The Department of Justice has convened a federal grand jury and subpoenaed the court-appointed monitor overseeing the UAW as part of a criminal investigation into UAW President Shawn Fain.
The monitor’s findings are damning: Fain “abused the authority of his office” to secure a cash bonus for his fiancée, an employee at the UAW-Stellantis National Training Center, and to intervene in her sister’s workers’ compensation claim against Stellantis. When Vice President Rich Boyer refused to go along, Fain retaliated by stripping him of his duties as chief Stellantis negotiator, on charges the monitor said Fain “knew were false when he made them.”
What the investigation confirms is what many of you have long known, and what my campaign has said since I first ran for this office: this bureaucracy cannot be reformed. It must be abolished, and power must be transferred to workers on the shop floor. That is what I am running for UAW president to do.
Like a cornered rat, Fain now says he has evidence that Boyer and Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock were pulling the same tricks to get family members jobs and favors. He says he “stayed quiet” because it “doesn’t help our union to have these fights out in public.” If these charges are true, no rank-and-file worker will be surprised. But one thing is certain: all of it was hidden from the membership, whose dues were stolen to provide perks and positions to hidden relatives.
Before anyone concludes that Boyer and Mock are the principled opposition in this fight, remember that they were part of Fain’s own slate, standing right beside him when he called the bogus “Stand Up” strike and hailed the 2023 contracts as “historic victories.” Boyer sold out Stellantis workers, and Fain and his whole staff signed off on the rotten deal that threw thousands of temporary workers into the streets, punished workers for taking time off, and led to the deaths of Antonio Gaston and Ronald Adams Sr.
As head of the UAW auto parts division, Boyer has his own record. Dana workers in Toledo, Warren and Paris, Tennessee massively rejected a deal he called a win, despite poverty-level starting pay. Nexteer workers in Saginaw voted down three UAW-backed contracts by overwhelming margins before the union rammed through a fourth.
With the election pending, the bureaucrats are fighting over who controls the $1.3 billion strike fund, the billion-dollar asset portfolio, and the network of retiree healthcare funds and training centers that sustain lavish salaries and careers for a bloated layer of officials. Neither faction has the interests of workers in mind.
Fain claims that “Corporate America” and the “political establishments of both parties” want him out because he stood up to the billionaires, and that the monitor is persecuting him over Gaza. These claims deserve nothing but contempt. When anti-genocide delegates chanted “Ceasefire now!” at the conference he assembled to endorse Joe Biden, the man supplying Israel the bombs, Fain watched as Secret Service agents and UAW thugs dragged them out.
The UAW bureaucracy strangled the University of California strike and blocked action at Columbia. When GE Aerospace workers struck a major defense contractor supplying weapons to Israel, Fain shut them down within weeks.
As for the monitor, it knew about Fain’s conduct before the convention, sat on his findings until Fain was already nominated, and let stand Fain’s sworn certification that he had not engaged in corrupt conduct, which Barofsky knew was a lie. This is the same monitor who signed off on the 2022-23 elections, rejected my documented evidence of deliberate voter disenfranchisement, and blessed an outcome in which Fain won with the votes of just six percent of the membership.
You are angry, and you have every right to be. But disgust with corruption is not enough. The question is: What are we going to do about it? It is not enough to complain. We must act.
I am not running for UAW president to reach the top of the garbage heap at Solidarity House. This campaign is not about replacing one official with another. It is about abolishing the bureaucracy and transferring power to the rank and file, on the basis of four demands:
- End the dictatorship of Solidarity House. Purge the hundreds of parasitic officials, nearly 470 of whom take home over $100,000 a year, and replace them with rank-and-file committees controlling every contract, every strike and every dollar of dues.
- End 45 years of pro-corporate collaboration. Fight for full wage recovery, a zero-layoff policy, health care at company expense, and a 30-hour week with no loss of pay.
- Reject the nationalism of the bureaucracy. Unite American, Canadian and Mexican workers against the transnational corporations that exploit us all.
- Mobilize the industrial power of this membership to defend democratic rights and oppose war.
There is growing opposition of the rank and file to every faction of the bureaucracy, expressed in the rejection of UAW-backed contracts and in massive strike votes. What that fighting spirit needs is organization: rank-and-file committees in every plant, independent of the apparatus and answerable only to you. Support this campaign. Build a committee on your shop floor.
This bureaucracy has had decades. We know what it is. It is time to replace it and restore power to the rank-and-file.
