The president of the United Auto Workers turned biblical when addressing thousands of union members last week, urging them to have faith as they prepared to go on strike against Detroit’s carmakers.
Addressing his fellow workers on social media, Shawn Fain, a Christian, said their low expectations were “heartbreaking”, a result of the union settling for too little over the years. But no longer.
“For many of us, who have yet to see our union fight hard and win big, it is hard to imagine what that would look like,” he said. “Making bold demands and organising to fight for them is an act of faith. It’s an act of faith in each other. Yes, these corporations are mountains, but together we can make them move.”
Fain has travelled through mountainous terrain already to reach this moment. The electrician from Kokomo, Indiana, was largely unknown in the US labour movement when he launched his bid for the UAW presidency last year following a corruption scandal that sent two former union presidents to prison.
Now he has led 13,000 workers on strike at three plants, one each run by Ford, General Motors and Stellantis. It is the first time in the UAW’s history that it has picketed all three companies at once, and if “serious progress” is not made at the bargaining table by noon on Friday, the union has said it will widen the strike. A widespread walkout could hamper the entire sector by causing job cuts at other plants and cancelllations of orders from suppliers.
Fain “has a style, a personality, an approach that is different from what has been used in the past”, said Arthur Wheaton, director of labour studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “So far it has been effective for him to rally support within the labour movement generally, his membership, politicians and the general public.”
It has yet to result in a ratified agreement, but “he’s already doubled their initial offers”, Wheaton added.
Fain has hauled the bargaining process into public view. When workers went on strike at GM in 2019, the union sent no communications to rank-and-file members outlining the bargaining table demands, said Scott Houldieson, chair of the steering committee for Unite All Workers for Democracy, which strives to make union leadership more accountable to members. But Fain has given regular updates through livestreams that have grown theatrical, with a rubbish bin labelled “Big Three Proposals”.
Mary Kay Henry, president of the 1.9mn-member Service Employees International Union, said she was struck by how “creative” Fain was when she met him last month.
“I found him incredibly agile in his thinking about how to confront the corporate greed that the auto workers are up against,” she said, predicting that other unions would soon replicate his unusual strike strategy in which some workers walk out while others stay on the job.
A city of 60,000, Kokomo boasts a GM plant for making electronic components and Stellantis factories for engines, transmissions and parts. Two grandparents worked in the car industry, one starting at Chrysler in 1937. The labour leader keeps one of his grandfather’s old payslips in his wallet.
Fain, one of three children whose father was the city’s police chief, started at a Chrysler plant in 1994 as an electrician and moved into local union leadership. In 2007 he opposed a decision by the UAW and carmakers to introduce wage tiers, paying new workers less than existing ones. Later he moved to the international union in Detroit.
In 2017 the US Department of Justice revealed that UAW officials had embezzled members’ dues and accepted illegal pay-offs from executives at Stellantis’ predecessor company. The aim, as a company accountant put it, was to keep union officials “fat, dumb and happy”.
The US Department of Justice’s investigation was settled in 2020 with a consent decree that ordered the UAW to allow rank-and-file members to vote directly for the president for the first time, paving the way for an outsider to run.
Challenging then-UAW president Ray Curry was “risky,” inviting ostracism from colleagues or loss of a staff position, Houldieson said.
“I felt that was very brave,” he said. “It’s kind of a hostile work environment situation if you’re on staff and working under the direction of the president that you just announced you’re running for his job.”
During the campaign Fain toured the mid-west and south and passed out literature at factory gates. One local union leader in Kentucky heckled Fain, while an official at another site encouraged security guards to remove campaigners from the property, Houldieson said.
When the votes were counted in the run-off election, Fain eked out a victory by 477 votes, just barely more than 50 per cent.
Will Bloom, a lawyer at the Chicago law firm Despres Schwartz & Geoghegan, which represented Fain during the election, said for “longtime UAW reformers, it can be very lonely”, but with Fain’s election and the union’s new energy “a good number of people who spent decades and decades in the wilderness are being proven right”.
The UAW president’s Christian faith appears to be his biggest driver, Wheaton said, even more than anger over his predecessors’ perceived incompetence or the carmakers’ reduction in workplace benefits. Though common in national politics, religious iconology is rare in the labour movement.
Fain carries around an old Bible that belonged to his grandmother and has said that he reads from a devotional book every morning.
“It is very firmly entrenched in his belief system that he’s fighting the good fight,” Wheaton said. “He will not cave in. I think he’s a ‘true believer’ in the cause, which is part of the reason why it’s unnerving some of the automakers.”