US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan Strikes Down Department of Labor Dismissal of Challenge to 2022 UAW Election, Orders Investigation Into Voter Suppression Claims
Will Lehman, a rank-and-file worker at Mack Trucks and socialist candidate for UAW president, issued the following statement in response to today’s decision in Lehman v. Department of Labor, 2:23-cv-11585. The decision held that the denial of Lehman’s complaint by the Department of Labor was “arbitrary and capricious.” The full opinion can be read here.
The decision by Judge David Lawson today vindicates the fight we have waged to defend the basic democratic rights of over 1 million rank-and-file members of the United Auto Workers. Last year, Biden’s Labor Department dismissed my objections to the illegitimate UAW elections without responding to the merits of my arguments about voter suppression, which led to 9 percent turnout and the fraudulent election of UAW President Shawn Fain.
Today’s ruling means the Department of Labor’s efforts to dismiss my complaint were illegal, with the judge characterizing the Department’s arguments as “pedantic” and “inherently illogical and textually unsupported.”
This is a devastating blow to the UAW bureaucracy, the Biden administration and the court-appointed Monitor, who collectively oversaw the election and worked to suppress voter turnout. The UAW bureaucracy deliberately kept the rank and file in the dark about the elections, using the “Local Union Information System” to send ballots but failing to update its member address lists, meaning that most rank-and-file workers never knew an election was taking place.
For workers, the ruling confirms what is the essential issue: The entire UAW apparatus works against the interests of the rank-and-file.
Nothing has changed since the “election” of UAW President Shawn Fain. First there was the phony “stand-up strike” at the Big Three, where the apparatus kept most workers on the job and then rammed through concessions contracts that have paved the way for mass layoffs. Then there was the isolation and shutdown of the strike by University of California academic workers against the police crackdown on anti-genocide protests. Then there were the revelations of ongoing corruption in the apparatus, implicating Fain himself.
Fain is working closely with the Biden administration in the escalation of war abroad, which is at the same time war on the working class at home. This is why the White House has done everything it could to defend the apparatus and Fain’s administration. The conclusion workers must draw from this entire experience is the need to abolish the UAW bureaucracy and transfer power to the rank and file, through the development of workers’ committees. Only in this way can we carry forward a real fight against the companies and the entire ruling class.
