Everything about Shawn Fain is different from his predecessors as president of the UAW. Almost as soon as he took office last March Fain tossed aside long-held traditions and practices using blunt and brash language with live webcasts and social media posts, chiding automaker CEOs for their big paychecks and appearing on a webcast wearing an “Eat the Rich” t-shirt.
He’s the first president elected directly by union members rather than by delegates at a national convention—a change mandated by the U.S. Justice Department in the aftermath of a corruption scandal that sent several union officials to prison.
Fain’s biggest move was deep-sixing the usual process of setting a target company with which to negotiate a pattern deal the other two Detroit-based automakers were expected to parrot, instead conducting simulataneous talks pitting the companies against each other, then staging progressive “stand up” strikes against the companies he felt weren’t negotiating in good faith to create “chaos.”
Just months shy of his planned retirement, 48-year assembly worker Roger Heffelbower found himself walking a picket line at the Ford Motor Co. Michigan Assembly Plant in suburban Detroit shaking his head as he expressed his first impressions of this new kind of union president.
“He scared the hell out of me at first,” said Heffelbower in an interview on the picket line. “He played hardball. No one’s ever played hardball like that. Kind of made me nervous, but if it pays off in the end, these are extreme times. Radical times require radical moves like this.”
Union members will decide if Fain’s tactics paid off when they vote on the tentative deal announced Wednesday night. On paper, it looks like it did, featuring a 25% pay raise over the course of the four-year contract and other key concessions regarding temporary workers, cost-of-living allowances and reducing the time it takes for a union worker to reach full pay.
It’s not everything Fain had on his shopping list when negotiations began, such as a 40% pay hike, but that was viewed all along as classic aiming high to leave room for negotiation.
“There is more value for our members in each individual year of this agreement than the entirety of the 2019 agreement. This deal puts more money on the table than the 2019 agreement four times over,” said UAW vice president Chuck Browning in a video posted to social media announcing the tentative agreement. “So when we say historic, we mean it. We have won a 25% general wage increase over the course of this agreement. With COLA we expect the top wage rate to increase by over 30% to above $40 an hour.”
“We told Ford to pony up and they did,” added Fain in that same video. “We won things nobody thought was possible. Since the strike began, Ford put 50% more on the table than when we walked out. This agreement sets us on a new path to make things right at Ford at the Big Three and across the auto industry.”
The first hurdle is winning ratification for the deal from union members. Fain will explain it in detail in a Facebook Live webcast on Sunday but these votes are rarely rubber stamps as the union found out recently when members rejected a tentative deal with Mack Truck.
Indeed, members may have been counting on Fain to win the magnitude of gains he so often demanded from the automakers. But in the immediate aftermath of the announcement of the tentative agreement there were more than a few expressions of disappointment.
“So no 40% wage increase, 32 hour work week or lifetime pension? Fail” wrote one commenter on X.com, formerly Twitter.
“IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A PENSION, VOTE NO ON THIS CONTRACT!!! SOLD OUT AGAIN BY OUR LEADERSHIP,” posted another in all uppercase text.
“Great news, good job, you delivered,” is indicative of the several comments supporting the tentative deal.
But will there be enough similar support to ratify the contract?
If there is, that only gets Fain and the UAW one-third through the process. Even though he strayed from the target/pattern process of the past it’s likely he’ll push General Motors Co. and Stellantis to match the key features of the Ford deal and in the video announcing the tentative deal with Ford, he appeared confident they will, declaring, “The last thing they want is for Ford to get back to full capacity while they mess around and lag behind.”
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