With Trump headed back to the White House, here’s how the UAW moves forward

The United Auto Workers’ campaigns to keep President-elect Donald Trump out of the White House, to organize more nonunion auto plants and to pressure Stellantis NV over its commitments to an idled Jeep plant in Illinois haven’t gone as planned.

But UAW President Shawn Fain on Friday characterized his term atop the union so far as “the most successful year and a half in the history of this union when it comes to bargaining, good contracts, organizing.”

The UAW’s $40 million organizing campaign built the momentum to unionize in April more than 4,300 hourly workers at Volkswagen AG’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, but it was followed by a lost National Labor Relations Board election in May at Mercedes-Benz Group’s plant in Alabama. The union, at the end of October, said it was pausing a strike authorization drive at a number of Stellantis locals over delays in the launch of a midsize truck at Belvidere Assembly Plant. And this week, Trump secured a presidential victory, winning industrial Midwest states like Michigan despite the largest electoral engagement program the UAW has put forth in decades.

Plus, UAW members await results from the investigation by the court-appointed monitor into actions by several executive board members — including Fain — for alleged retaliation and favoritism. Fain has said that he will shake up the status quo to take the UAW in a new direction, and the union has said it welcomes the monitor’s work in rooting out corruption and will cooperate with the probe.

“What has transpired since (ratification of 2023’s record contracts with the Detroit Three automakers),” said Marick Masters, a management professor emeritus at Wayne State University, “has been a series of events that have combined to raise questions about his (Fain’s) leadership,”

Some UAW members are already raising questions. Rene LaCross, 40, of Flint, a Trump supporter working at General Motors Co.’s Davison Road Processing Center in Burton, feels the union should have a recall vote on Fain because of the UAW funds spent to support the Harris campaign.

“There are plants that are doing massive layoffs, there are plants that are shutting down, and they’re planning on moving, Stellantis put those notifications out, and he’s off dealing with a presidential election,” LaCross said. “I understand you want to support her, and you can do that on your own time. You need to worry about your membership and the people that put you there. Because if you don’t, then we have the right to do what we should do, and that is to recall Fain, because he did not ask the membership if we would support her campaign, or any campaign with those funds.”

Last year produced victory in the form of agreements with Ford Motor Co., Stellantis and GM that secured 27% compounded wage increases over four years, the reinstitution of cost-of-living adjustments, a shorter timeline to the top wage and other benefits. Appearing on national television and hosting Facebook livestreams with negotiation updates, Fain became a nationally recognized figure in the labor movement, and President Joe Biden made history by being the first sitting president to join striking workers on a picket line.

“With the current state of politics in the union, the idea of someone challenging him (Fain) next time around in the aftermath of the ‘23 contract, that seemed inconceivable,” said Marc Robinson, principal of consultancy MSR Strategy and a former GM internal consultant who was involved in labor negotiations.

‘Continuing realignment’

More than 5,000 UAW volunteers nationwide activated as a part of the union’s political engagement program, and they knocked on more than 250,000 doors in Michigan alone. An internal survey showed a 22 percentage-point lead among members for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over the GOP’s Trump with that increased to 29 points among members who heard from the UAW about the election, according to the union.

“A majority of our members supported Kamala Harris,” Fain, who’d been seen on numerous occasions leading up to the election wearing a “Trump is a scab” T-shirt, said in an interview with The Detroit News. “A majority of organized labor supported Kamala Harris, but a lot of working-class people have felt left behind for decades.

“A lot of people looked at their pocketbooks and where they were and the price of things, and typically, no matter who’s in power, they’re typically held accountable for those things, and so I think that’s part of it. But at the end of the day, a majority of Americans decided to give Trump a second chance.”

Trump flipped at least four swing states red, including Michigan, from blue in 2020. Losses in U.S. Senate races by Dan Osborne, an independent in Nebraska, and Sherrod Brown, the incumbent Democrat in Ohio, represented two of three other races of focus for the UAW. In Michigan’s Senate race, U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Holly, eked out a victory over former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, R-White Lake Township.

“There’s a continuing realignment between the political parties,” Masters said. “The Republican Party will be more increasingly identified as a working-class party cut across gender and race. Most of the working class is nonunion. He (Trump) realizes he needs to pay attention to union workers and certainly will not do that indebted to the leadership of organized labor.”

In UAW Region 2B, union members knocked on 80,000 doors in the region covering Ohio and Indiana. The UAW will have to focus on what its strategy was, Region 2B Director Dave Green said, but labor is only one piece of the puzzle.

“The Democratic Party, obviously, has to sit down and find some better direction,” Green said.

Green has been trying to stay positive about the outcome of the election with his staff, telling them: “As they roll back regulations on businesses, I imagine safety standards, OSHA regulations, claw back at social justice issues and human rights, that it’s job security for us. We’re going to have a lot more work to do trying to protect what we have and building on that.”

Over time, both the UAW and the Democrats “got complacent,” said Lori Welch, 57, of Lapeer, Michigan, a lifelong Democrat and 30-year GM hourly employee.

“It really does fall all the way back to education. We have just eroded education,” said Welch, who spent six weeks engaging with union members in Genesee County about the election. “It looks like a lot of men came out, voted for just Donald Trump and never went down ticket. It isn’t that she (Harris) wasn’t a good candidate. I mean, she’s 10 times more intelligent than what got elected. It’s just the fact that she’s a woman.”

‘He will bring jobs back’

There are some common objectives between the union and what Trump has said on the campaign trail. He has said he will renegotiate the United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, encourage domestic industrial investment and prevent U.S. manufacturing jobs from going to Mexico.

“President Trump will keep his promise to the hardworking men and women of America,” Karoline Leavitt, spokesperson for the Trump-Vance transition team, said in a statement. “He will bring jobs back home, restore American manufacturing, slash inflation, and cut taxes. Working Americans elected President Trump because they trust him to Make America Great Again.”

Fain said the union hadn’t yet reached out to the Trump transition team but that the UAW is willing to work with “any politician, regardless of party” to protect American jobs.

“President Trump said repeatedly he’s going to bring the jobs back and be tough on companies if they outsource American jobs, and we agree on that,” Fain said, noting the union is facing several companies threatening to move work from the United States. “There’s a lot of work ahead. We’re always willing to work on that, where we can find common ground.”

Harley Shaiken, a University of California-Berkeley professor emeritus who specializes in labor and the global economy, suggested it might be time for Fain to trade out his T-shirt but said the challenges faced by the union won’t stop it from possibly making some gains.

“It doesn’t count them out,” he said. “It just underscores how tough things are for unions in general. There are some surprising areas where the union pushing harder could help it achieve some goals.”

Trump, according to media reports, has asked Robert Lighthizer, who was the U.S. trade representative under his first term, to lead the Federal Trade Commission again.

“He understands the kind of demands that the UAW are making in regards to trade,” Shaiken said. “He’s open to some of that. Whether he can act on any of that is something to keep in mind. There are a few bright spots.”

Even Trump’s close relationship with Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk may have its benefits, Shaiken said.

“Musk is very critical of the UAW,” he said. “But he very much wants to see electric and autonomous vehicles take center stage and continuing that not only benefits the economy. The Inflation Reduction Act’s incentives and tax credits are a positive for the UAW, given the Detroit automakers have sunk billions of dollars (into EVs). To leave them hanging would be in no one’s interest.”

‘We’re not going to slow down’

The UAW under Fain has struck an increasingly aggressive tone with Stellantis and its CEO, Carlos Tavares, in recent months, especially after the automaker said it was delaying a commitment to reopen the former Jeep Cherokee plant in Belvidere. Illinois. The union filed a series of grievances, held rallies and threatened to strike over the Belvidere delays, while also raising concerns that the company could move production of the Dodge Durango SUV from Detroit to Canada.

But workers are increasingly worried about their jobs amid ongoing Stellantis plant layoffs, and the company continues to struggle financially and with high inventory levels. Late last month, union officials said they were withdrawing many of the grievances and pulling back on the strike push, at least for now, but warned they still could revive the effort in the coming weeks.

UAW Local 1166 — which represents Stellantis’ casting plant in Kokomo, Indiana, and was the local where Fain previously was a plant shop chairman — didn’t secure the two-thirds support required to authorize a strike at the end of October.

“Sixty-one percent voted to support a strike, but there has to be two-thirds majority to authorize it. Our members overwhelmingly support action,” Fain said. “We have to take this company on, and we’re not going to shift that. We’re not going to slow down on that fight.”

A day after the election, Stellantis also announced more layoffs at its Toledo Assembly Complex where it builds the Jeep Gladiator pickup: “They choose that day to do it,” Fain said. “Maybe they’re banking that Trump won’t do anything.”

Brian Keller is a Stellantis worker who ran against Fain in 2022 and has sharply criticized him on social media. In a Thursday Facebook Live event, he reiterated his call for Fain’s removal due to the ongoing Stellantis job cuts as well as his strong backing of Harris, which he warned could now backfire against the union.

“The fact is, Biden and Kamala Harris is in there right now, and we’ve been bleeding jobs since the ratification of the tentative agreement,” Keller said. “I’m hoping that Biden and Harris does something to stop Stellantis from whatever Stellantis is doing (conducting layoffs). If not that, we’re going to have to have some dialogue with Trump. And the thing is, because Shawn Fain bad-mouthed Trump, Shawn Fain burned any bridges we had with Trump.”

David Pillsbury, another UAW member and Fain critic, joined Keller during the event and agreed with his assessment that Fain had gone too far in his rhetoric, referencing a political mailing with an image of excrement with a scratch and sniff that said, “Donald Trump is so full of it, you can smell it.”

“Harris lost. Shawn Fain made enemies out of Donald Trump, called him a scab,” Pillsbury told the Facebook Live audience of close to 200. “This isn’t going to go well for him.”

He added that the union now needs to “think for a minute, cool it down, and figure out a way to walk back some of the rhetoric, and figure out if he’s (Trump) going to work together or not.”

Marc Jones, 53, works at Stellantis’ Detroit Assembly Complex. He initially backed Harris and attended one of her Detroit rallies in mid-October, telling a reporter then that he appreciated the vice president’s message on manufacturing and the middle class, and he thought Trump was out of touch with working people like him.

But reached after Election Day, the Detroit resident said he’d ultimately voted for Trump, citing issues like protecting U.S. autoworker jobs, electric vehicle regulations and transgender issues.

“I think he actually does what he said,” Jones said of Trump. “He may get paid in the process — that’s Donald Trump, he’s gonna do what he do. But he’s our guy.”

Meanwhile, the UAW continues its organizing efforts, Fain said. It is negotiating its first contract with Volkswagen, which finds itself in a cost crisis and says it could close three plants in its homeland of Germany. A majority of roughly 1,000 workers at the GM and LG Energy Solution joint-venture Ultium Cells LLC battery plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, also opted to join the union in September via a card-check system.

And Fain suggested workers in Kentucky at BlueOval SK, the EV battery manufacturing joint venture between Ford Motor Co. and SK On Ltd., are “ready to roll” and that a filing for a National Labor Relations Board election could happen “soon.” The union also has added tens of thousands of higher education workers this year, too.

“For I don’t know how long, we’ve been told we can’t win, we can’t win in the South, and we win, and now we’re told we’re not winning fast enough,” Fain said. “Things are going great, and we’re going to continue to do what we’re doing.

“In the past, the Republican Party hasn’t really championed those issues when it comes to organizing. I guess we’ll see. You can’t sit here and claim that you’re for workers, and when you know workers want better for themselves, you basically try to eliminate all the programs that are in place. We’ve seen (the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation’s) Project 2025, some of the things in that. If that’s the pathway this party is going to go, then you’ll see another shift in the election the next go around.”

The union continues with its efforts to gain support for NLRB elections at nonunion plants. It previously had announced milestones when 30%, 50% and a supermajority of workers had signed union authorization cards before filing for an NLRB election. It hasn’t announced any milestones since the loss at Mercedes-Benz. Workers in Chicago for auto supplier Flex-N-Gate voted to organize with the union earlier this month.

Organizing under a Trump administration is likely to prove much tougher, Shaiken said. Looking at his first term, the NLRB faced cutbacks on enforcement staffing, and court decisions may be less friendly to labor.

“It doesn’t mean it’s impossible,” Shaiken said. “Unions have shown and Shawn Fain has shown solidarity delivers. That would be a great new T-shirt.”