UAW's Shawn Fain is onto a new campaign he calls 'Stand Up 2.0'
Jamie L. LaReau, Detroit Free Press
Updated 10 min read
It's a rainy Friday evening when United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain prepares for a 40-minute commute from his office at the union's Solidarity House on Jefferson Avenue on Detroit's east side to his home in Shelby Township.
He puts some papers in a black canvas backpack — no briefcase for this executive — and snaps his cellphone to his belt. A sign on his desk reads: "I don't sugar coat (expletive), I'm not Willy Wonka." He keeps another sign on the floor near his feet that he glances down at daily to keep him humble. It reads: "Remember: The toes you step on today may be attached to the ass you will have to kiss tomorrow."
He has at least half a dozen more calls to make that evening, he told a Detroit Free Press reporter, meaning it'll be close to midnight before his workday is done.
"At some point, I have to turn it off for an hour and try to go to sleep," Fain said. "But I live for this. This is what I love. I’m a proud father of two daughters I’ve raised and they’re grown now. I am at the point in my life where this is my focus. That’s why I decided to run for president. I’m a 29-year member. I’ve had my frustrations as a worker on the floor, as a local leader, as a national leader ... so I took on this challenge. I’m excited about where we’re headed and I’m ecstatic about what’s happened in the first eight months of my presidency."
UAW president Shawn Fain sits at his office desk for a portrait at the UAW Solidarity House in Detroit on Friday, Dec. 1, 2023.
Fain — who turned 55 on Oct. 30, the same day he got a tentative new 4½-year contract with General Motors that GM union members ratified last month — is proud of uniting a divided union and winning record contracts. He talked to the Free Press about some of the behind-the-scenes challenges during negotiations and his thoughts on the Detroit automakers' leaders.
But he doesn't have much time to reflect on the past eight months because he is already onto a new campaign he dubs, "Stand Up 2.0," which the UAW launched earlier this week. It urges employees at some 13 nonunion carmakers across the United States to go on www.uaw.org/join to sign a card to unionize. It is an enhanced strategy of Fain's so-called Stand-Up Strike, but instead of bargaining labor deals with three automakers at once using targeted strikes as leverage, the union is trying to organize all the nonunion automakers across the country at once. Then, do targeted union votes.
Fain said the UAW already has "thousands" of worker signatures on the online cards and he has a sense of which companies may be first to get a vote, though he declined to name them.
“We’ve got our ideas right now, but I don’t want to get into that until we get going, but it’s going well, it’s going very well," Fain said. "The first domino to fall will be the big one because when you get one, I think others will fall in line quick.”
Changing union culture
To understand where Fain is going, it's necessary to look back.
An electrician by trade, Fain worked for Chrysler at Kokomo Casting Plant in his hometown of Kokomo, Indiana. On March 26, Fain was sworn in as UAW president after the union's first-ever direct election. A large, deep blue glass plaque with his title etched in it — a gift from friends — and made by the famed Kokomo Opalescent Glass Co. sits on a bureau behind his desk.
"When I walked into that convention on Day 1 and it was a very divided house," Fain said. "It was not a warm reception for me. It was not an easy thing to do, but I knew that going in.”
Fain is well aware of the naysayers who said he wasn't qualified. But "I tuned it all out," he said. He has an executive board consisting of experienced leaders that UAW members elected including the three vice presidents. He brought in some outsiders as strategic advisers too.
"If we’re going to change the culture of this union, I thought it was important to find some people who had an outside set of eyes to bring in a fresh perspective and who had success in the labor movement in the past in organizing, bargaining good contracts and in communications," Fain said. “We had to be a lot more aggressive in the negotiation process than we had been in the past.”
Don't mess with working-class people
Fain brought other outsider ideas with him. For example, when Fain campaigned for the presidency, he said he had to get creative. He did not have enough vacation days to travel to plants to campaign. So he used Facebook Live to broadcast his talks on the internet. Once elected, he made the livestreams a trademark for weekly updates during the Detroit Three negotiations.
Scattered across his spacious office are various placards used as backdrops when he sat at his small conference table doing most of his Facebook Lives during the strike.
His talks often featured a bit of cursing, some belligerent rants and melodrama: He made an impact by tossing automaker contract offers in his trash can (which still sits in his office). In person, Fain is soft-spoken, almost shy. When this Hoosier gets frustrated, he said he closes the door and lets off steam by tossing a small basketball at a miniature backboard and net in his Solidarity House office.
UAW president Shawn Fain holds a wastebasket that says Big Three Proposals that includes a proposal and some of his speeches that sit in his office at the UAW Solidarity House in Detroit on Friday, Dec. 1, 2023.
"I am humble. I’m a working-class person. I love people," Fain said. "But I have my frustrations with this economy and how it’s not worked for working-class people. So when I'm in the fight, naturally, I’m going to come off pretty harsh. I try to be civil and try to be professional as best I can, but there are triggers. When you mess with working-class people and poor people … I take that serious."
Great expectations
Fain is coming off of a 46-day strike against Ford Motor Co., Stellantis and GM that started Sept. 15. Against great odds, he came out with record deals — though the ratification at GM slid through by a comparatively narrow 55%. As the Free Press reported, some GM workers felt the contract did not do enough for older workers or that Fain had set expectations too high.
“My experience in bargaining is if you go to the bargaining table and you get everything you ask for, you didn’t ask for enough," Fain said. "We have a tendency in this union to set expectations low and to settle lower. That was something I wanted to change. Our expectation should always be through the roof and we’ll see where we land.”
UAW president Shawn Fain talks with the Detroit Free Press at the UAW Solidarity House in Detroit on Friday, Dec. 1, 2023.
The negotiations saw a fair share of “firsts.” It was the first time a sitting U.S. president walked the picket line. Fain said that may still not be enough to earn the union’s endorsement in next year's election, but meeting Joe Biden, "was a great experience. ... How many people get to ride in the presidential motorcade with the president to a picket line? But, at the end of the day, it’s about the members and it’s about getting results and I’m proud of the results we got.”
The contracts are record-breaking, giving union-represented workers at each company a 25% base wage raise over the 4½-year span, a return to cost-of-living adjustments, job security and more.
"We didn’t get everything we wanted but we addressed every issue in some way," Fain said. "There’s still work to be done. The membership had high expectations and I’m proud of that. I want them to have high expectations and we’re going to build on that."
Fain said he entered bargaining with some preconceived ideas that turned out to be false.
“I really thought going into this that Stellantis was going to be the worst to deal with ... they really ended up being the best. They were serious; they wanted to get things done. There’s not one time in this process that they misled us or they lied to us," Fain said. "I can’t say that for Jim Farley. Jim Farley led us to believe one thing for five weeks and then did a complete 180 and denied he even said certain things or committed to certain things."
UAW president Shawn Fain talks with the Detroit Free Press at the UAW Solidarity House in Detroit on Friday, Dec. 1, 2023.
Fain didn’t provide additional details to support his criticism, and he declined to elaborate Saturday, but he said he "went ahead and talked to Bill Ford," Ford's executive chair, near the end of negotiations rather than Farley. "I do believe Bill — obviously his name is on that company — he cares about Ford.”
Ford spokesman Mark Truby declined to comment, but noted that Ford was the first to reach a tentative agreement with the UAW. Regarding battery plants, those negotiations were always going to be complicated because automakers tend to team up with partners on such ventures, creating legal barriers.
“As far as Mary Barra goes, I have a lot of respect for her," Fain said. "She worked her way up through the ranks in the company ... she knows the business. She’s a very smart woman. We have different agendas as to who we represent.”
When it comes to his relationship with the CEOs now, he said, “the membership comes first for me. I don’t carry grudges. The bargaining is over. Our contracts were successful. We move forward."
Fain answers Musk
Fain next wants to see workers get better deals at the electric vehicle manufacturers Tesla, Lucid Motors and Rivian Automotive, the Asian automakers and European automakers with factories in the United States.
The UAW has tried for years to organize at the foreign transplants and failed, but Fain believes now is the time as working-class people are weary of living paycheck-to-paycheck.
“We have to harness the power of the working-class people. The facts are on our side," Fain said. "We just have to connect those dots. The average worker doesn’t have the time to do all this research and look at the fact that the Japanese and Korean six made $480 billion in the past decade, the German Three made $460 billion. Working-class people deserve their share."
“Tesla doesn’t have a union right now and there is a lord-and-peasant culture there," Fain said. "The lord makes rocket ships and shoots his ass into outer space and whatever he wants to do, while the peasants keep scraping to get by."
Fain wants to add 150,000 nonunion workers to the UAW, doubling the size of the union's current autoworker membership, but his priority is to serve as the equalizer between the working class and corporate billionaires.
"The UAW is going to be fine," Fain said, even if it doesn't add new members. "We want to grow, but we want to bring security to workers in America and all over the world."
This story has been updated to reflect that Fain did not put together the executive board, but rather that it is comprised of member-elected leaders.
