Indiana native Shawn Fain meets the moment to make auto industry history, experts say

When labor experts describe UAW President Shawn Fain, one word consistently pops up: militant.

At first glance, it’s not what you might expect. He’s a 55-year-old Midwesterner who lives in Shelby Township, a conservative area about 45 minutes north of Detroit. Balding and bespectacled, he frequently opts for golf polos or windbreakers.

But social media and public appearances capture the real essence of the most powerful labor leader in the country: a fighter, one who seeks to capitalize on everyman qualities to provide a new future for the working class.

The same man who appeared a little uncomfortable working through a script while announcing his UAW presidential candidacy in June 2022 is now rubbing shoulders with President Joe Biden, progressive rock star Bernie Sanders and a cadre of political leaders. He revved up UAW members across the country with his “Eat the Rich” T-shirt, signing autographs, and in one social media post confidently sitting on a jet black motorcycle, his leather jacket dripping with tassels.

He and his team perpetually forced leadership at the Detroit Three automakers to scramble during recent contract talks, thanks to theatrics and pugnacious rhetoric that hammers on what Fain calls corporate greed and economic inequality.

It’s a transformation that embodies the change he promised to bring to Detroit and a union previously hamstrung by corruption, declining membership and a general ceding of power.

“I think the moment and the person have sort of gelled. In many ways, the moment required Shawn Fain. But Shawn Fain had to step up into that moment,” said Robert Bruno, a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois.

“I think he’s saying … the most likely way we’re going to be successful is if we’re all in on this. That we really take a big position here, we demand a lot and we do something very creative and militant to bring it about.”

Now, Fain is starting to deliver.

Last Wednesday, weeks after the start of a contentious strike, Fain announced the union reached a tentative agreement with Ford. On Saturday, Stellantis fell in line. GM announced its own agreement Monday.

Members still need to vote on the agreements. But outlines of the proposals show they provide the biggest pay raises in decades and restore a slew of benefits lost years earlier.

Days after the announcement of the final Detroit Three deal, Toyota confirmed it's offering its workforce a 9% raise by Jan. 1. That's likely akin to blood in the water for Fain and his team, who have long eyed the nonunion automaker for possible UAW organization.

Instead of offering a congenial tone in revealing the Detroit Three deals, Fain remained aggressive. In the video announcing the Ford agreement, he equated negotations to chess, saying his strategic strike operation forced Ford into “checkmate.” Fain repeatedly stressed members lead the union, while colleague Chuck Browning said it's the most united he had seen his UAW brothers and sisters in years.

While thousands of union members did not vote for Fain or necessarily have inside information on the unfolding strike plan, they trusted their leader. By the time he and others announced the GM deal, some workers on the picket lines wore Shawn Fain masks on their faces.

“Kids dress like superheroes for Halloween,” Judith Rice told the Free Press.

Representatives for Fain did not respond to Free Press interview requests over previous weeks. But Fain offered a profound message at the end of a video announcing the Ford deal: The UAW is “back in the fight to save the American dream.” It’s a bold promise, one of many made in recent months.

He has fulfilled quite a few pledges already. How the labor movement uses this momentum is still unknown. But it’s clear who’ll be leading the charge: a grandfather from Kokomo, Indiana.

Growing up in a conservative town

The son of a police officer and nurse, Fain grew up in the conservative blue-collar town that’s a little more than an hour north of Indianapolis, according to the New York Times. His grandparents fled “dirt-poor” conditions in Tennessee and Kentucky for UAW jobs in the North, he said during an August 2022 Facebook Live video.

He frequently talks about carrying around a check stub that belonged to his grandfather, who he says joined Chrysler in 1937 — the same year the workforce unionized with the UAW.

Like any good son of Indiana, Fain loved basketball as a kid. He told the Times a high school coach served as a model for what became his current leadership style.

“I had a pretty hard-core basketball coach, in your face all the time, and I adopted a lot of that mentality,” Fain said.

Listless after high school, he enrolled in a local university to play basketball but dropped out before earning a degree. Married to his first wife in 1991 and welcoming two daughters later, he, at times, had to apply for unemployment before landing a job as an electrician. Divorced twice in Indiana, he’s now engaged to Keesha McConaghie, a financial analyst with the UAW, according to his union biography page.

He eventually landed a skilled trades position with Chrysler in Kokomo, a role that ultimately took him to the UAW. For the last 29 years, he has worked in various posts with the union.

As he worked at Chrysler and moved up the union ranks in Indiana, he also sought public service roles: a 2006 piece in the Kokomo Tribune notes Fain registered as a Democrat in a race for county elected office. Only 37, Fain had already run unsuccessfully for school board and served on the local planning commission, board of health and the aviation commission, according to the Tribune.

His quotes to a newspaper reporter echo those he made decades later as UAW president: He said he wanted to serve to listen to neighbors so he could best cater to their specific needs. He talked about utilizing his leadership skills for change, and helping those who need assistance the most. Today, he also frequently quotes popular Democratic political icons, like Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy.

These are political tropes, but they have the capacity to resonate with people when delivered with authenticity. Fain provides that, experts said. While his larger speeches can have a rehearsed feel, his unscripted online question-and-answer sessions convey the working class man he hopes to represent.

“I think he’s really tapped into genuine issues of concern with the members, and that’s why they back him. He’s not just saying it, he’s voicing what people really feel strongly about. Not just UAW workers, but workers everywhere,” said Michelle Fecteau, director of the Center for Labor and Community Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

“He is tapping into these issues of inequality that have gone on for decades and have really heightened over the last 10 years. And people, I think, generally, feel like it’s unfair.”

Fain really came on to the national union scene in the late 2000s, during what was then a contentious time for Chrysler. Despite many Michigan local units supporting the company’s contract proposal in 2007, Fain fiercely opposed it. His own local chapter in Kokomo overwhelmingly rejected the deal, and Fain posted a public letter that foreshadowed the combative style he’s deployed now as UAW president.

If the union approved this contract, Fain, a skilled trades committeeman at the time, argued, "you might as well get a gun and shoot yourself in the head.”

The majority disagreed and ultimately did sign off on the deal, but it helped establish Fain as a prominent reform voice in the union. However, a few years later, he moved to Michigan to take on larger leadership roles with the union and at the training center jointly run by the UAW and Chrysler. Both the union administration and that training center would feature prominently in future scandals.

Yet Fain came out unscathed, despite working as a UAW administration employee during a time when federal law enforcement elicited 15 convictions tied to corruption involving the centers, union leaders and company executives.

Fain addressed some of this directly on his campaign website, saying he repeatedly stood up to his union boss Norwood Jewell, who was sentenced to 15 months in prison for his role in the scandal. In his campaign announcement video, Fain said he decided to run after then-UAW president Ray Curry approved new pay raises for union leaders despite languishing pay from the automakers for workers.

Fain joined a slate of other candidates last year running against Curry and the old guard. Despite his years of service in UAW leadership, Fain deployed consistent jabs and colorful language to show how he was different than those he had previously served.

“All (the Curry team does) is go into attack mode, they name call and they’ll paint people to be liars or try to divide the union. It’s all bullshit, we all know that,” Fain said during a Nov. 11 Facebook Live video.

“Questioning our leadership isn’t causing division, that’s our duty as a member. … I have not lied one damn time. So anyone who wants to claim that, you’re full of shit.”

Ultimately, Fain and his team won earlier this year in a tight election, thanks in large part to both their advocacy for substantial change but also to overhauls in the voting system. For the first time, individual members voted for leadership, as opposed to a smaller number of previously chosen leaders picking a president.

Despite a relatively narrow margin of victory — it came down to several hundred votes in an election with more than 100,000 ballots cast — Fain and his team took their win as a mandate. Almost immediately, Fain made sweeping changes. He ousted members of his transition team, bringing on new organizers.

One, Chris Brooks, wrote a transition memo for Fain, a document that appeared to lay the groundwork for the forthcoming strikes against the Detroit Three.

“The mantra of the counter-revolution is going to be, ‘we’ve never done it this way.’ Our response must be clear, consistent and unrelenting: ‘We know. Now do it anyway,’ ” the memo states.

Tough negotiator

To labor movement observers, the fact Fain deliberately avoided the ceremonial pre-negotiation handshake with Detroit Three executives was not a surprise. Neither was literally trashing a contract offer from Stellantis during a video to the members.

It’s all part of the president he promised to be: one who pushed away from the “company union” leadership of the past, hearkening back to a different era of a truly bottom-up approach to bargaining.

“Much of it’s very deliberate to identify with his rank and file. You see it all the time. When he’s on the picket lines, high-fiving and fist-bumping fellow workers. That’s reflected in his rhetorical style as well,” said Jake Rosenfeld, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis who has extensively researched unions and the labor movement.

“He’s really juxtaposing himself from some of his predecessors, which were — not to mention the corruption — but were widely perceived to be way too cozy with management. And so drawing a sharp line of distinction, rhetorically and in other ways, to make clear to the rank and file that he is one of them.”

Rosenfeld and the other experts noted that his “Stand Up Strike” strategy may not have worked at another time in U.S. history. In fact, Rosenfeld said, in recent years, strikes generally did not prove fruitful. But this one came when polls show the general public overwhelmingly favors workers' rights and opposes the broadening economic class divides that Fain rails against.

“I think there’s an anger. You can tap into these feelings that people are just sick of so many people making so much money, and just feel like it’s wrong, it’s unfair,” Feacteau said.

“It’s just gotten out of control. And unions, I think, see themselves — and Fain sees himself — as a mechanism of controlling the inequality.”

What the critics say

Critics argue that the mentality from Fain and his team is socialist. They point to social media posts from some on his team that they say advocate for socialism. Some also attacked Fain for taking his $206,000 salary while many striking workers struggled on the $500 a week they received from the union. (Fain is not still an employee at the joint training center, contrary to a widely shared video from an industry journalist, according to a Stellantis spokesperson.)

More broadly, they repeatedly tried to say he was more interested in fighting than finding a deal, pointing to leaked text messages from a top union aide that suggested creating chaos for the car companies and keeping them "wounded for months."

"It’s clear that there is no real intent to get to an agreement," GM CEO Mary Barra said in late September, about a month before the UAW and automaker reached a deal.

Sandy Baruah, leader of the Detroit Regional Chamber, said the agreements are good "but come at a substantial cost."

"In addition to the $10 billion economic hit this prolonged strike cost our economy — including workers and businesses outside the Detroit Three — these agreements place additional competitive pressures on our companies and the state," Baruah said after news of the GM tentative deal.

"These agreements will increase the cost of vehicles made by UAW workers by hundreds, even a thousand dollars, and make competing companies' offerings more attractive. As the home of the Detroit Three and the most automotive manufacturing, Michigan will have to work overtime to send the message that it is open for business.”

All three academic experts, who spoke with the Free Press before the union and automakers arrived at tentative agreements, largely dismissed most concerns about Fain's approach.

Feacteau said unions stand for equal pay for equal work, and Fain is “working his head off.” Looking back, Bruno said history shows comparable attacks anytime advocates pushed for substantial workforce changes opposed by management, from the women’s suffrage movement to strengthening child labor laws. While he acknowledged the criticisms might resonate with some union workers, he called it predictable “modern-day red-baiting or McCarthyism.”

“I think it’s an indication of how badly the auto industry, or at least the leadership of the auto industry, is really doing in this particular struggle. Because public polling across the board has been very supportive of organized labor,” Bruno said.

“It’s somewhat a sign of desperation.”

Rosenfeld said such messaging could have proven effective, but only if the strike persisted or if workers oppose the tentative deals. While union members do care about political arguments, Rosenfeld said they generally care more about contract results.

Fain is banking on that, as he eyes what is likely the end of the most productive Detroit Three strike in generations. Every expert agreed he’s using negotiatons as a big flag to signal recruiting season is open.

It needs to be, if the UAW wants to exist. More than half the union now consists of retirees and automotive membership is on the decline; Rosenfeld said more broadly, only 16% of the people building cars nowadays are unionized. That’s down from almost 60% in the early 1980s, he said.

Fain likely telegraphed some of his future plans in a recent Facebook Live video.

“The days of the UAW and Ford being a team to fight other companies are over. We won’t be used in this phony competition. We will always and forever be on the side of working people everywhere,” Fain said. “Nonunion autoworkers are not the enemy. Those are our future union family.”

The UAW continues to branch out beyond autoworkers as well, efforts that began before Fain took over. Fain recently touted his union members at Detroit casinos and Blue Cross Blue Shield who are also striking. Increasingly, university staff or graduate students comprise a large portion of the UAW.

But the union likely needs to do more to regain the power it once had. Fain recently pledged to organize autoworkers not currently represented by a union.

It’s something of a white whale for the UAW. Previous efforts to unionize large Volkswagen plants across the South ultimately failed. That might just sound like a worthwhile fight to Fain.

“There are some that are trying to say that I’m raising members’ expectations too high. They think it’s dangerous to tell the working class that they deserve more. I want to be clear: I didn’t raise our expectations. Our broken economy is what’s raising our members’ expectations,” Fain said during an Oct. 13 speech.

“Standing up for yourself is not dangerous. It’s our obligation to the working class, and to future generations. … So unless employers start coming to their senses, unless we start to see real gains in our contracts that match the gains we’ve seen on Wall Street, then I predict there are going to be a lot more strikes on the horizon.”

Contact Dave Boucher: dboucher@freepress.com and on X, previously called Twitter, @Dave_Boucher1.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Indiana's Shawn Fain steps up, makes auto industry history, experts say