https://theintercept.com/2023/03/07/uaw-union-election-shawn-fain/
IN A HISTORIC election that could dramatically reshape the 400,000-member United Auto Workers union, insurgent challenger Shawn Fain currently leads incumbent Ray Curry by a margin of 645 votes for the union’s top leadership role.
The election of Fain and the Unite All Workers for Democracy slate would bookend years of corruption investigations into the old guard of UAW leadership. The scandals, the insurgent faction contends, distracted from multiple major contract negotiations with America’s largest auto manufacturers and soured rank-and-file members against leadership.
The victory would be another notch in the belt of progressive labor reformers in some of the nation’s most influential unions.
“A Fain victory is the difference between solidarity unionism — rank-and-file unionism — and the company unionism that we’ve been experiencing in the UAW for several decades now,” Scott Houldieson, a leader of Unite All Workers for Democracy, told The Intercept. “Look no further than the last set of negotiations when GM workers were on strike. There was a complete information blackout. The workers on the picket line knew what they wanted out of the contract: no more tiers, no more pensions bleeding dry, and bringing back cost-of-living adjustments. There was none of that messaging coming out of negotiations from past leadership.”
A FAIN VICTORY would follow on the heels of another leadership upset in one of America’s most powerful unions, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. In 2021, a ticket led by Sean O’Brien defeated the incumbent slate led by James Hoffa, who, like his father, led the union for decades. After their victory, the new Teamsters’s leadership assumed an aggressive posture and has since committed to massively expanding on-the-ground organizing to combat consolidation and wage deflation in the transportation and shipping industry.
Fain hammered UAW’s incumbent leadership for failing to take an aggressive negotiating posture toward large auto manufacturers and blasted the tiered employment system, which splits auto workers into different classes of employees, weakening union benefits in the process.
He’s also attacked the UAW’s failure to take an aggressive stance on auto manufacturers’ planned expansion into nonunionized plants in the South for building electric vehicles.
“For too long, the UAW has been controlled by leadership with a top-down, company union philosophy,” Fain said in a press release. “Ray Curry and the Administration Caucus have been unwilling to confront the companies, and as a result we’ve seen nothing but concessions, corruption, and plant closures. We now have a historic opportunity to get back to setting the standard across all sectors, and to transform the UAW into a member-led, fighting union once again. The future of the working class is at stake.”
As of a few hours ago Fain has defeated Curry.
This looks to me like another step in the right direction. A strong labor movement requires strong unions, and we can't have that if leadership is more interested in cutting backroom deals then in fighting for workers.