Shawn Fain Takes On the EV Industry and the Election

The United Autoworkers' Union has been making a lot of news recently.

Across twenty states, coast to coast.

Thousands of workers already walking off the job.

Taking unprecedented action against the Big three US automakers. The UAW won a historic contract by taking to the picket lines last year. It was a big win for organized labor at a time when union membership has been on the decline across multiple industries, and it was all spearheaded by the uaw's energetic new president, Sean Fain.

Our fights not just for the UAW, our fights for the entire working class.

Fane's known to go on Facebook Live wearing a t shirt that says eat the Rich. He took over the UAW last spring with a vision to rebuild it as a powerful force in America, and not just at the negotiating table with automakers.

Shawn Fain's ambitions are to transform what it's like to work at the Big Three, but also to be part of broader transformations in society, to change the union contract and to change the social contract.

That's my colleague Josh Edelson. He's a labor reporter at Bloomberg and one of the people who's been chasing this story since long before the UAW became front page news. Just last week, Fain made the news again by emphatically endorsing President Joe Biden to serve a second term.

Of our endorsements must be earned. Joe Biden has earned it.

And days later he slammed former President Donald Trump on CBS's face the nation.

I can't fathom any union would support Donald Trump for president.

This is big. Many of the union's almost four hundred thousand members live in the Ross Belt. That area swung the election for Trump in twenty sixteen and for Biden in twenty twenty. But the story of the UAW, its influence in the auto industry and in politics, it's complicated. Today I'm joined by two of my Bloomberg News colleagues who have been tracking the uaw's rise, fall, and rebirth. We'll hear from conversations they've had with Fane over the

It was a powerful organization based on the industrial dominance and might of the United States and the post World War two era. When Walter Ruther was the president of the UAW in the fifties six, it was really powerful. He was very aligned with the Democratic Party and had a lot of political power. He was a real power broker. So they had a lot of power in Washington because you know, they were able to organize and deliver votes.

Back in the seventies, UAW membership peaked at around one point five million. Since then that number has dropped by two thirds.

We started to see more globalization, you know, outsourcing, integration of China into the world economy, foreign car companies coming in and opening up a lot of plants in the non union South that started to erode their power. The other thing, I would say, they had a huge corruption scandal that ended up implicating dozens of people, both from two former UAW presidents, but also a few executives from

Sean Fain the uaw's president. He won a close election last spring. Gabrielle and some of our colleagues have gotten to know him since then.

So Sean Fain, He's in his early fifties. He's from Cocomo, Indiana. He was an electrician who worked for Chrysler for many years. He was a single dad, raised his daughters. He comes from a long line of union workers.

You know.

He tells a story about his grandparents coming from you know, the South during the Depression era and coming up and getting jobs at GM or you know, at the Detroit Makers.

It was the American dream, I mean three more for grandparents, you know, migrated here. They were destitute in the hills of Tennessee, Kentucky and they migrated north for good paying union jobs and change their lives.

The union really brought his family into the middle class. So he really you talk about what the ideal, you know, image of what a UAW job is, that's what he grew up around. That's what he saw. His family in Indiana was very politically active.

He said.

His parents used to make him go around putting signs in people's lawns for local elections. Always very democratic.

From the time we could walk, we were put out yard signs, you know, when mayor races or whatever. Really knocking on doors.

Even when he wasn't in charge of the UAW, he was always kind of standing up to management whenever time they would have something that they wanted to go along with what the company proposed and he didn't think it was good for his members or his co workers, he would speak up. And you know, I'm sure that was not always appreciated that he made a lot of enemies that way.

What about the rank and file of UAW members. What do they think of him?

Oh, man, I think he's pretty popular. He won by a very narrow margin when he won the election, I mean barely a mandate, you could say. And I think he had a lot to prove, and he proved it with this contract, a twenty five percent wage increase plus cost of living adjustment.

That hard fought contract came out of last year's strike. It took a lot to get tens of thousands of workers to walk off the job and to hold out until execs from Detroit's big three automakers came to a deal that they supported. They made sure to hit them where it hurt. The whole thing cost Ford GM and stillantis about ten billion dollars.

People really love the way he just really stood up to the companies. Something he talks about a lot, and this is definitely how the UAW rank and file feel. They feel like they sacrificed a lot. And you know, two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, to help save the car companies, people took wage cuts, buyouts, they gave up all kinds of benefits to keep the companies afloat when.

The economic recession hit, they took it all and.

In their mind, that was supposed to be temporary to get the company through a hard time. And then the companies went on to have this great really over you know, decade long period of boffo profits and you know, great car sales, and they said, hey, what about us.

Our model right now is record profits equal record contracts, and these companies have had record profits for a decade and it's time for them to take care of the people that created its profits.

They felt like they were really due, So I think Fame really voiced the frustration.

He also notched another win when Biden flew to Michigan in September. It was the first time a sitting US president joined a picket line.

We've adopted to states that our endorsements will be earned, not not freely.

Given, and made Biden sweat about it a little bit and do more to support the union.

But not every member of the UAW agrees with Fain on this. In fact, a Bloomberg News Morning Consult poll found that a lot of Michigan autoworkers support Trump over Biden.

For a long time, the UAW for the most part, and you know, most unions have been reliably in the Democratic Party's camp. But I think there's been like sort of a sense of you know, slow burning crisis inside of like we've seen this writing on the wall for a long time. The unonization is going down. If we don't turn this around, then you know, we're not going to have much political power. We're not going to exist.

Coming up, how that slow burning crisis is shaping autoworkers' votes, how electric vehicles are shaping the narrative, and how these tensions could shape the twenty twenty four election. Sean Faine's endorsement of President Biden wasn't a given, my colleague Josh Adelson says, it was a chip that Fain held tightly for a reason.

Sean Fain made a point of showing that the UAW was not going to jump on board with endorsing Joe Biden at the point that the AFL, CIO and much of organized labor was doing so. Sean Fayne made a point of saying that being a Democrat running for president, even running against Donald Trump, was not enough to get an endorsement, that the endorsement had to be earned, and he gave Joe Biden opportunities to earn it, including making history by showing up on the picket line.

UAW, you saved the autobile industry back and two accoutation in four made a lot of sacrifices gave him a lot, and the companies were in trouble, and now they're doing incredibly well.

And guess what you should be doing incredibly well too.

We saw at the uaw's convention in DC a taste of what Sean Fayn's argument for Joe Biden well looks like.

Let's take a look at the candidates in their own words and their own actions.

And it has some of the trash talking and some of the societal vision and some of the knack for spectacle that we've come to expect from Sean Feinne. At one point, he said, we had a strike during the Trump administration, and here, here's everything that was done by Donald Trump to support those workers.

And I want to show you a picture.

He showed a blank page.

He said nothing.

He did nothing, not a damn thing, because he doesn't care about the American worker.

Sean Feinne also specifically called Donald Trump a scab and said if Donald Trump was your coworker, he would be anti union, he would be a company man.

Fine continued to slam Trump unface the nation on Sunday.

Donald Trump has a history of serving himself and standing for pa billionire class, and that's contrary to everything that working class people stand for.

Now.

Sure, all of this strong language may not seem that surprising coming from the leader of an auto union in the United States, but remember it's not the nineteen seventies anymore. The voter base that used to be so solidly with the Democratic Party not anymore.

There's been a long running explicit and implicit competition between Donald Trump and Joe Biden about who speaks for workers in America, who speaks for people who felt like they've been forgotten, Who actually will be good for union members in particular.

The anxiety for our workers is more or less, in my opinion, job security.

And there's one key battleground in the auto industry when it comes to job security right now, electric vehicles.

There's been a view for years from companies, sometimes from the union, that electric vehicles are likely to lead to fewer jobs. There are union members concerned that the transition to electric vehicles will be a transition away from them, away from the particular workers who've had these jobs, away from union members in general, away from the painstakingly negotiated pay and benefits and safety standards that exist in union contracts.

That's a fear Trump has played into He's used it as leverage against Biden, who passed policies that mandate electric vehicle production. Bloomberg's Gabrielle Coppola heard this first hint at a Trump rally in Michigan last fall.

Now they want to go all electric and put you all out of business?

You know that, right?

Was classic Trump kind of hyperbole about how you know, just kind of taking your worst anxiety, worst nightmare and projecting this is what's going to happen if you don't vote for me. You know, you're not going to have one job left in this state.

Biden's mandate isn't a government regulation, it's a government assassinated of your jobs and of your industry.

Really capping into people's fears about change that's coming from electric vehicles.

That contract Fine secured from the Big three automakers included some protections around EV jobs, So he started to make some headway on the issue. And Josh Edelson said that from his many conversations with UAW members, more of them seemed open to an EV future than not.

As one said, we don't have the VCR like we used to do, why should cars be any different? But want to make sure that that's a future that they would be part of, and academics with proprietary Info pointing out that at least in the short to medium term, electric vehicles could involve more jobs.

There is one other complication. The country's biggest EV maker, Tesla, isn't unionized.

Tessa's the world's most valuable automaker, it's the iconic EV company. It's led by maybe the most prominent anti union executive, certainly the richest anti union executive in the world in our galaxy.

He's talking about Elon Musk. At the New York Times deal Book Summit in November, Musk pretty much scoffed at the idea of Tesla workers creating a union.

I disagree with the idea of union's past word a reason that is different than through made expectors, which is I just don't like anything which creates kind of a lords and peasants sort of thing. Elon Musk has shown he is not too worried about bad press or legal conflicts in the past during organizing efforts by the UAW, the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that Tesla repeatedly violated the law, including by firing an activist Tesla has denied wrongdoing.

During one of Josh's conversations with Sean Fain, he posed the Tesla question.

Some people say Elon Musk is the most powerful unionvester the world, more powerful than some governments countries. Can you beat Elon Musk and organize Tesla.

I think we can beat anybody. It's going to come down to the working class people and the people that work for him decide if they want their fair share and if they want to get justice, or if they want him to be able to continue to build rocket ships and fly himself to the moon.

Where this all nets out when it comes time for auto workers to vote in November is hard to say. Gabrielle told me the UAW isn't unique in that way.

I think the union is divided just like America is divided. So, you know, Trump, I think a big part of his rise has been his appeal to working class voters and really speaking to this more populist kind of anger about, you know, injustice in the US economy. And I spoke to, you know, a Chrysler worker who is a big Trump fan, and he told me I only felt safe when Trump was president. He's the only one that can really is

Gabriel, you live in Detroit, so naturally what's going on in the UAW is influencing your day to day. But going into this election year, why do you think that the everyday American across the country outside of Detroit, why should they care?

I mean, the auto industry is sort of not only symbolically, but it is sort of the backbone of working class jobs, blue collar jobs in America where you don't need a nationally need to college degree to get a path to the middle class. So I think those jobs are really important for people's standard of living and being able to

You know.

We saw this during the pandemic when we couldn't get chips. We had spiral and inflation car prices when crazy we couldn't get you know, Ppe, we couldn't get drugs. Certainly in the White House, there's this recognition that, oh man, we outsourced all these jobs. We all thought they were kind of unimportant, kind of commodity, low skill jobs. Well,

Do you think the UAW has power to shape the election in any way?

Yeah? I do, because I think no matter what, the strike really engaged people. You know, it restored their faith in the Union, and it just got people mobilized and acting in a community or in manner, you know, supporting people on the picket line. You know, Fain has really built a real cult of personality. He's very popular beyond the UAW. Just whenever I mention him, people from all different walks of life, different class backgrounds, they like him.

Yeah, well that's gonna be a big question. Gabrielle, thanks so much for joining me. Was great to hang out.

Thank you, thanks for having me.

Thanks for listening to the Big Take DC podcast from Bloomberg News. I'm Seleiah Mosen. This episode was produced by Julia Press and Naomi Shaven. It was fact checked by Tiffany Choi. A special thanks to David Welch, Jeff Green and Jeff Muscus. Alex Sagira and Blake Maples are mix engineers. Our story editors are Caitlin Kenny, Wendy Benjaminson, and Michael Sheppard. Nicole Beemster Bower is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is