The American labor movement is being reborn, and the UAW under Shawn Fain is the only national union in the country with a credible claim to be leading it. The verdict from the old guard is that Fain has squandered worker dues. Read the actual numbers and a different picture emerges: an organizing machine winning where the labor movement has lost for half a century.
Fain won the UAW’s first direct membership election in 2023 by fewer than 500 votes — a margin that should have told the outgoing establishment exactly how tired members were of their act. Three years on, the referendum on his leadership is taking place now, with ballots closing Monday — but the question is no longer the one his critics imagined. The real question is whether the UAW will be the union of the post-industrial American workforce or a twentieth-century nostalgia project. By every measure that matters — member count where the growth is, leverage in the sectors where the future is, and the willingness to redirect member dues into the organizing infrastructure that wins — Fain has chosen the future.
The previous decade ended with eleven UAW officials convicted in federal court and a federal court appointment of an independent monitor to clean up the wreckage. Fain did not create that mess. He was elected to end it. Now that same monitor, Neil Barofsky, has alleged that Fain retaliated against union vice president Rich Boyer for refusing to take improper actions that would financially benefit Fain’s fiancée. A separate monitor report found that the union had mismanaged investments in its strike fund. Barofsky accused Fain of scapegoating and retaliating against the secretary-treasurer for the apparent financial lapses. Fain denied wrongdoing and answered that the monitor is waging a vendetta for his anti-war activism — that Barofsky has a “political grudge against me because the UAW took an anti-war stance about what was happening in Gaza.” The fact that the same monitor is now producing reports critical of his administration tells you more about the monitor’s institutional disposition than about Fain’s leadership.
Boyer’s version is now the platform of his challenge. Read that platform carefully: it pledges to “cut overspending,” reduce union dues, and “end the hiring of non-UAW members at excess salaries.” Strip the rhetoric and that is a program for shrinking the union back into the boutique operation that lost the auto sector, lost the South, and lost a generation of private-sector workers.
Fain’s critics will not mention the most important word in that last sentence, and they will want you to hear “anti-Israel activism” and stop listening. He has owned his anti-war stance openly, in public, at a press conference with Congressional Democrats in 2023, where he declared, “We cannot bomb our way to peace,” and demanded that Israel agree to a Gaza cease-fire. He has backed anti-war student organizers on college campuses, many of whom are themselves UAW members. Holding a union leader accountable for opposing a war that has killed tens of thousands of civilians is not a breach of fiduciary duty. It is what international labor solidarity looks like in this decade, and the UAW is stronger for taking that position publicly. In a labor movement that has spent decades trying to find a working-class foreign policy, this is not a liability. It is the only kind of moral leadership a twenty-first-century union can offer.
The strategic logic is even harder to dispute. The UAW has struggled to unionize auto plants in the U.S. South. It has had no such trouble on campus. The union now represents more than 120,000 workers in higher education, largely graduate students. It has organized the University of California, California State University, Columbia, Harvard, New York University, the University of Southern California, and Penn State. The UAW has more members at the University of California than it does at General Motors. Last year it organized 24,500 workers at universities. The critics call that misplaced priorities. It is the opposite. A graduate employee teaching three courses, grading for thirty undergraduates, and surviving on a stipend below the local poverty line is a worker. These are the workers of the next century, and Fain has gone where they are.
The facts the old guard marshals against him are real. UAW membership overall has shrunk by about 23,000 since 2016. The union’s strikes in 2019 and 2023 pressured the Detroit Three into expensive wage and benefit increases that contributed to job losses. Some colleges are now cutting admissions and graduate-student employment owing to higher costs from collective-bargaining agreements. None of that is a reason to retreat — it is the record of a union that finally did its job, and management responded the way management always responds: by trimming headcount and shifting investment toward non-union jurisdictions. Blaming Fain for the structural decline of the U.S. auto workforce is blaming the firefighter for the fire. The 2014 dues increase that his critics complain about was passed to build a strike fund — and the fund did its job. It paid for the 2023 stand-up strike that extracted record contracts from the Detroit Three.
Then there is the bloat charge. Since 2020 the union has added twenty-three administrative assistants and twelve public relations specialists, many of whom make two to three times as much as auto workers, and the critics grumble that much of the 2014 money went to overhead rather than to the strike fund. That is not a squander. That is the cost of running a union that is actually trying to grow — and the UAW needs staff, it needs communications, and it needs lawyers, organizers, and researchers. Calling that “overspending” is the same argument that has been used against every union that has tried to grow in fifty years. The alternative is a smaller, weaker union that is easier for management to ignore. A dues-cut platform is how you build one.
The UAW’s existential contest is not between Fain and the old guard. It is between a labor movement that will be present in the workplaces where the American working class is actually forming, and a labor movement that will retreat to a defensive crouch on the assembly line. Fain has bet the UAW on the first option.
The real test on the ballot is not whether the UAW exists to help workers. It is whether the union will keep organizing the workers the business-union model abandoned — graduate employees, adjuncts, campus workers, and the next generation of private-sector labor — or whether it will retreat into a defensive posture of dues cuts and staff layoffs. Boyer’s candidacy is a vote for the latter. Fain’s incumbency is a vote for the former. The members casting ballots by Monday should ratify the bet. Vote accordingly.
