Nathan Howard/Sipa USA via AP Images
United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain speaks during the first night of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago, August 19, 2024.
Having prompted the delegates to the Democratic convention to chant “Trump’s a scab” on Monday night, UAW president Shawn Fain met with about 20 reporters on Tuesday afternoon to make his case, lest anyone doubted it, about Trump’s essential “scabiness.” Among the cases he cited, he also made clear how fundamentally organizing is affected by the party in power in the White House, how Stellantis is trying to trash the commitments it made in its contract with the UAW earlier this year, and how the labor movement has, and hasn’t, taken advantage of the current record levels of public support for unions.
Fain was clearly delighted at the excitement that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have brought to Democratic ranks. While making clear he thought Biden was a terrific, and terrifically pro-union, president, he noted that a Detroit rally the UAW had held for Biden earlier this summer had drawn about 2,000 attendees, while a Detroit rally the union that thrown together on short notice for Harris earlier this month had drawn 15,000. The UAW, an aide also noted, would be waging a large member-to-member field campaign for Harris this fall, and Fain’s enthusiasm for a Harris administration was unmistakable. (Fain’s enthusiasm for Biden’s acting secretary of labor, Julie Su, was also such that it struck me as likely that he—and other union presidents—would urge a President Harris to reappoint Su to run the DOL.)
To any syndicalists who somehow believe that unions should focus on organizing and life on the shop floor to the exclusion of political involvement, Fain made clear the differences between organizing with Joe Biden in the White House and organizing when Donald Trump was there. Under Trump’s National Labor Relations Board, the rules governing organizing campaigns and union recognition elections were rigged to favor management, often by delaying the amount of time between workers filing for an election and the election’s actual date. The longer the time, the greater the chance that management will wage an all-out prolonged campaign (including such illegal actions as firing workers active in the union drive) to deter the workers from voting to organize.
Under Biden, Fain said, thanks to the rules set by his appointees at the NLRB, “within 30 days of filing, we had an election. That matters. Who’s in the White House has a massive impact on organizing.”
Fain also discussed the UAW’s displeasure with Stellantis, with which the union signed a contract last fall. The contract contained a commitment by the company to reopen a currently shuttered plant in Belvidere, Illinois. Despite its contractual commitment, Stellantis now says it won’t reopen the plant, as agreed to, in 2027, nor reopen supplier plants, some scheduled to be reopened next year, until the main plant is brought back.
By pushing the main reopening to 2028, Fain said, the current contract, with its commitments, will have expired by the time Stellantis now says the reopening will happen—effectively voiding its current contractual pledge. Fain noted that the union could strike the company in roughly a month’s time if Stellantis doesn’t recommit to the contract it signed. He also noted that the UAW had dropped some other demands last fall when the company agreed to reopen Belvidere, and should the union strike, those demands could be back on the table.
Among the sea changes the UAW has seen since Fain has become president is the reversal of a dynamic that had plagued UAW and other manufacturing union members in recent decades. For years, Fain said, “we’d been told going into bargaining that we couldn’t ask for more because of the [lower wage and benefit] competition from [non-union] plants in the South.” Last year, when the union’s contract with the Big Three automakers expired, the union went ahead and asked for—and won, thanks to its strike—major raises and the extension of the contract to new electric-vehicle plants.
Rather than scale back the UAW’s demands to Southern standards, Fain noted, those non-union plants—Toyota, Honda, Nissan, and the rest—significantly raised their workers’ wages to catch up with the raises the UAW had won.
My colleague David Dayen asked Fain how he’d been able to turn the UAW around in so short a time. Fain credited the union’s members, of course, but then noted that this more militant consciousness is “where we are as a nation. People are fed up at the levels of inequality.” Such metrics as the record-high levels of public support for unions, and the organizing successes of workers (university teaching assistants, hospital interns, museum docents, and the like) who can’t be deterred from unionizing by firings, since they’re not readily replaceable, make clear that what the UAW has done under Fain is move rapidly to take advantage of this new zeitgeist. Which raises the further question of why other unions aren’t doing this themselves, and instead, still failing to invest in organizing at the scale that the UAW has adopted.
Oh, and this “scab” business. Well, hell—you know what a scab is. What you don’t know is that the UAW has already sold hundreds of the “Trump Is a Scab—Vote Harris” T-shirts that Fain wore during his speech to the Democratic convention, since the union made it available on its website late Monday night.
