This article appears in the April 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Read more from the issue.
To many supporters of American unions—indeed, to many in the meeting room—the conflicting accounts, palpable animosities, and vituperative attacks launched during the February 2024 meeting of the United Auto Workers’ International Executive Board (IEB)—the union’s topmost policymaking body between its quadrennial conventions—came as a shock. That this rift persists, and that it may lead to a bitterly contested election campaign for the union’s top posts later this year, only deepens those supporters’ confusion and dismay, particularly since the union has, from the outside, amassed a stellar record of victories in bargaining and organizing of late.
At stake is the future of the institution that did more to build the broadly shared prosperity of mid-20th-century America than any other. At stake is the future of the union that was the anchor tenant in the house of postwar American liberalism, providing crucial funding to the civil rights movement and early iterations of the women’s and environmental movements. At stake is the future of a union that for the past 40 years has borne the brunt of the downsizing of American manufacturing, of the foreign competition and hostile trade policy that both winnowed its ranks and compelled its members to give back some of the gains their predecessors had won.
But also at stake is the historic revival that the union has experienced under its new leadership in the past three years, and its ability to build on this dynamic success, which depends in part on the union—its leaders and staffers most particularly—ceasing to act as a house divided against itself.
At stake is the future of the institution that did more to build the broadly shared prosperity of mid-20th-century America than any other.
When the IEB convened in early 2024, an outsider might have expected the meeting to be both celebratory and focused on organizing strategies. It had been only four months since the union had waged its innovative “Stand Up” strikes and bargaining campaigns against General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler), winning members their first decisive victory since the 1980s. The strikes, which saw selected UAW locals walk out of crucially important plants on a timetable that the Big Three automakers could not plan for, befuddled and alarmed the companies. The campaign also built member excitement (and, crucially, public excitement) through social media, where rank-and-filers attested to their struggles and demands, and the UAW’s new president, Shawn Fain, broke with tradition by continually updating the progress of negotiations, which had previously always been closely guarded secrets until settlements were announced.
What’s more, the February meeting took place amid what would become a landmark organizing victory, not just for the UAW but for the entire labor movement. Less than two months later, the UAW would win the right to represent workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tennessee, factory by a 73 percent to 27 percent margin. For decades, European, Japanese, and South Korean automakers had been opening factories in the right-to-work states of the American South, where the power elite’s mobilization of long-standing anti-union sentiment had doomed nearly all the labor movement’s efforts to persuade workers to go union. But on the heels of the record contracts with the Big Three, which had been so widely publicized that many of the South’s non-union factories immediately announced major wage increases lest their workers take it into their heads to unionize, the UAW was throwing everything it had into the Chattanooga campaign, among several other plants in the South.
Finally, the union’s campaigns to organize university graduate students employed as teaching and research assistants, as well as postdocs and adjunct professors, had swelled UAW ranks in recent years by roughly 100,000 members. Academic workers now constituted roughly one-quarter of union membership.
But the February meeting of the IEB didn’t dwell on any of this. To be sure, the leaders expressed excitement about their new and anticipated triumphs after 40 years of plant closings, wage cuts, reduced benefits, and lower living standards for their members. But the meeting was dominated by divisions among key leaders and staff members. Accusations of failure to perform necessary duties flew; charges of officials targeting staff members because of their factional alignment were levied; allegations of handicapping vital campaigns due to internal rifts were made. Even as Fain and his supporters documented what they saw as malfeasances in the union’s highest ranks, other IEB members labeled their charges an ambush that could have been avoided if Fain wasn’t dead set on effectively purging his opponents.
Even more confusingly, the dispute was chiefly between the two leading members of the insurgent slate that won control of the UAW in late 2022, in the first-ever rank-and-file election to pick the union’s top officers: President Fain and Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock. (Previously, union officers had been chosen solely by delegates to the UAW’s quadrennial conventions.) It was Mock whom the Fain forces were accusing of having obstructed the union’s ability to wage the Stand Up Strike and the speedy campaign at the Chattanooga VW plant. It was Fain whom the Mock forces were accusing of having replaced many longtime officials and activists with new staffers who weren’t UAW members and who behaved as if they possessed a secret formula for union revival that union veterans failed to understand.
Those divisions persist to this day, and as Fain seeks re-election as president in the member vote to be held later this year, he may well be opposed by a challenger who’ll run on a slate with Mock in her re-election campaign for secretary-treasurer. The faction that won control of the union in 2022 has now become two factions, bitterly opposed.
As if that weren’t divisive enough, there’s a third very powerful player in—though not of—the UAW today: Neil Barofsky, a New York attorney appointed by a federal court in the wake of the financial crimes of the last decade that shook the historically squeaky-clean UAW to its core. (Fain, Mock, and Barofsky all declined to be interviewed for this article.)
Mock was plainly seething at Fain’s lieutenants, whose contempt for much of the UAW’s officers and staff was palpable.
In 2021, the two most recent former UAW presidents were convicted and sentenced to prison for misappropriating union funds for their own lavish lifestyles, spent chiefly in Palm Springs. (A sharper contrast with the conduct of the UAW’s Walter Reuther, who presided over the union from 1946 until 1970, is unimaginable. At Reuther’s insistence, UAW leaders’ salaries were kept well below those of the leaders of comparable unions, and he routinely objected to holding the union presidents’ winter meetings of the AFL-CIO in tony Florida hotels, while chiding his colleagues for wanting to “wallow in luxury like a bunch of capitalists!”) The UAW, in a settlement with federal district court, agreed to accept a federal monitor, who could compel the union leadership to relinquish control of officer selection at its conventions by holding rank-and-file elections, while also overseeing finances and operations to root out other corrupt or undemocratic practices.
Such a system had been in place at the Teamsters from the early 1990s until just a few years ago, and as corrupt practices were also a feature of more than a few Teamster locals in those years, that monitor didn’t lack for work. No such corruption has been a feature of UAW locals, but a bitter dispute between monitor Barofsky and Fain broke out nonetheless, connected initially to the UAW’s late-2023 statement condemning both Hamas’s October 7th massacre and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza, for which the union demanded a cease-fire.
That issue and its follow-up became the subject of an angry exchange between Fain and Barofsky at the February 2024 meeting, whereby Fain would eventually challenge Barofsky to a fight. One week later, Barofsky began investigating some members of Fain’s staff for their efforts to undermine Mock, and eventually compelled Fain’s chief of staff, Chris Brooks, to resign. In a series of monitor reports after that meeting, Barofsky stated he’d found some of Mock’s allegations to be legitimate, even as he completely failed to acknowledge the serious nature of Fain’s claims.
How did the UAW—once the greatest of American unions, now showing signs, after decades of decline, of at least provisional revival—get into this mess? That requires going back to 2022.
GIVEN THE TEAMSTERS’ RICH HISTORY of corruption and mob domination, it’s no surprise that an internal reform movement called Teamsters for a Democratic Union formed in 1976 and has been in existence ever since. Given the absence of corruption in the UAW until the miscreant leaders of the late 2010s, it’s no surprise that the UAW had no such organization until Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) formed in 2019, and grew large enough to be a force within the union only in 2021, with the indictments and convictions of its past presidents. (In the 1980s and ’90s, an opposition caucus named New Directions formed, not to oppose corruption but rather the continual rule of the established Administration Caucus. By the time UAWD was created, however, virtually none of the New Directions activists still belonged to the union.)
That didn’t give UAWD much time to get its act together before, at the newly appointed monitor’s suggestion, the union held an election to see if the rank and file wanted to elect their leaders. They did. And so UAWD scrambled to build a slate of candidates for the officer election, scheduled for December 2022.
“The slate was pieced together,” one activist involved in the subsequent campaign recalls. “It wasn’t really based on sharing a common ideology or approach to key questions that unions deal with. It was based on whoever raised their hand.” Fain, who has since emerged as one of the most innovative leaders in American labor, had been a staff member, not previously involved in UAWD or other reform activities. “Both Fain and Mock came out of the staff that worked at [the UAW’s] Stellantis [division],” one former UAW official says. “They sometimes campaigned together, but they were never close.”
Their abrupt ascendance bore scant resemblance to what had historically been a stepladder approach to union leadership. “Normally, incoming UAW leaders have a good deal of experience,” a Mock supporter told me. “The way the conventions worked, you’d come up from heading a regional office. I can’t imagine coming into office like Margaret or Shawn did”—that is, without a background in leadership.
The UAWD was able to field candidates for only roughly half of the IEB member slots, so several supporters of the existing regime remained on the board. Mock and other UAWD slate members won their posts outright in December. Fain, however, was forced into a 2023 runoff against the incumbent president, Ray Curry, who’d had no involvement in the misdeeds that landed his predecessors in prison, but who was the candidate of the ancien régime. (A third candidate in the December presidential race kept Fain or Curry from winning the required 50 percent plus one.) Fain prevailed over Curry by just a few hundred votes in the runoff, taking office in March 2023.
During Fain’s campaign, a number of UAW veterans appeared poised to staff him if he won. Shortly after his victory, however, Fain told them he’d decided to dispense with their services. His actual plans were made clear in a memo written by Chris Brooks, the head of his transition team, who would shortly become his chief of staff.
“UAW members elected Shawn and the other reformers to the union’s highest offices to enact real, clear, and substantive change,” the memo began. “Everything we do, at every stage, must be reinforcing the message: there is a new sheriff in town, something different is happening. This starts with who is appointed to what, who does and does not get fired, and by demonstrating the willingness of the new leadership to embrace new ideas and new practices.”
The appetite for confrontation was front and center in the memo. “The mantra of the counter-revolution is going to be ‘we’ve never done it this way,’” Brooks continued. “Our response must be clear, consistent, and unrelenting: ‘We know. Now do it anyway.’ If we do this well, then heads are going to be spinning with how fast things are going to change. People will be upset because their jobs are going to change and because new things are being expected of them. Some people will leave and we should make that as easy as possible for them.”
Brooks had honed the perspective he brought to this memo, and to Fain’s administration, while working at Labor Notes, an organization of union radicals with a foundational skepticism about the capacity of bureaucratized unions to make significant change. More recently, he’d been the field director of the New York local of the News Guild, the union of print media employees. He’d also been a labor and community organizer in East Tennessee, where he’d been involved in rallying support for the UAW’s failed 2014 campaign to unionize Chattanooga’s VW plant.
Fain bought into the revolutionary approach, and became intensely loyal to Brooks and his confreres. At one staff meeting, he pointed to his Labor Notes crew and said that if anyone messed with them, he would “slit [their] fucking throats.”
“Fain’s done a great job, but he surrounded himself with ideologues,” one longtime union consigliere told me. “Arrogance doesn’t work in an institution like [the UAW]. Labor Notes blames the decline of American unions on the bureaucratic structure of unions and the perfidy of their leaders … But this wholesale denunciation of, say, past UAW leaders is wrong. [Former president Bob] King was devotedly pro-worker, as were so many secondary leaders.”
On the other hand, in the assessment of a noted labor historian, “There’s lots of deadwood on the UAW staff; many old staffers should be fearful.”
Perhaps the key to understanding the UAW’s internal travails is that both those assessments are right.
SOME VICTORIOUS UNION INSURGENT CAMPAIGNS have taken power by discharging many staffers from the previous regime; that’s certainly what Teamster President Sean O’Brien did when he took office in 2021. Nothing like that had happened at the UAW, however, since 1947, when Walter Reuther’s slate, dominated by socialists and social democrats, ousted some incumbent regime officials and staff members, chiefly members and supporters of the Communist Party. But if the axe-swinging zeal of Brooks and his Labor Notes associates raised understandable anxiety among many UAW staffers of 2023, the fact that many of them—most particularly Brooks and Communications Director Jonah Furman—weren’t even UAW members at the time kindled anger among some UAW longtime officials and employees.
Going back to the union’s origins, the UAW had almost always filled key staff positions with members who’d actually once worked on assembly lines. Such was the importance of the UAW to the progressive remaking of America during the 1930s and ’40s that some of those assembly-line workers were among the nation’s most talented leftists. Reuther’s lieutenants included onetime autoworkers who rose in the union’s hierarchy and eventually became architects of American liberalism, including Jack Conway, who devised many of the War on Poverty programs for Lyndon Johnson and eventually became the president of Common Cause; Leonard Woodcock, who became U.S. ambassador to China during Jimmy Carter’s presidency; and federal judge George Edwards. The Communist Party’s arsenal of autoworkers included Clancy Sigal, whose subsequent career included writing a great novel of the American left (Going Away) and a stint as Humphrey Bogart’s agent.
Even Reuther reached outside the UAW’s ranks, however, for talented specialists, most notably chief economist Nat Weinberg, who played a key role in helping Reuther develop the specifics of how to create income stability, health insurance, and adequate pensions within one union when the federal government shunned those commitments.
But the cachet that the UAW, and the labor movement generally, had enjoyed in the Reuther years had become a dim memory long before Fain and Mock took office. Major unions had long since been hiring staffers and consultants in messaging, polling, and politics who’d never been members. What the UAW had been able to draw from its ranks 80 years ago no longer existed; that some of its officers insisted on retaining the promote-from-within rule was a sign of organizational inertia.
The one officer who insisted on that most was Margaret Mock. At the outset of the February 2024 IEB meeting, Fain asked the board to approve the hiring of some nonmembers for specialized positions on the union’s communications staff. Only one board member objected: Mock, who argued, “We have hundreds of thousands of members, and surely there must be someone that’s within the UAW that’s qualified to take these jobs. So, I take offense that our people aren’t qualified.”
In fact, Mock was plainly seething at Fain’s lieutenants, whose contempt—I don’t think that’s too strong a word—for much of the UAW’s officers and staff was palpable. Mock’s own staff, in the assessment of one former UAW official, was similarly indignant. Unlike Fain, the official notes, Mock brought no staff members with her; rather, she inherited holdovers from the Curry regime. Her staff, he says, “resisted much of what Shawn wanted to do,” seeing themselves as a check on Fain and his Labor Notes revolutions. “Fain’s staff,” he continues, “was very smart, but very new and very overzealous.”
According to one of Mock’s defenders, “I’ve never seen politics like this—the lack of institutional understanding. It’s not all that infrequent when a union’s officials don’t speak to each other, but their staffs serve as guardrails. This time they didn’t. They threw Molotov cocktails.”
AT THE FEBRUARY 2024 IEB MEETING, the Fain forces accused Mock of actions both trivial and critical. On the trivial side, she had denied reimbursement to three Fain aides: one for a taxi fare where the driver had failed to send the email receipt; one for a plane fare that the union had mistakenly charged to an aide’s personal credit card; and one for $152 in pizzas Brooks bought for a meeting of organizers on the Chattanooga campaign. She had also refused to create cards with greater lines of credit for Fain’s top aides. Mock argued that she was following union rules under the shadow of the federal monitor; Fain’s defenders responded that their people had also followed union rules in filing exception forms, which Mock rejected.
On the critical side, she had held up the union’s $500,000 agreement with a new D.C.-based media buying firm named Conexion in the ongoing Chattanooga campaign, insisting that the offer should be bid out to three firms despite the additional time this would entail. Mock also allegedly delayed another sole-source vendor, a PR contract with Feldman Strategies, which works with several unions (though this particular issue didn’t come up during the meeting). The UAW’s consent decree stated explicitly that all “major” contracts had to go through multiple bids.
Fain and Brooks had argued that Chattanooga’s business establishment had already started to buy anti-UAW billboards in the city, and that any leak about the campaign (made more likely with multiple bids) would prompt that establishment to buy all the city’s billboards, just as a leak about renting an office for the union’s campaign there had successfully brought pressure on the building owner to cancel the offer. The concern was rooted in the understanding that the union’s victory in the Stand Up Strike created a greater receptivity to unionization among autoworkers, and that a ruling from the Biden National Labor Relations Board would compel Volkswagen to submit to an election within just two weeks of the union requesting a vote. The longer a vote was delayed, the greater the odds that worker support for unionization would wane, a fact of life that labor scholars had documented and that the vast majority of union organizers and officials understood all too well.
The other crucial intervention that Mock had made was to delay authorization for the production of picket signs at the outset of the Stand Up Strike, in the belief that there were usable signs in many a local’s basement, even if such signs weren’t emblazoned with the message specific to this strike. For the first week of the strike, accordingly, pickets marched without signs.
The remedy available to Fain was to have the IEB reverse these denials at the February 2024 meeting. The board duly reversed them, and members—including members who still had reservations about Fain and Brooks—expressed incredulity that such questions even had to come before them.
Rich Boyer, the UAW vice president in charge of its Stellantis division, whose relationship with Fain has been rocky at best (indeed, he may challenge Fain for the presidency later this year), called it “terrible that we spend this much time with something like this … I don’t think anybody in this room gets up in the morning and says, how am I going to steal $5 from this international union. If somebody loses a receipt or the cab driver says he’s going to email it and doesn’t email it, Jesus Christ, we’ve got to trust the people that we work with. [And] we spend a lot of time talking about President Fain trying to get some money to help organize down south. Come on, you guys, that’s a no-fucking-brainer.”
The meeting then moved to a motion from Fain’s supporters to strip Mock of her duties overseeing particular UAW departments, while retaining those fiduciary duties assigned to the secretary-treasurer by the UAW’s constitution. Mock was blindsided; she had received no advance notice that such a motion would come before the board. (For that matter, Mock had not been invited to the planning meetings for the Stand Up Strike or the VW campaign, which may make her dilatory actions more understandable.) Following the presentation of Mock’s decisions, the optics of the motion itself reinforced how the entire day was a well-plotted ploy by Fain’s forces: The two IEB members making the motion were, like Mock, Black women. (It would later come out that Fain asked one of the women to issue the motion, because “it would be better coming from her than me, a white guy.”)
The board’s senior member, Ford division vice president Chuck Browning, reminded his fellow members that UAW presidents could reassign any officer or staffer without having to go to the board for approval, and that past presidents had frequently done so. The motion passed on an 11-to-2 vote, with Boyer abstaining. Not all the members who voted aye were enamored of Brooks or of Fain’s very evident ire at Mock. But they clearly admired the smarts that had gone into the Stand Up Strike, which augured well for the upcoming vote at Volkswagen. Even more, the prospect that the union could be hindered by divisions in its topmost ranks appalled them, and even if Brooks and company were as responsible for those divisions as Mock, they understood that the union’s campaigns—which Fain set in motion—must not be subverted from within.
WHEN WALTER REUTHER WON the UAW presidency in 1946, his opponents still controlled a majority on the IEB; Reuther’s forces weren’t able to win a majority until the 1947 convention. Nat Weinberg, whom Reuther had brought on as a researcher during that yearlong interval, once told me that when he had a paper he needed to be typed, he had to find a secretary aligned with the Reuther faction to type it; secretaries aligned with the Communist-dominated faction refused to do it.
That division, at least, was rooted in ideology. The divisions in today’s UAW aren’t so neatly explained, nor is it clear that they extend beyond the higher stratum of officials and staff into the rank and file. One factor that hasn’t risen to the level of an articulated issue, I suspect, is the changing composition of that rank and file—specifically, the roughly 100,000 academic workers who have joined the union in the past couple of decades, at least half of them in the past three years. There’s no question that the push for the union’s December 2023 call for a cease-fire in Israel’s war on Gaza came from those members.
While all UAW officials certainly welcome the union’s recent growth, which has preponderantly come from university campuses, those grad students may be forgiven if they think some in the union view them as an exogenous body. During the February 2024 meeting, West Coast regional director Mike Miller cited the 100,000 academics who’ve voted to join the UAW; Mock interjected that only 47,000 of them were paying dues. (That was almost entirely due to delays in securing first contracts.) Miller and Northeastern regional director Brandon Mancilla had been trying for four successive IEB meetings to persuade the board to create a division of the union to specifically represent academic workers (who are concentrated in their two regions), like the divisions that represent the workers at GM, Ford, and Stellantis. The board rebuffed them. That the UAW’s academic members disproportionately supported Fain, and that the Labor Notes crew represented some kind of distillation of the academic workers’ alien sensibilities and preference for revolution, portends a future that some in the old guard—not a majority, but not an inconsiderable number—don’t want to be around for.
The UAW’s Gaza cease-fire resolution also initiated the ancillary but very real conflict currently imperiling the union’s leadership: that between Fain and federal monitor Neil Barofsky.
A New York–based attorney with the firm of Jenner & Block, Barofsky served as the special inspector general overseeing the federal bailouts following the financial collapse of 2008, during which time he tangled with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner over the government’s unwillingness to assist homeowners with foreclosures even as it was tending to the needs of big banks. He was also hired by Credit Suisse to oversee its investigation into its own history of assistance to Nazi Germany.
Fain’s office felt that its campaign to unionize Volkswagen required the kind of quick and decisive action that Mock disallowed.
Barofsky was in Switzerland working the Credit Suisse case when he learned of the UAW’s resolution. He almost immediately put in a call to Fain, which he began by noting that he was not calling in his capacity as the union’s monitor. To Fain’s astonishment, he said he was calling about the resolution, and that he happened right then to be with Barack Obama’s former special envoy on antisemitism, who could provide another perspective on issues that the resolution raised. (Barofsky added that he didn’t ask for any particular action to be taken, and apologized if it was perceived otherwise.)
At least, that’s how Barofsky characterized the call when he spoke to the IEB on the second day of its February 2024 meeting. Fain said he remembered the call differently: “The first thing you said to me was that you were calling me because you had concerns about my comments and they could be, you knew what I meant, but my comments could be misconstrued as being antisemitic. That’s what you said to me. And when I started explaining to you what I meant by my comment, then your comment was, well, I guess it is antisemitic.” Fain concluded, “For anybody to ever fucking say I’m antisemitic, brother, I’ll fight your ass in front of this building in a heartbeat.”
Barofsky denied calling Fain antisemitic and added that he had “no reason to think that.” But pressed by Fain to reveal more about their phone call, Barofsky told the IEB that “I shared the anecdote about the fact that my kids have been harassed since October 7th with antisemitic language. And, yes, it described that protest with people holding UAW signs chanting hateful comments.”
The whole issue was before the board because Barofsky had passed along a letter to the IEB that he’d received from the Anti-Defamation League, claiming that a resolution on Israel and Palestine from a UAW local of New York–based public defenders was antisemitic. Ben Dictor, the UAW’s attorney, had responded with a letter to Barofsky noting that the UAW had a history of resolutions and actions that many, including UAW members, had found offensive, such as calling for U.S. divestment from apartheid South Africa—and he certainly could have added such UAW efforts as providing crucial support for both the 1963 March on Washington and the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium.
Barofsky insisted he wasn’t demanding that the UAW do something about the letter; he said he had forwarded it because “we took it very seriously, in part because who it was that was making the allegation: the Anti-Defamation League … it is an important civil rights organization in this country.” He added, “Just because I described the allegation as serious, of course, doesn’t mean that I agree with it.” (In recent years, previous ADL leaders such as Abe Foxman have criticized the organization for becoming a mouthpiece for Israel’s right-wing nationalist government; a number of longtime ADL employees have quit for that reason.)
Fain’s response—the gist of which was “I couldn’t give a damn what the ADL says”—underlined his belief that Barofsky’s interventions were about union policies with which he disagreed, and coming as they did from a federal monitor with the power to investigate and recommend prosecution of UAW officials for criminal offenses, was a boundary-crossing extension of the monitor’s mission and power.
JUST ONE WEEK AFTER THE IEB MEETING, Barofsky began an investigation of Fain’s staff for its role in curtailing Mock’s responsibilities and instilling fear into some of the union’s officials and staff. In a report issued in July of 2024, he wrote that Mock’s reassignments “risk diluting the role of the Secretary-Treasurer as a potential independent check on actions that pertain to financial approvals and oversight of expenditures.” In a subsequent report, he wrote that “the Monitor’s investigation found that Mock consistently and strictly applied Union policy, guided by a commitment to accountability in the wake of the UAW’s past financial scandals. Her removal was not the result of dereliction of duty or dishonesty, but rather a consequence of her refusal to grant exceptions to the strict policy restrictions governing the expenditure of Union resources, including to those within Fain’s inner circle.”
Fain’s office felt that its campaign to unionize Volkswagen required the kind of quick and decisive action that Mock disallowed; though this was the centerpiece of their case against Mock, Barofsky’s reports do not address this at all, though it surely weighed on the IEB members’ decision to strip Mock of her control of some of the union’s departments. They grasped, as Barofsky did not, what the VW campaign meant to the union’s future, and what the passage of time meant to the UAW’s prospects at Volkswagen. His failure to consider the exigencies confronting union campaigns leaves the impression that had he been in a position similar to that of federal monitor to the UAW in 1936, he would have disallowed the historic sit-down strikes, which marked a turning point in American unionism.
The monitor’s reports also include episodes demonstrating Fain’s ill temper, recounting one incident in detail: “Fain had heard from Furman that Mock wanted her photo included alongside Fain’s on the back of a publication outlining a tentative contract between the Union and a company. Fain reportedly confronted the Head of the Print Shop in a tirade, demanding, among other things, that she tell him, ‘Who told you to put [Mock’s] motherfucking photo on there? This is my motherfucking membership.’ Witnesses stated that the interaction, during which Fain admitted he ‘got shitty,’ was aggressive and left staff in tears.”
While demonstrating that Fain can be the boss from hell and a palpable threat to staff morale, it’s not clear what legal issues arise here.
Barofsky has the power to recommend that the Justice Department start an investigation of the UAW, something that Donald Trump’s administration would dearly love to do. To forestall that threat, the UAW agreed last December to give back to Mock and Vice President Rich Boyer the authority they had lost over particular departments of the union, and Brooks announced he was resigning as chief of staff.
In a message announcing the changes, Fain wrote, “In addition to our work in bargaining and organizing, it is also crucial that we build an internal culture of accountability, fairness, transparency, and collaboration. Our union is committed to building a culture of compliance, where staff can speak freely without any fear of retaliation.”
“Is there really a legal issue raised by the Fain-Mock fight?” one union attorney who’s known Barofsky for years asked me. “Looks more like internal politics.”
In the course of his investigation, Barofsky found that 123 text messages between Fain and Brooks on the subject of Margaret Mock had been erased; other texts between Brooks and Furman openly discussed and gloried in removing Mock from her duties. But what made those messages any more illegal than, say, the phone calls between UAW President Leonard Woodcock and his allies when they were working to ensure the defeat at an upcoming convention of IEB member Paul Schrade, a Woodcock critic, in the early 1970s?
Barofsky’s reports contain both anecdotal and survey evidence that a number of UAW officers and staffers are scared of antagonizing Fain, but it’s questionable whether that is of any concern to rank-and-file UAW members. To the union’s autoworkers, Fain’s success at winning contracts with the Big Three and Volkswagen that increase wages and end the two-tier system of paying new hires less surely matters more. To the union’s academic employees, the union’s stance on Israel-Palestine and its general political orientation—at its annual political conference in Washington, D.C., this January, the two main outside speakers were Bernie Sanders and AOC—surely matter more.
Yet what may concern UAW members more is that the union’s internal strife is a major reason why, at least for now, the union’s run of momentum has stalled out.
After the VW win, the UAW lost an election at a Mercedes plant in Vance, Alabama, after filing with cards signed by 70 percent of the workers. Unionization efforts at the other plants in the Southern campaign have not moved forward or gone public, in part due to the difficulties of organizing in the South. The union did win an election at a Ford BlueOval SK battery plant in Kentucky, but by a narrow vote that involved challenged ballots and has yet to be resolved; Ford laid off 1,600 workers at the plant in February. A casino worker election in Rockford, Illinois, was a blowout loss. In January, by contrast, hundreds of curators, designers, and historians at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art voted to join the UAW—confirming the grim reality for today’s labor movement that the only workers who can unionize without fear of being fired are workers whose specialized talents make them hard to replace.
There’s no question that Fain’s demeanor and his aides’ war on the staff did the UAW no favors; many talented organizers and other staffers have left, some voluntarily, some not. The UAW has big ambitions, including something close to a general strike in May 2028; Fain has been encouraging other unions to align their contract expirations with those of the UAW’s Big Three contracts. Major progress on labor in the age of Donald Trump is unlikely. But the UAW’s energy and attention inward has thrown its ambitions into some question, at a time when it was a main source of hope in organized labor.
Fain has a new chief of staff now who previously worked for Chuck Browning, one of the union’s most highly regarded leaders. The union’s revival, wherever it may lead, remains a work in progress. That it’s been reviving at all, despite the Sturm und Drang, is no small achievement.
This article appears in Apr 2026 issue.
