Shawn Fain’s UAW Is Facing Strong Headwinds

A Tumultuous Reform Process

All this set the stage for what would turn out to be a highly consequential meeting of the UAW executive board in February 2024. By this time, the UAW had turned its sights on organizing the non-union auto factories in the South, first VW in Chattanooga but also Mercedes in Vance, Alabama and Toyota in Georgetown, Kentucky. Immediately after the conclusion of the 2023 “Stand Up Strike,” whose label linked the contract fight to the historic “sit-down strikes” of 1937, all the non-union companies raised wages to meet the new UAW standard. Fain called that the “UAW bump.” Upward of ten thousand Southern auto workers signed union authorization cards, many with little or no encouragement from a UAW organizer.

“The workers are ready,” Fain told his executive board. “This is our time . . . We haven’t seen a moment like this in our lives and we may not see one again . . . it is not a time for half measures and being conservative. It’s time to swing for the fences.” A “generational leap” could rebuild the UAW, said Fain, not unlike that of the founding generation in the 1930s and 1940s.14

Fain: “Every time we make a request, we’re being investigated like we’re doing something corrupt . . .”

Here, Fain was outlining a theory of “momentum” organizing, an approach to unionization pushed forward by Chris Brooks and many of the new staff hires, that eschewed the careful planning and step-by-step organizing of the sort most unions practiced when confronted by management hostility and worker hesitation. That latter approach, one refined and advertised by the late Jane McAlevey, was essential in normal times, but now Fain and his team wagered that the UAW’s exceptionally high-profile strike had created a “movement moment,” a “brief period in time that workers are ready to join by the thousands.”15

Of course, that did not mean that the union could neglect the recruitment and training of union advocates in the factory and community. But even here, the UAW was trying something new. It had been trying to organize the big VW complex in Chattanooga for more than a decade, and a handful of veteran staffers were on the scene. But Fain wanted to inject more energy and elan into the effort. He therefore recruited nearly a dozen West Coast unionists, who had won their spurs in university organizing.

Their leader, Carla Villanueva, who holds a PhD in Latin American history, would later argue, in a New Labor Forum article coauthored with Michael Belt (see “There Is No Substitute for Structure-Based Union Organizing” in this issue), that at both VW and in higher education, momentum was hardly enough. The UAW’s big National Labor Relations Board election victory at VW (73 percent voting for the UAW in April 2024) was the product of an intense cadre-building effort in every department and on every shift, so that nearly all the four thousand three hundred workers understood the stakes.16

[D]emocracy itself holds the solution to the most important problems that emerge within the union. That is the rough-and-tumble democratic union “culture” that represents real reform.

Regardless of the organizing methodology, Fain and his team wanted to strike while the iron was hot, while union enthusiasm in the South was high, and before the Tennessee business and political elite could mobilize. The UAW had appropriated $40 million for the organizing campaign, so Furman sought to hire a couple of DC-based media and consulting firms, both of which had close connections to the Biden administration or the Democratic Party. They would spread the UAW message on billboards and on television and social media throughout East Tennessee. The contracts would be worth upward of half a million dollars each and both would be “no-bid,” an exception to the “three-bid” procedure mandated by the outside monitor and the UAW constitution. Fain and Furman argued that delay would sap the momentum, and, equally important, the three-bid contract procedure would alert anti-union forces in Tennessee to the renewed UAW effort.17 In years past, billboards the UAW sought to rent had instead been secured by the National Right to Work Committee and other business groups, who emblazoned them with messages like “The UAW Wants Your Guns” and pictures of derelict factories with the tag line, “Detroit: Brought to You by the UAW.”18

But Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock was unwilling to cut corners. In December 2024, she had angered Furman and the rest of the Fain team when she refused to sign off on one of the DC contracts. Her office had spent the Christmas holidays vetting Conexion, the media company Furman wanted, but the delay angered Brooks, Fain, and other newcomers—just one more instance, they thought, of Mock not grasping the need for organizing speed and message. Thus, for example, when the 2023 strike began, Mock wanted to save money by using up the many thousands of generic picket signs stored at various UAW local offices, much to the annoyance of Furman and Brooks who had crafted strike-specific messages. And then there were the petty holdups and reimbursement denials when organizers found their UAW credit card unworkable. In one instance, Mock rejected a $151 pizza bill, paid by Brooks with his personal card, when Shawn Fain visited Chattanooga to meet with key UAW organizers.19

Complained Fain, “Every time we make a request, we’re being investigated like we’re doing something corrupt . . . we get blocked and it turns into a damn fight just to get done what we need to get done.” To which Mock replied that because of the corruption scandal of just a few years back, she was indeed “strict” when enforcing UAW expenditures guidelines. “I was sent here with a mandate,” she argued, “the membership said, go in there and you protect our money at all costs. Am I counting dollars and pennies and nickels and dimes? Absolutely. That’s my job.”20

In all [of Barofsky’s] many reports on [the UAW’s transgressions], there was . . . [little] understanding that the . . . point of the union was the mobilization of a working class for effective combat . . .

But Mock’s outlook embodied more than just green-eyeshade rigidity. Early in her tenure, according to union staffers, she had unsuccessfully tried to get her son on the UAW staff focused on Stellantis.21 Later, her hostility to Brooks and other new staffers—and her defense of the old system whereby union jobs were a reward for years of service—became clear when she told the executive board, “I am totally against hiring anybody from outside. We have hundreds of thousands of members . . . So I take offense that our people aren’t qualified.” At the 2026 UAW Constitutional Convention, Mock put that sentiment forward in a resolution prohibiting “nonmembers from exercising policy making, strategic direction or supervisory control,” but her awkward and insular effort failed to gain traction among the delegates.22

Mock was also isolated at that February 2024 executive board meeting. Significantly, she had no support from Chuck Browning, a veteran UAW officer, then vice president in charge of Ford, who had been a Curry partisan in the election just a year before. Browning, however, was now an enthusiastic supporter of Fain’s “kick-ass” organizing strategy, and he thought the new UAW president was entirely within his rights to reassign some of Mock’s responsibilities in order to eliminate what he also considered her obstructionism.23 Thus, the union’s executive board stripped Mock of some eleven departments under her supervision, prompted by a report from the UAW’s compliance officer asserting that she had used her authority “to delay, obstruct, or even block the work of other departments.” For “weeks and even months,” she used the Purchasing Department to drag out approval of vital union tasks. It was a “dereliction of duty,” concluded the report.24

Enter the Monitor

Margaret Mock may have lost the battle on the UAW executive board, but she had a powerful ally waiting in the wings. In May 2021, the Michigan federal court that oversaw the union’s corruption case appointed Neil Barofsky UAW monitor, a post that gave him a wide-ranging mandate to investigate virtually any aspect of the union’s activities to “remove fraud, corruption, illegal behavior, dishonesty, and unethical practices from the UAW.” Barofsky, a former prosecutor and a Democrat, was the Treasury Department’s Special Inspector General in 2009 and 2010. He oversaw the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program, after which he wrote a book, Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street, asserting that because of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s regulatory favoritism to the banks, the American people “should be enraged by the broken promises to Main Street and the unending protection of Wall Street.” Thereafter, Barofsky joined the law firm Jenner & Block, where he cochaired its New York-based monitorship practice.25

It is a lucrative business, in the United States and abroad, where courts and government agencies use monitorships as part of various investigations, legal settlements, and regulatory actions. Big companies like Credit Suisse, Citigroup, Glencore, GM, Uber, and the New York City Housing Authority have been Jenner & Block clients. With at least three partners working with Barofsky on the UAW monitorship, Jenner & Block billed the union more than $25 million in the four years that ended in 2025.26

Courts have imposed monitorships on unions far less frequently than on companies and other government entities. Beginning with the Teamsters in 1989, monitorships at the Laborers and Carpenters have supervised fair elections and excluded officials guilty of outright corruption from union affairs. But Barofsky saw his mandate at the UAW as far more intrusive, a perspective derived from his work with corporations and government agencies where he saw “a flawed or dysfunctional corporate culture” as the object of reform and rehabilitation. But “fixing a broken culture is no easy task,” wrote Barofsky in a monitorship handbook written by Jenner & Block attorneys. To do so required “the successful monitor to develop a deep understanding of the company’s business and financial objectives.” In other words, Barofsky was going to be a nanny correcting and cajoling a set of potentially wayward wards.27

Barofsky was clearly among those equating opposition to the Gaza war with a species of anti-Semitism . . .

Such a perspective may or may not have worked when it came to the hierarchically structured capitalist enterprise, but trade unions are something else entirely. If the monitor does in fact create conditions under which a free and fair election can be held, democracy itself holds the solution to the most important problems that emerge within the union. That is the rough-and-tumble democratic union “culture” that represents real reform. It is unlikely that Barofsky had much of a feel for that dynamic. His firm had contracted out the sometimes-complex work involved in holding both the UAW referendum on a one-member, one-vote basis and the subsequent election of all the top officers. And in all his many reports on the transgressions he saw in UAW governance, there was nary a word of understanding that the whole point of the union was the mobilization of a working class for effective combat with enterprises of enormous wealth and power.28

“If you go to war with [a federal monitor], you’re going to lose.”

Barofsky exacerbated these difficulties when on December 13, 2023, he made a phone call, “strictly on a personal level,” to President Fain, then in Pennsylvania for a Mack Truck negotiation, urging him to rethink the UAW president’s talk at a Capitol Hill rally the next day where several unions would call for a Gaza ceasefire. Fain’s appearance was in line with a recently adopted UAW executive board resolution on the Israeli incursion, a position that reflected the growing strength and radicalism of that portion of the union, largely in the Northeast and on the West Coast, composed of grad students, contingent faculty, public defenders.29

When Barofsky made the phone call, he was actually in Switzerland, where he was investigating the extent to which Credit Suisse had failed to divulge previously unreported relationships between the bank and the Nazis. Barofsky was clearly among those equating opposition to the Gaza war with a species of anti-Semitism, a sentiment that he punctuated by describing how his children had been “harassed” when passing a UAW protest where members were holding signs and “chanting hateful comments.”30

Not unexpectedly, Fain took offense, not only because it was impossible for the monitor to make a “personal” phone call, given the legal and supervisory authority at his command, but also because of the veiled charge that either Fain or others in the UAW were anti-Semitic. Said Fain at a later executive board meeting, “For anybody to ever fucking say I’m anti-Semitic, brother, I’ll fight your ass in front of this building in a heartbeat.”31

Fain was willing to let it all pass after the call. But then in mid-February, Barofsky emailed the entire executive board, this time prompted by a message he had received from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which noted that UAW Local 7902, composed of NYU and New School lecturers and teaching assistants, issued a pro-Palestine resolution and came out in favor of BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) against Israel, which might put that union in violation of a New York State anti-BDS Executive Order. This prompted another round of recriminations. At an executive board meeting Barofsky attended remotely from New York, Ben Dictor, who made a point of mentioning that he became a bar mitzvah at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, took the lead in pummeling the monitor. He called the ADL, who Barofsky cited in questioning the UAW’s Gaza stance, an outside “interest group” and wanted to know if the UAW was being billed for “unsolicited political advice” based on concerns raised by an outside third party.32

Barofsky was humiliated; “lesson learned,” he later admitted.33 But as Ken Paff, a founder and leader of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, put it, “Monitors are powerful. If you go to war with them, you’re going to lose.”34

[I]f the union is successfully moving forward, then many of the old divisions transcend themselves.

Until that conflict, Fain had maintained “a pretty collaborative working relationship with the monitor,” said one UAW official.35 However, within days of the February 2024 executive board meeting where she was stripped of her posts, Margaret Mock complained to Barofsky of what she saw as a set of illicit and retaliatory persecutions. Almost immediately, he sent the union a request for all its internal communications bearing on that potential transgression. This inaugurated more than a year of investigations and interviews. During that time, Barofsky probed and judged the degree to which Fain and his close assistants had unjustly harmed Mock and also Rich Boyer—the Stellantis vice president who was also stripped of some of his responsibilities in May 2024—after it became clear that during the 2023 negotiations he had permitted his corporate adversaries to actually strengthen an attendance policy that had long been an irritant for thousands of factory workers.

Barofsky’s investigation turned up a good deal of damaging information on Fain, Brooks, and other unionists in their corner. None of it was criminal or corrupt, but it did violate what the monitor thought to be good governance and ethical practice. Fain had made the determination to sideline Mock late in 2023, so Brooks and Furman colluded with the union’s ostensibly independent compliance officer to edit and revise portions of the report that indicted Mock for her delays and other transgressions. Barofsky also thought it untoward that Fain, seeking to deflect any charge of racism, had Laura Dickerson and LaShawn English, both African American women on the union’s executive board, formally introduce the compliance report for discussion. When Barofsky sought thousands of internal UAW documents, e-mails, and other messages related to these issues, Fain and his team either delayed their release or attempted to delete some of them from their computers and cell phones. From Barofsky’s perspective, all this was emblematic of a “union culture that remained mired in fear and distrust,” with staffers “scared to death, scared to lose jobs if they don’t march to [the President’s] tune,” because his approach is “you’re either with me or against me.”36

[A] drift to the right was hardly apparent at the UAW’s June 2026 Constitutional Convention.

But Barofsky’s will would not be thwarted, at least for a season. Finding that Fain had acted with “illegitimate and retaliatory intent” after both Mock and Boyer had been stripped of their responsibilities, Barofsky threatened to take his charge to the Trump Justice Department unless the UAW caved. And that the union did in late 2025, agreeing to restore to Mock and Boyer all the departments and assignments lost the previous year, while demoting Jonah Furman and forcing Chris Brooks to resign under pressure.38

Toward the Next Internal Election

Neither Mock nor Boyer are members of the slate Shawn Fain has assembled for the general membership election that began when ballots were mailed out in August. Mock is running for Secretary-Treasurer and Boyer for President, but it does not look as if either will anchor a full-fledged opposition slate. As one veteran unionist on Mock’s side during the UAW’s internal conflicts told me, there is “no political basis for the formation” of such an opposition.39 While Mock has come to represent the outlook of the old Administration Caucus, which former president Ray Curry has even sought to revive, her perspective has little in common with other Fain opponents, largely sectarian radicals and self-starters who never signed on to his agenda in the first place.40

Because Fain’s new electoral team, “United UAW,” is composed of several figures who were members or backers of the old Administration Caucus, some observers have described it as either a “more progressive version” of that caucus or perhaps even the UAW’s “Thermidor.” Only three people who were part of the original UAWD-backed slate in 2022 are still on the Fain ballot lineup, and the UAW president has chosen Brandon Keatts, who worked for many years under Chuck Browning, as his new chief of staff. Fain told me he was “disgusted” with the three years of executive board infighting and wants to groom a new generation of union militants, but in the meantime, “I need people who know how the union works.” So, there are some “holdovers” from the old regime.41

Fain is right to combine forces, because if the union is successfully moving forward, then many of the old divisions transcend themselves. Brooks has cited an old organizer maxim: “We win people over, we don’t write them off.”42 Thus, Mike Miller, the West Coast director, wanted more money and support for his organizational work in higher education, so in 2022 he backed Ray Curry, a calculated bet that the old regime would hold on to power and purse. But once Fain was in, Miller quickly became a team player, forming a productive alliance with the younger and more radical Brandon Mancilla, director of the New York/New England region, where colleges and universities were also a big organizing target. That kind of programmatic integration may be more difficult in the Midwest auto centers, where many local unions are still controlled by a set of “get along, go along” leaders unwilling to mobilize their membership for shop-floor fights with management. They may expect officials like Laura Dickerson, another Browning protégé now running for vice president and Brandon Campbell, a Chrysler/Stellantis veteran staffer, candidate for Secretary-Treasurer, to protect their interests.

However, a drift to the right was hardly apparent at the UAW’s June 2026 Constitutional Convention. Fain gave a characteristically militant first-day speech in which he emphasized the pathbreaking work of both the union’s Communications Department and its Department of Bargaining Strategies, initiatives in which Furman and Brooks were both heavily engaged. But more important than any speech was the lively and engaged participation of scores of delegates, a sharp break from past conventions where dissident voices were rare and sometimes met with booing from delegates aligned with UAW top officers. As Scott Houldieson, a veteran leader of reform forces, told Labor Notes, “More delegates are willing to speak up. The fear of reprisal for speaking up has melted away.”43

There were two reform caucuses active at the convention. The UAWD, now led after an internal conflict by a cohort of radicals whose support was largely based among Northeast academic workers and public defenders, succeeded in pushing through a resolution requiring the UAW to sell its $400,000 worth of Israeli bonds. The vote was close, 321 to 287, with the large group of delegates from locals with many Middle Eastern workers, such as Local 600 at the Rouge, probably playing a decisive role.44 While the UAWD sided with Fain against Mock and the monitor and applauded the UAW President’s militant rhetoric, they also thought that Fain has more recently charted a “progressive bureaucratic approach” rather than “advancing a program of class-struggle unionism.” They condemned his re-election effort on a slate containing many of his former antagonists.45

The fate of UAW’s revitalization is not entirely within its own hands, whatever the reforms that might be forthcoming.

In contrast, UAW Member Action, a larger Midwest-centered caucus led by veteran reformers, has endorsed Fain’s United UAW slate, seeking to deepen and extend the democratic procedures and organizing capacity within the union. To this end they championed the package of strike-fund reforms that raised striker pay to $550 a week (although the caucus had initially wanted $625) and increased from $60 million to $100 million the amount of strike-fund money union officers can spend between conventions devoted to organizing and contract campaigns. UAW Member Action also sought an amendment to the union constitution that would prevent delegates at a future UAW convention from overturning One Member, One Vote elections. That initiative had substantial support, certainly enough for a full-fledged debate. But in a complicated maneuver, the UAW General Counsel ruled the amendment unconstitutional in its present form, a ruling that may have been facilitated by what UAW Member Action called “old guard forces” on the UAW staff.46

The fate of UAW’s revitalization is not entirely within its own hands, whatever the reforms that might be forthcoming. It will also be shaped by conditions over which union leaders and activists have little control, and here the near-term prospects are hardly bright. The Trump administration’s about face on the electric vehicles (EVs) transition has made the UAW’s organizing effort much more difficult, North and South. There have been layoffs at GM’s Factory ZERO, near Hamtramck, which built electric trucks and SUVs, and at the Ultium Cells battery plants in Lordstown, Ohio and Spring Hill, Tennessee. Near Memphis, Ford’s BlueOval SK joint venture with a South Korean battery maker has dissolved, putting in jeopardy a narrow UAW election victory at this large buckle of the mid-South “battery belt.” Workers getting the shaft at such new production facilities are as likely to blame Fain’s UAW for not protecting their jobs as they are to pin responsibility on GM, Ford, or Trump. That is one reason for the demise of the UAW’s once-hopeful Southern organizing drive.

Meanwhile, Stellantis workers are furious that for the first time in over a decade, they will take home no profit-sharing checks in 2026 while checks upward of $10,000 are in the pipeline at GM and Ford. Stellantis reported a $26 billion loss in 2025, largely attributed to the cost of the on-again, off-again EV transition. Layoffs have mounted since the UAW’s 2023 strike, with blame for the failure of the company to reopen its Belvidere Assembly Plant, then considered a signal victory for the UAW after the union convinced the company to reopen the plant through the strike, landing on Fain’s shoulders. Not unexpectedly, support for the United UAW Slate may well prove weak among the nearly forty thousand UAW members at Stellantis. And since Mock has roots among these workers, their disaffection may constitute her one chance of retaining power and office in the union.47

Such discontent exists throughout UAW ranks, not unlike the economic and social disquiet now spreading in so many working-class neighborhoods.

So, this year’s UAW election, free, fair, and un-gerrymandered, will constitute more than a referendum on the Fain leadership. It will be a token of the larger hopes and frustrations confronting tens of millions of American workers.