been well-received, it is not without some hiccups.

In late February, Fain sent a letter to staff following a meeting of the International Executive Board (IEB) in which he said they had “reorganized some departments and assignments,” removing several key duties from Mock, suggesting that they were nothing more than a routine change in the organizational structure.

Mock had been elected along with Fain on the same reform platform a year earlier backed by Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), which describes itself as “a grassroots movement of UAW members in good standing, united in the common goal of building a more democratic and fighting union.”

The UAWD said in a statement that 11 of 14 IEB members had voted for the changes after Mock had engaged in “misconduct (that) has harmed the membership of our union”  which UAWD said included withholding approval of routine expenditures in an attempted exchange for votes on the IEB, refusing to approve routine purchases of supplies for last year’s Stand Up Strike, which hurt strike preparation, improperly denying legitimate reimbursement requests and refusing to approve legitimate expenditures for ongoing organizing campaigns in a timely manner, which UAWD said risked the loss of NLRB elections and the waste of millions of dollars.

“Secretary-Treasurer Mock’s abuses of authority have directly undermined militant, forward-looking initiatives that the UAW membership voted for, such as building a strong Big 3 contract campaign,” said the group.

Mock denied the allegations , telling the Detroit Free Press that the dispute centered on a misunderstanding about the role of the secretary-treasurer.

But in June, things took a much more serious turn, with Neil Barofsky — the court-appointed watchdog following the UAW’s corruption scandal — telling a federal judge he was investigating Fain and other senior officials after a “recent lapse” in the union’s cooperation. In addition to probing the fight between Mock and Fain, Barofsky said he’s also investigating whether Fain retaliated against one of the UAW’s vice presidents.

The monitor has the power to bring charges seeking to discipline, remove, suspend, expel and fine UAW officers and members, the Detroit News notes .

“We encourage the Monitor to investigate whatever claims are brought to their office, because we know what they’ll find: a UAW leadership committed to serving the membership, and running a democratic union,” Fain said in a statement. “We’re staying focused on winning record contracts, growing our union, and fighting for economic and social justice on and off the job.”

‘A very clear picture’

When the UAW officially endorsed President Joe Biden in January, Fain spared none of his bluntness in explaining why.

“Donald Trump is a scab,” Fain said to loud applause and whistling at the UAW’s biannual political conference in Washington, D.C. “Donald Trump is a billionaire and that’s who he represents. If Donald Trump ever worked in an auto plant, he wouldn’t be a UAW member. He’d be a company man, trying to squeeze the American autoworker.”

The endorsement came as no surprise, especially after Biden became the first sitting president to join an active strike , as he did in September when he made an appearance in Belleville where members of UAW Local 174 walked a picket line outside the Willow Run Redistribution Center.

For Fain, while the endorsement was a basic decision about the future of the UAW, the past was the best predictor of how that future would play out.

“Our decision with this was simply looking at the issues that are critical to our future, to our members’ futures and who’s going to support our members in that and who can give a damn about our members,” Fain told the Advance . “Trump through his presidency showed he couldn’t care less about the UAW when they were on strike in 2019. He didn’t give a damn about the Lordstown Assembly Plant closing.”

General Motors’ Lordstown Assembly Plant, about 15 miles outside of Youngstown, Ohio, employed about 4,500 workers in 2017 when Trump famously told residents “Don’t sell your house,” as he repeatedly claimed his policies would bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. from overseas.

By 2019, the plant, which manufactured the fuel-efficient Chevy Cruze, was closed — meaning many of the 1,500 remaining workers did indeed have to sell their homes as they accepted UAW positions in other plants, some as far away as Texas.

While some blamed the closure on the Trump administration’s relaxing of fuel efficiency standards which incentivized GM to stop making the Cruze in favor of larger, more profitable, vehicles, others pointed to Trump’s trade war with China. In fact, GM itself said the higher tariffs imposed by Trump would mean a loss of manufacturing jobs due to increased costs in steel and aluminum.

Either way, plenty of UAW members felt they had been abandoned by Trump, with some regretting their support for him in 2016.

Meanwhile, Fain says Biden’s union support goes back long before he joined their picket line last year in Belleville.

“You go clear back to the recession though in 2008 and 2009, Biden is vice president, and again he bet on the American workers, stood with the workers and gave us a path forward,” said Fain, referring to Biden’s influence within the Obama administration to approve massive federal loans that saved GM and Chrysler from bankruptcy.

“Donald Trump was saying, ‘Let ’em fail,’ and was blaming the workers for what was wrong with these companies, which was a complete farce. And so, there’s just a huge difference in my opinion and in the body of work and the actions and these two in their own words. And it’s just a very clear picture for us as far as how that goes,” Fain said.

As to what impact the endorsement would have, Fain says UAW members are a diverse group of people with very different points of view, but he believes they generally can see who has their interests at heart.

“The majority of UAW members will support Joe Biden for president,” he insisted. “Like any organization, no matter where you find it, there’s still going to be members of ours that vote for Trump, and that’s just the reality of politics.”

Fain also hasn’t always been in lock step with Biden, joining with progressive Democrats in calling for a ceasefire in Gaza long before the president did. The labor leader told the Advance that the UAW is more focused on social justice now than in the recent past.

“Organizing and bargaining good contracts is one of the things unions do,” Fain said. “But at the end of the day, all of this goes back to justice for people, for working people, for the poor. It’s lifting the standard for everyone.”

But although some in the pro-Palestinian movement are encouraging voters to “Abandon Biden” in November, Fain said in March that the election is “critical.”

“Working-class people can’t stay home,” he said. “One of two people will be the president of this country. And it’s imperative we give Joe Biden another term because if Donald Trump gets in, we go backwards.”

Contrast with the Teamsters

While Fain has repeatedly blasted Trump for representing everything the UAW stands against, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters is taking a different approach.

Teamsters President Sean O’Brien held roundtable discussions in December with independent and Republican presidential candidates, the first time the union had done that.

Then in early January, O’Brien turned heads when he personally met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, saying afterward that he was making sure his members’ voices were heard heading into a critical election year.

“We thank the former president for taking time during this private meeting to listen to the Teamsters’ top priorities. And we are eager to bring together the rank-and-file for an important and necessary roundtable with President Trump this month,” said O’Brien, who posted a photo of himself, standing with his hands together while Trump gave his standard thumbs up.

Trump, on the other hand, posted a picture to social media of both he and O’Brien with the thumbs-up pose.

“ Had a great dinner tonight with Sean O’Brien, General President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Looking forward to more discussions about important issues in the near future!” said Trump.

That was followed in February with news that the 1.3 million member union had given the Republican National Committee a $45,000 donation , its first to the GOP in many years.

While it was pointed out that the Teamsters had also given $150,000 to the Democratic National Committee in 2023, many in the progressive wing of the union became alarmed at what appeared to be an embrace of Trump and the GOP.

The Teamsters have never endorsed Trump, backing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020.

When asked about O’Brien’s meeting with Trump and whether that represented a different approach than what the UAW leader had taken, Fain was careful not to criticize O’Brien, while simultaneously justifying his counter-approach.

“Every union has their different leaders and different make up of members and just different philosophies. I’m sure President O’Brien’s doing what he thinks he needs to do. I just didn’t see a need when, for us, it was such a clear picture of where Donald Trump stands and where Joe Biden stands when it comes to working-class people,” said Fain.

“Trump’s favorite words are ‘You’re fired.’ He stands with the boss, he stands with the billionaire class and he stands for the continued growth of the disparity between the extremely wealthy and everybody else. So, as far as what the Teamsters are doing versus how we did it, it’s just a difference in where we are as a union and how we feel about things. I just think he chose to go a different path and that’s fine.”

O’Brien did later meet with Biden , and indicated afterward that an endorsement in the presidential contest from the Teamsters likely wouldn’t happen until after each party held their national conventions this summer. He doubled down on his partisan agnosticism this month with Trump’s announcement he would speak at the Republican National Convention in July.

“Our GREAT convention will unify Americans and demonstrate to the nation’s working families they come first,” Trump posted on social media. “When I am back in the White House, the hardworking Teamsters, and all working Americans, will once again have a country they can afford to live in and be respected around the world.”

O’Brien also has a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention in August.

Fain has been clear from the start of his tenure that organized labor needed to stick together and the Teamsters would figure prominently in his plans.

As Fain prepared to take control of the UAW in early 2023, a transition plan indicated his sweeping agenda, which the Detroit Free Press reported included that there was a “new sheriff in town,” and that started with “demonstrating the willingness of the new leadership to embrace new ideas and new practices.”

That document also stated Fain’s desire to “Quickly have a public meeting with IBT President Sean O’Brien and publicly commit to support one another in coming struggles,” adding that the “IBT is critical in Big 3 strike, secure commitment of car haulers to not cross picket lines.”

Indeed, that’s exactly what happened as Teamsters honored the UAW picket lines during last year’s strike, with O’Brien emphasizing the solidarity among unions.

“You can be sure there is no division in America’s labor movement today. And you are urged to remember that Teamsters don’t cross picket lines,” he stated.

That resolve was demonstrated last summer when UPS and its 340,000 workers, represented by the Teamsters, reached a deal on a five-year contract that included wage increases and workplace safety protections.

Meanwhile, Biden’s embrace of, and embrace by, organized labor has picked up speed as seen in an endorsement by the United Steelworkers (USW) .

“President Biden proved time and again during his first term that he stands with working families,” said USW International President David McCall, who managed to take a swipe at Trump without calling him out by name.

“ Workers and their families are more secure than they were four years ago, thanks to President Biden’s leadership. From infrastructure to retirement security, international trade to safer workplaces, we’re honored to back him as he runs for reelection,” said McCall.

Biden has also been endorsed by the North America’s Building Trades Unions, a massive labor organization now committing resources in the battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Expanding the union movement

Following up on the success of the strike against the Detroit Three, Fain made no secret about his intention to use that momentum to begin organizing the workers at U.S. plants owned by foreign automakers, with the $40 million a tangible marker of the expression, “Put your money where your mouth is.”

“We’re well on our way,” Fain told the Advance in March. “If you look right now, we’ve hit a majority at Volkswagen (which has since voted to join); we’ve hit a majority at Mercedes in Vance, Ala. (which voted against joining in May). We hit 30% at Toyota in Missouri, and we hit over 30% at Hyundai in Alabama. So things are moving.”

Fain was referencing the union’s organizing model, known as “30-50-70” that guides its efforts to organize nonunion plants. When 30% of workers at those plants sign union cards, a public announcement is made by an organizing committee made up of autoworkers at that plant publicly saying, “We’re going to be loud and proud about our union.”

When 50% sign their cards, a public rally is organized with Fain, community leaders, workers, and other supporters demonstrating “a majority of us are ready to fight for what we deserve.”

And then when 70% sign their cards, an organizing committee made up of workers from every shift, every job classification, and every group of workers in the plant, demand that the company recognize the union. “If they don’t, we file cards with the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] and take it to a vote.”

But Fain says the willingness of nonunion autoworkers to organize was apparent before they even started their efforts.

“Workers are fed up and as soon as we bargained our agreement, these non-union companies in the south started giving increases to all their workers , bigger increases than they have ever,” said Fain. “We call that the UAW bump. We’re claiming that because we know what it is. They’re giving that bump to workers to try to keep them from getting their fair share of justice, and they’re worthy. These workers are going to actually organize and take their lives back. And I believe the workers are ready. And I think we’re seeing that now through action and the workers are leading us. We’re there to help them, but they’re leading us.”

In fact, Fain says while they were unsuccessful organizing the Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama, although the union has asked the National Labor Relations Board to reject the results and order a new election, the effort itself provided tangible benefits for those workers.

“Let’s be clear: workers won serious gains in this campaign,” he said the day the losing vote was announced. “They raised their wages, with the ‘UAW bump.’ They killed wage tiers. They got rid of a CEO who had no interest in improving conditions in the workplace. Mercedes is a better place to work thanks to this campaign, and thanks to these courageous workers.”

Meanwhile, the momentum of 2023 extended far beyond just the success of the UAW. There was also the Teamsters’ historic contract win with UPS , the SAG-AFTRA strike win over AI technology, Kaiser Permanente health care worker deal , Detroit casino strike and the University of Michigan graduate employees strike, which resulted in a new three-year contract.

T he number of workers involved in major work stoppages increased by 280% in 2023 and union membership rose last year to 16.2 million workers — an increase of 191,000.

That’s from a report by the Economic Policy Institute , a nonprofit, left-leaning think tank. Despite the increase, the percentage of workers represented by a union decreased from 11.3% to 11.2%, as unionization in the private sector rose in 2023, but public-sector unionization continued to decline.

Jennifer Sherer, director of the institute’s State Worker Power Initiative, helped write the report and tells the Advance that the UAW is out in front of that renewed interest in worker empowerment through collective bargaining.

“I think they’re seizing the moment in a really effective and powerful way and recognizing that this is a time when workers are looking to correct for literally decades of wage suppression, stagnant wages, and in the auto industry in particular, an active move on the part of major auto companies who are at this moment receiving millions to billions in federal and state subsidies to expand their operations and create new jobs, but without a clear commitment to the wages, benefits, and conditions that are going to go along with those jobs,” she said.

Sherer says auto manufacturers have maneuvered for decades to erode the wages and working conditions for employees, which was at the heart of last year’s strike. But the reality, Sherer says, is that the vast majority of U.S. auto workers are not covered by UAW contracts.

“So you’ve got auto workers throughout the industry and really folks across the country looking at what UAW members have been able to accomplish and beginning to rebalance some of those conditions for the workers who are covered under current contracts and saying, ‘Why should everybody else be left out?’ she said.

Sherer says the result is autoworkers in Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee and other southern states signing union cards right now and looking at this as a moment of opportunity.

“They know that their companies are highly profitable right now, and there’s every reason to expect that those profits are going to continue in part because of a really clear signal from the federal level that we are going to invest in this industry as a domestic priority for decades going forward,” she said.

Last year was also a watershed for labor rights in Michigan when Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed legislation repealing Michigan’s right-to-work laws that had been passed more than a decade earlier in what had proven to be a one-two punch for the UAW.

When in December 2012, 12,000 protesters , many of them UAW members, converged on Michigan’s capitol building, they were intent on trying to prevent the GOP-led Legislature from passing Right to Work legislation, which undermined unions by preventing them from requiring members to pay dues.

Just a month earlier, a UAW-backed ballot amendment to place collective bargaining rights in the state constitution failed at the ballot box, 57 to 43%, emboldening right-to-work proponents to push through the legislation during a lame duck session.

When Republican Gov. Rick Snyder went back on his earlier vow not to sign such a bill, it stood as a low moment for unions in general, but the UAW specifically, which had led the failed ballot amendment coalition and then failed to prevent the law from being signed.

In reaction, then-UAW President Bob King said the union planned to try and recall state legislators and maybe even Snyder himself,  all of which came to naught, another blow to the union’s prestige, which could neither prevent nor successfully retaliate against anti-union forces taking control in the very state where it began.

Eleven years later, whatever cloud might have remained from that experience evaporated with the UAW’s stand-up strike success. In fact, Fain had just been elected UAW president when Whitmer signed the repeal, something she got to tout at the union’s special bargaining convention in Detroit.

Fain recounted how Whitmer, then the Senate minority leader, had joined with union members in 2012 to oppose Right to Work legislation.

“I’ll never forget her standing there with us, and I think it’s awesome to stand here 10 years later and now she’s our governor,” said Fain, who was sworn into office just days before.

Whitmer was equally profuse in her praise of Fain, telling the Advance that his leadership has been key to ensuring the state remains a leader in automotive manufacturing.

“Michigan’s auto industry has been the backbone of our economy for a century, powered by the men and women of the UAW,” she said. “Under President Fain’s leadership, the union negotiated and ratified record contracts last year, putting more money in workers’ pockets, securing jobs, and keeping operations right here in Michigan. Michigan’s economy is on the move, and we will continue working with anyone to build on our progress to secure 37,000 auto jobs, onshore supply chains, and make Michigan the home of the auto industry for years to come.”

Sherer says 2023 really was a breakthrough year in that it decisively checked a tide of active opposition to unions represented by a combination of extremely hostile employer anti-union activity and labor laws being increasingly weakened since the late 1940s.

“Those factors together along with, in past decades, much higher rates of unemployment have all conspired to weaken workers’ collective bargaining power and their ability to form new unions,” she said. “We’re in a different moment right now. We’re seeing workers across many industries looking to unions as a vehicle for addressing the power imbalances in their workplaces.”

Sherer says because the UAW strike was so effective, it drew the kind of attention that other unions, that have been operating and organizing just as effectively in very similar veins, haven’t been able to draw.

“We’ve had unions in the hospitality industry organizing hotels, in the healthcare sector organizing hospitals, all kinds of smaller organizing campaigns that have been extremely successful,” she said. “I mean, this is not just limited to the auto industry, with much of that momentum preceding the strikes at the Big Three last summer. So I think absolutely folks are learning from, and in some cases, trying to emulate the success of the UAW, but also the UAW is building on momentum that workers in other sectors had been building leading up to it. So it’s more of an ecosystem.”

For his part, Fain said the UAW has been in talks with “ a lot of labor leaders … trying to get other unions to line up with us. And there’s a lot of things we’re looking at doing even further down the road that I think strengthen the labor movement even more and bring us together even more.”

He stressed that he’s not just focused on the U.S. — he wants to build up the international labor movement.

“We’re talking to leaders in Italy and Belgium and all over Europe and Mexico, and everywhere working-class people are. We have to act globally because we’re taking on global corporations and the days of them pitting us against each other are over. We have to stand together, and we have to stand in solidarity together, and fight for one another. I talk about this a lot when I speak to other workers. It goes back to the civil rights movement when Dr. [Martin Luther] King said, ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ And it’s no different for working-class people.”

Speaking truth to power

Fain frequently delivers fiery speeches about income inequality and class differences — something that hearkens back to past labor leaders like Walter Reuther.

Fain says it simply reflects who he is and his experiences throughout his career as a UAW member.

“I think it’s me expressing the realities of what working-class people have felt my entire work life. But it’s a lot of my opinion and my philosophy of the direction I think our union needed to go and that the labor movement needs to go because we have to stand up and represent working class people. That’s our obligation,” he said.

However, he acknowledges it hasn’t been all off the cuff, and that indeed there has been a planned strategy. If past actions are usually a good predictor for future actions, Fain says they understood that auto executives would say one thing, but ultimately do another.

“The irony of all that is, even while we were in the campaign and we took those stances, the companies cried poverty and cried, ‘We can’t sustain if we pay better wages and give better benefits, and these contracts are going to cost us, the price of vehicles are gonna go up’ and then two weeks after we ratify, GM pays out $10 billion in dividends of stock buybacks to shareholders, which costs more than the entire contract,” said Fain. “Stellantis [CEO] Carlos Tavares, his salary went from $23 million to $39.5 million in the last year, a 56% increase.”

Fain says understanding that dynamic is the key to understanding his drive to keep the UAW in its leadership position in the labor movement.

“It’s our job to speak truth, put the facts out there and let the public and the members decide it. And when we put the facts out there through our campaign, when 75% of the public supported us in that fight, it’s pretty apparent where the majority of people in this nation stand, whether they’re union or not, and they’re fed up and tired of being left behind,” he said.

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