I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I was initially fooled by UAW president Shawn Fain. The Stellantis factory electrician burst on the national scene early last year when he was elected president of the UAW in the union’s first rank-and-file direct vote, besting an entrenched management whose previous three scandal-ridden presidents landed in prison, as did some executives at Fiat Chrysler who bribed them. As I have little regard for the CEOs of GM and Ford and the obscene salaries they are paid for their poor performances, I found Fain’s bombastic rhetoric refreshing.
“This trashcan is overflowing with the bullshit that the Big Three continue to peddle,” Fain said in a video prior to calling his first ‘Stand Up” strike last September 14. “We’re all fed up with living in a world that values profits over people. We’re all fed up with seeing the rich get richer while the rest of us just continue to scrape by. We’re all fed up with corporate greed and together we’re going to fight like hell to change it. The race to the bottom ends September 14.”
I was impressed with Fain’s stump speeches at UAW strike rallies, particularly an address he gave to striking workers at Stellantis’ Jeep plant in Toledo, when he talked about how his grandfather was among those who served in WWII.
“They didn’t go fight those wars to watch their grandkid and future generations work for poverty, damn wages to get by,” Fain said. “They fought them wars just like every veteran that served this country since that time and continues to serve. This (strike) is just as much about them as it is about us. That’s because they don’t fight these battles, they don’t stand up for this country to watch a country go down the drain and watch.” (see 4:28 of linked video.)
As the UAW strikes continued, I became increasingly wary of Fain. He repeatedly referred to the union’s Detroit 3 employers as the “enemy” and Europe-based Stellantis was the target of his fiercest criticisms. Fain never addressed the questionable work ethic of many of his union members, particularly those working at Stellantis’ Jeep truck assembly plant in suburban Detroit, where unplanned absenteeism sometimes ran as high as 25 percent.
Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares previously said that U.S. plants have higher absenteeism than other plants around the world. Nevertheless, Stellantis paid its UAW workers more lucrative bonuses than GM and Ford last year because the company is bigger and more profitable than its rivals.
My skepticism of Fain was heightened upon reading this exclusive Detroit News story about text messages sent by UAW communications director Jonah Furman in a private group chat on Elon Musk’s X social media platform. Furman boasted that UAW negotiators were using bargaining sessions to inflict “recurring reputations damage and operational chaos” on the Detroit 3 automakers.
“(I)f we can keep them wounded for months they don’t know what to do. The beauty is we’ve laid it all out in the public and they’re still helpless to stop it,” Furman said.
Furman’s background and experience speaks volumes. He served as Bernie Sanders’ national labor organizer in 2020 and a political and labor organizer for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He also was co-chair of the Metro DC arm of the Democratic Socialists of America Labor Working Group, an organization which “stands in unwavering solidarity” with pro-Palestinian encampments on U.S. university campuses and their “righteous message.”
According to a bio posted by the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, Furman was born in Chicago and raised in Evanston, an affluent suburb. He attended Johns Hopkins University, where he majored in philosophy and literature. After graduation, Furman moved to Boston and was in a touring band for four years, which traveled the US and Europe. He later moved to New York and interned at the Street Vendor Project, a center for NYC street vendors.
Furman’s CUNY bio said he’s interested “in radical approaches (emphasis mine) to work and wages (basic income, work refusal) and the histories of those approaches.”
Furman was flattering himself about the pain he imagined the UAW was inflicting on the Detroit 3 automakers. While the UAW secured what the media billed as an “historic” contract, for thousands of UAW workers it proved to be a Pyrrhic victory.
Fain’s contract provided that temporary workers be made permanent and paid higher wages. Stellantis instead chose to fire more than 4,000 of its temporary workers, some of whom were single mothers who depended on their jobs to feed their families. Underscoring the low regard Stellantis has for the UAW, the company used automated calls to notify fired UAW workers at the Jeep Toledo plant of their lost employment.
Although Fain garners favorable coverage in the mainstream media — Time ranks him among the 100 most influential people in America — Nissan employees at the company’s parts distribution facility in Somerset, New Jersey, clearly weren’t impressed with the UAW after four years of being represented by the union. Of the 60 employees represented by the UAW, 37 last month voted to oust the union, and only 17 voted to support it.
“UAW union officials were far more concerned with hoarding power in the workplace than communicating with or listening to workers,” Michael Oliver, the Nissan employee who filed on April 1 the petition for the decertification election, said in a statement provided to the Detroit News by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. “They kept us completely in the dark about contract negotiations, and treated anyone in the workplace who opposed their agenda or questioned their leadership with a huge amount of arrogance, contempt, and even intimidation.”
In recent months, I began noticing Fain being photographed with Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib at pro-Palestinian rallies in Washington and elsewhere. Tlaib is a dyed-in-the-wool Jew hater, who opposes a two-state solution and has embraced the chant, “From the River To the Sea,” which calls for genocide of all Israelis and is popular in her political neck of the woods. Tlaib’s Jew hatred is such that she was named “2023 Antisemite of the Year,” besting even Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
It seems a safe bet that Fain’s WWII fighting grandfather wouldn’t be proud of his association with Tlaib, who refused to denounce “Death to America” chants a rally held in Dearborn, which includes parts of Tlaib’s district.
I was also puzzled seeing the UAW’s logo prominently displayed at many of the pro-Palestinian college encampments. Having watched countless videos of pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses, I’ve yet to see one student Gaza activist that I perceived could last more than a few days working on an automotive assembly line.
Turns out, U.S. colleges are fertile recruitment grounds for the UAW, but not to work in auto plants. The UAW represents nearly 100,000 graduate students and other academic workers across the country, more than any other union. Indeed, the UAW represents more workers in the University of California university system (UC) than it does autoworkers employed at GM.
Some 48,000 UAW graduate students and other academic members of the University of California university system have authorized a strike because of college crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protests on campuses in recent weeks, citing free speech and student safety concerns. Among their demands is that UC divests from Israel and companies that support the country.
UC admirably has taken issue with the UAW promoting a political agenda in its representation of the system’s academic workers.
“UC believes that a strike sets a dangerous precedent that would introduce non-labor issues into labor agreements,” said a UC spokesperson in an emailed statement to Axios.
Among the U.S. companies that support Israel are GM and Ford, both of which have substantial research and development facilities in Israel, as do virtually all major U.S. technology companies. While the CEOs of GM and Ford have so far lacked the courage to address or denounce the pervasive Jew hatred in their backyards, Ford vice chairman Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah who also served as U.S. Ambassador to China, Russia, and Singapore, was among the first major donors to cut off funding to his alma mater University of Pennsylvania because of the school’s tolerance of pro-Hamas demonstrations.
“Silence is antisemitism, and antisemitism is hate, the very thing higher ed was built to obviate,” Huntsman wrote in a letter to Penn’s trustees.
Ford embraced same sex rights long before it was politically correct, something not allowed in Gaza and most Muslim countries, where being gay is punishable by death. In the Detroit suburb of Hamtramck, a city with a sizeable Muslim population and where GM has a major auto plant on the city’s border, the Gay Pride flag is banned. Hamtramck also renamed a major street Palestine Avenue.
Given the UAW’s focus and pursuit of its Jew hating agenda, it’s little wonder the union is dying. The union’s membership declined to 370,000 last year, down from 400,000 in 2020 and its peak of 1.5 million members in 1970. Still, the union has retained some friends in high places, including President Biden, who proudly stood alongside Fain at a union strike rally.
The UAW in January endorsed Biden’s reelection. UAW’s leadership no doubt was pleased with Biden’s decision to halt weapons shipments to Israel to aid the country’s eradication of Hamas, which the U.S. government deems a terrorist organization and its supporters openly chant “Death to America,” even on U.S. soil.
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