Fain’s Future
By 
There’s a big profile of UAW head Shawn Fain in Bloomberg and it’s worth registering for the site over there to read it. There’s a lot of good material in it, especially Fain standing up to Biden and saying, look we need you to do more to get our endorsement, which has now happened much to Trump’s outrage. It is indeed important for labor to not just roll over for Democrats but to demand more for their endorsement. The real issue though is what comes next. The future of the UAW really is dependent on organizing the massive unorganized plants, largely run by Tesla and the foreign car makers. Can he move beyond the tough talking rhetoric (which he is good at) and winning solid contracts from the Big Three (which he is also good at) and take this on. There is some skepticism, even within the UAW, but there’s also the belief that he has earned his shot.
Like Fain’s Detroit strike, this organizing push defies recent UAW tradition. Rather than training resources on a couple of relatively promising targets, he’s going after the whole industry at once, announcing his ambitions to the world and banking on recent momentum to notch some quick wins, as the Starbucks union did in 2022. While there have been disagreements within the UAW about which companies represent the lowest-hanging fruit, ultimately employees will decide. The union’s new website lets workers at any of the 13 companies’ nonunion plants sign cards online. Once organizers reach 30% support at a particular workplace, workers on the union committee there will publicly announce themselves. At 50%, they’ll do a big rally featuring Fain. At 70%, if the company won’t voluntarily agree to recognize their union, they’ll try to win a government-run election.
Judging by the companies’ actions, they don’t see it as an idle threat. Within a few weeks of the Detroit deals, Honda, Nissan and Toyota each announced raises for their nonunion staff. Tesla did the same in January, calling it a “market adjustment.” The UAW says it hit the 30% mark in December at a Volkswagen factory in Tennessee, and in January at a Mercedes plant in Alabama.
Fain’s approach could flop, of course, and cost the UAW its new clout. Big companies generally have the advantage in union elections, because federal law lets them hold mandatory anti-union meetings and imposes minimal penalties for illegal retaliation against labor organizers. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is investigating UAW complaints alleging such retaliation by Honda in Indiana, Rivian in Illinois and Hyundai in Alabama. (In a statement to Businessweek, Hyundai denied wrongdoing. Rivian declined to comment, and Honda didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Spreading resources across a bunch of companies, while tipping them all to the union’s plans, could backfire badly. “I think workers are ready,” Fain says. “I think now is the time.”
Tesla presents an especially alluring and tricky target. It’s the world’s most valuable automaker, the one synonymous with EVs and run by the galaxy’s richest troll. But there’s no boss more determined to avoid ceding control to workers. During the UAW’s last push at Tesla’s California factory, the NLRB ruled that the company repeatedly violated federal law, including by firing an activist named Richard Ortiz, “coercively interrogating” employees and using Musk’s pre-X Twitter account to threaten them. Last year, when Tesla workers in New York handed out Valentine-style cards announcing an organizing campaign with the union Workers United, the company fired dozens of people over the next two days. An NLRB regional director dismissed the union’s claim that the New York firings constituted illegal retaliation. Workers United is appealing the decision.
Even when companies do get into scrapes with the NLRB, it tends not to leave a mark. Appeals can drag on for years, and there’s no individual liability for executives or punitive damages for companies found to have broken the law. Ortiz was fired in 2017 and still hasn’t gotten his job back despite a series of rulings in his favor. His case is pending before the Louisiana-based Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which recently ruled in a different dispute that Tesla has the right to ban UAW T-shirts.
Tesla, which didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story, has denied wrongdoing in these cases.
Musk’s penchant for immolating money and reputations out of pique just deepens some employees’ hesitancy to cross him. “The more antics he does, the more people get scared,” says one. Some workers are convinced Musk would rather shut down the Fremont, California, plant than recognize a union there. During prior UAW organizing attempts, announced in 2017, the company posted anti-union messages above urinals, such as comparing joining a union to handing a stranger a blank check. Musk has also made hay of the UAW’s corruption scandals and noted that the last time the union represented staff on the Fremont property—then a GM-Toyota venture that made Pontiac Vibes and Toyota Matrixes—it eventually closed.
Fain says it’s no surprise the UAW couldn’t get traction at Tesla before, when the union was bogged down by its own scandals, corporate coziness and lousy contracts. Now, he says, “we can beat anybody.” Tesla’s Fremont factory will be a closely watched target. Black workers there have won millions of dollars in total judgments after alleging routine racial harassment and discrimination. The plant has its safety issues, too. Last April an employee was hospitalized with six broken ribs, having been pinned inside a Model Y after Tesla failed to ensure power was cut to a conveyor belt, according to a citation by California’s safety agency that Businessweek obtained through a public records request. (Tesla is appealing the citation.) Musk’s personal pivot to amplifying antisemitic social media bile and hyping Republican presidential also-rans could also dent his credibility with Bay Area staff.
Look, we will see. But this is the future and I can absolutely see why Fain is doing this. It’s not like the previous half-century of UAW leadership has figured this out. Might as well try something new. And Musk is such a horrid scumbag and so abjectly stupid that targeting Tesla first really might make the most sense, even as Musk wants the Supreme Court to basically overturn the National Labor Relations Act.