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SHAWN FAIN: WE NEED A POLITICAL MOVEMENT FOR WORKERS  
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Shawn Fain
April 15, 2025
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_ United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain explains his union’s
position on tariffs and argues that we need a political movement that
puts working-class people first to address the current political
crisis in the US. _

UAW President Shawn Fain,

 

_On Thursday, April 10, United Auto Workers (UAW) president Shawn Fain
addressed UAW members and the broader public via video livestream
[[link removed]] to explain the
union’s position on Donald Trump’s tariffs as well as other
aspects of the administration’s policies. Jacobin is happy to
publish his remarks here. This transcript has been edited for length
and clarity._

There’s a lot of uncertainty about what this moment holds for the
working class. We’re in the middle of two massive transformations.
One is in our economic system, where the rules of global trade are
being upended, with huge implications for workers everywhere. The
other major transformation is in our political system, where
fundamental rights are being eroded, with huge implications for
workers everywhere.

The UAW’s mission remains the same as it’s ever been — our
mission, no matter what president is in the White House, is to take
our power back and raise the standard for the working class.

Divide and Conquer

One of the great divide-and-conquer tricks the ruling class has played
on the working class of this country is to [get them to] see politics
like a spectator sport. It wants everyone who chooses to wear a red
hat to hate everyone who votes blue; if you’re on the blue team, you
have to hate everything the red team does. Both sides talk about
bullshit issues to hype up their fan bases, while the real issues that
impact working-class people are never addressed.

In the labor movement, at our best, we have a different way of doing
politics. We don’t make politics about personalities or parties; we
see politics as a negotiation. We don’t sit down to negotiate with
corporate executives because we like them or trust them. We focus on
what we need as a working class and what the hell it’s going to take
to get it, and we do that whether we’re sitting across from the
friendliest CEO or the meanest Wall Street con artist.

Politics is just like contract negotiation. You win what you have the
power to fight for, and that’s exactly the situation we find
ourselves in right now.

We’re not aligning everything we do with the Trump administration
— we don’t align with any politician or president. We’re
negotiating with the Trump administration; our approach to President
Donald Trump is no different than our approach was to President Joe
Biden, and it’s no different than our approach at Stellantis or
Columbia University or General Dynamics.

I keep hearing people say, “UAW loves Trump now,” or “The UAW
only supports Democrats.” It’s all bullshit. Our union has a clear
North Star, and that’s the working class. The working class’s
issues don’t change because somebody has a D or an R next to their
name.

Ending the Free-Trade Disaster

For decades, our unions fought to end the free-trade disaster, and
that was true under Republican and Democratic administrations. When we
say we will never give up our First Amendment rights to speak out,
whether it’s against genocide or for our union rights, that’s true
no matter who’s in office; it’s true no matter who agrees or
disagrees. That’s not flip-flopping. It’s called integrity.

We’ve seen some reckless and chaotic activity on trade from this
administration, and there’s a lot of fear of disruption. But what we
have to remember is that disruption is not new to factory workers in
this country — disruption is what we’ve been living with for
thirty years under a free-trade disaster.

It doesn’t mean we support reckless random tariffs. I don’t
believe that’s the answer to all this. But there is a reason for
tariffs, and it’s also a mistake to just defend the status quo,
especially when it comes to free trade.

A lot of politicians and pundits are suddenly concerned about our
trade agreements. But where was that concern when we lost four million
manufacturing jobs in less than a decade in the 2000s? Where were the
pundits when 90,000 plants closed in the wake of NAFTA [the North
American Free Trade Agreement] ? Where was Wall Street when the Big
Three closed over sixty facilities in the past twenty years?

That’s the difference. When working-class people suffer, it’s just
the cost of doing business. When it’s Wall Street’s asses on the
line, then it’s a crisis.

I know we’re all tied up in the fate of this economy; we can’t
afford a recession. My question to the country is this: Can we afford
90,000 more plants closed? There are thirteen million manufacturing
workers left in this country. We can’t afford to let employers
threaten thirteen million families every day with destroying their
jobs if they dare to demand their fair share. Free trade has been the
most harmful government policy of my entire work life, and almost all
of our entire work lives. We have to end this free-trade disaster, and
we don’t care if it’s a Democrat or a Republican who ends it.

Against Trump’s Vision of America

How do we not only bring back and protect our jobs, but also protect
our right to organize and our right to collectively bargain? How do we
fight to blow up the billionaire economy while also defending attacks
on our right to protest, our right to retire with dignity, and our
right to health care?

It’s not enough for politicians to talk a good game about wanting to
bring back jobs — they need to be good union jobs, with good
standards. And we have good reason to be suspicious that the Trump
administration is not interested in supporting the right to organize
or bargain.

Because here’s what we’ve seen so far from the Trump
administration: we’ve seen the destruction of bargaining rights for
a million federal workers. That’s not good for the working class.
We’ve seen attacks on the National Labor Relations Board, including
illegally firing a board member, leading to deadlock on workers’
cases. That’s not good for the working class. We’ve seen attacks
planned on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, programs that
millions of workers depend on. That’s not good for the working
class.

We’ve seen the absolute trampling of constitutional rights. We have
seen the First Amendment go up in smoke at college campuses — with
detentions, deportations, expulsions, and firings of people who dared
to speak out against and protest against a war, just to call for a
cease-fire. We have seen the right to due process disappear as working
people are deported for no crime and no reason. That’s not good for
the working class.

Mahmoud Khalil, who has now been detained for over a month for
protesting the war, is a former UAW member. Grant Miner, the president
of UAW Local 2710 at Columbia

University, was expelled for protesting the war the day before the
bargaining was going to start. Rümeysa Öztürk, a Service Employees
International Union member at Tufts University, has been detained for
writing an op-ed. Kilmar Abrego García
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a sheet metal apprentice in Maryland was deported for no reason, no
crime, to a prison in El Salvador. We’ve seen the arbitrary and
unlawful termination of hundreds of our members’ visas, which may
lead to their unjust deportation. And the list goes on.

There is a reason we campaigned aggressively against this vision of
America in the last election. We will continue to speak out and
mobilize against it.

Our union participated in mass protests across the country as part of
our campaign to kill the cuts at the National Institutes of Health .
The NIH is a part of the federal government that funds essential
scientific research. That’s not waste; it’s not fraud; it’s not
abuse. We represent five thousand members who just won their first
union contract at the National Institutes of Health. We also represent
tens of thousands of members whose jobs rely on funding provided by
NIH at universities across the country. When we cure cancer, when we
save lives with new medications, it’s because of these workers who
bust their asses on high-level research that changes the world.

Our government should expand funding for life-saving research and
allow researchers in the United States to be the first to find cures
for diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. Cutting research funding
kills union jobs, and even worse, it kills the hope of working people
who rely on this research to see new treatments to save their loved
ones’ lives. It kills the hopes of the millions of Americans who are
caring for family members with Alzheimer’s to see advances in
prevention and treatment. It kills the hope of a parent of a child
with a rare disease whose only shot at survival is a clinical trial.

One of the first things the Trump administration did was go after NIH
funding. Why did they do it? For the same reason as so much of their
agenda: to steal money from the public to pay for billionaires’ tax
cuts. This is the same reason they’re going after higher-education
workers and institutions — because they want to use political
leverage to claw back funds to pay out to the billionaires. We have
joined a lawsuit to kill the cuts to NIH funding across the country.
[Last week,] we hit the streets and rallied in DC, New York,
Philadelphia, Seattle, LA, the Bay Area, and many more cities to save
thousands of jobs and life-saving research.

We’re beginning to see the results. On Friday, [April 4,] a judge
ruled against the Trump administration’s first round of cuts at the
National Institutes of Health, and we’re already seeing more NIH
funds being released. But the fight’s far from over.

“Free Trade” and the Working Class

When we speak out against these actions, we get called liberals by the
right-wingers; when we speak out in support of tariffs, we get called
right-wingers by the liberals. People say we’re flip-flopping or
doing a 180. The truth is, what we are doing is acting with integrity.
If you want to destroy our unions and our government and attack our
members, we’re going to oppose you every step of the way. If you
want to undo our broken, unfair trade system and raise the standards
for factory workers, we’ll go to the mat to support that. Because
we aren’t Democrats and we’re not Republicans — we are trade
unionists.

I want to take some time to dig into what’s going on with trade and
these tariffs. There’s a lot of confusion, a lot of hype, and a lot
of chaos. If we were running the show, it would look a lot different.
But there are a few things we should all understand about our trade
rules and about these tariffs, because they affect your life, your
future, and your family.

We need to acknowledge free trade has been a disaster for the working
class. This is how the free-trade scam works: The government gives a
green light to companies to build their product wherever they can find
the most exploited workers — countries where desperate people work
for $3 an hour, where there are no labor laws or environmental
regulations. Then the companies kill jobs in the United States and run
a race to the bottom around the globe. They force workers to compete
with one another across borders, and the companies ship product back
in at a massive profit, which they pocket for the executives and for
the shareholders, and pay off the politicians for good measure.

Meanwhile we get Flint; we get Lordstown; we get Belvidere. We get
communities that look like a bomb got dropped [on them]. We get
divorce; we get drug addictions; we get suicide; we get deaths of
despair.

What do consumers get? They get price gouged. What does Wall Street
get? Massive profits. What do politicians get? They get huge campaign
contributions from companies and billionaires flush with cash. What do
voters get? They get politicians bought off by corporate America, who
continue to pass laws that harm the working class.

And what do foreign workers get? In Mexico, they’ve seen their real
wages cut in half since NAFTA passed. The big promise of NAFTA was it
was going to lift up the standard for everybody. But taking inflation
into account, the average real wages of Mexican autoworkers were about
$6 an hour in 1993; today the average hourly wage of an autoworker in
Mexico is $3 an hour. NAFTA has been devastating for autoworkers in
the United States and Mexico.

Where do tariffs come into play? In our view, tariffs are a tool in
the toolbox — they’re a first step. They have to be well-designed;
they need to be paired with other policies and changes, but they are a
start to stop the bleeding.

How Tariffs Can Help Autoworkers

Here is our position as a union on tariffs and free trade. One: free
trade has been a disaster for the working class, and we have to end
these broken anti-worker policies. Two: we can and should reshore tens
of thousands of jobs in very short order, which would raise the
standard for all workers. Strategic tariffs can play a role in that.
Three: the automakers, the auto market, and corporate America can
afford it.

Right now, there are three main kinds of tariffs on the table. Some of
these tariffs target entire countries, and some target specific
industries. We support some use of tariffs on auto manufacturing and
other similar industries. We don’t support the use of tariffs for
political gains about immigration or fentanyl; we do not support
reckless chaotic tariffs on all countries at crazy rates. We support
and have always supported tariffs on the auto industry, on heavy
trucks, and on agricultural implements.

The difference is, the auto tariffs are designed for a specific
purpose. They raise the costs of the companies that have killed good
jobs in a race to the bottom for cheap labor elsewhere while Wall
Street makes a killing. Specifically, we have industries where right
now there are active plants operating under capacity in the United
States, while workers outside the US are exploited for $3 an hour.

We have excess auto-production capacity in the US: We could bring back
tens of thousands of jobs in a matter of months. That’s before we
even talk about building new plants; we’re talking about adding
shifts, adding lines, and adding jobs, making products that we know
are profitable. Companies could do this immediately and bring back
tens of thousands of jobs.

An example: Six months ago, over a thousand workers were laid off at
Stellantis’s Warren Truck Assembly Plant. For eighty years, that
plant has operated and built profitable vehicles. Recently the company
decided to move production of the Ram truck to a plant in Mexico,
where workers make $3 an hour — instead of paying workers $37 an
hour, they’re paying workers $3 an hour.

But when they do this, the price of the truck doesn’t go down, and
the wages in Mexico don’t go up. Instead, company executives and
shareholders pocket the difference while a thousand workers’ lives
are upended here in Michigan.

There are tons of plants all over this country just like that. We took
a look at a handful of Big Three plants, and we asked ourselves how
many more vehicles we could produce if we went back to the levels that
those plants operated at just ten years ago. The answer was
staggering: twelve Big Three plants that are still in operation were
producing over two million more vehicles every year. These plants
still have that capacity; that’s tens of thousands of jobs that we
could bring back right now.

Our research tells us that if the Big Three alone got their currently
active plants up to 100 percent capacity, they could add 50,000 jobs.
That’s not even including closed plants like Lordstown Assembly in
Ohio, which could bring thousands more jobs back. That’s not
including building new plants.

For every hundred auto assembly jobs that are created in the United
States, there are another seven hundred jobs created in the supply
chain. Fifty thousand more jobs in the Big Three means hundreds of
thousands of more jobs at parts suppliers and other businesses that
support them. That’s not even including non-US automakers.

The other thing we hear about these auto tariffs is that they’ll be
too expensive for working people — the automakers can’t afford it,
so they’ll pass the cost on to the consumer. We call that what is:
it’s bullshit. It is exactly what we heard in our stand-up strike;
it’s what the bosses say whenever workers have the courage to demand
more of their fair share. Back in 2023, we said record profits mean
record contracts. Company executives said our demands to raise wages
and end tiers would force them to raise prices. They said the industry
would never survive.

It turns out the companies lied: they could afford to do the right
thing then and they can afford to do the right thing now. Here’s a
chart that shows the price of a new car next to the automakers’
price gouging.

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See how the profit goes up right alongside the price? That’s because
they’re price gouging, and they’ve been price gouging for years.
That tells us that we shouldn’t trust the companies when they say
they can’t afford it. It also means there’s flexibility in the
price: they don’t need to pass the cost of auto tariffs on to
consumers, because they’re already making plenty of money.

And where do those profits go? Wall Street. The profits don’t get
reinvested in new plants; they don’t go to the workers; they don’t
go to the federal government to fund Social Security or Medicare or
Medicaid.

In the past fifteen years, the top ten automakers have made $1.6
trillion in profits. They have funneled $367 billion into stock
buyback schemes that artificially inflate the value of company shares
and further enrich company executives and the 1 percent. They could
have built dozens of plants with that money — they chose not to.
They chose to loot the Rust Belt to pay off Wall Street.

A First Step

The auto tariffs are a first step in ending the free-trade disaster.
We don’t need to trust Donald Trump or any politician to fix it for
us. But the Trump administration is the first administration in my
lifetime that’s been willing to do something about this broken
free-trade system. Tariffs are the first step, but we need to put out
our vision for an auto industry that doesn’t leave behind
working-class people, and then we need to fight like hell for it.

In 2026, the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement , which is the new
rendition of NAFTA, is up for review. Under the USMCA, autoworkers
are still living under a race to the bottom. Mexican autoworkers are
still having their union rights trampled on; American autoworkers are
still under constant threat of plant closures.

We want to sit down at the bargaining table and renegotiate the USMCA
trade deal today. A new trade deal for North America should have a
manufacturing minimum wage. A new trade deal for North America should
make it so if you want to sell product in a country, you have to make
a product in that country. That would be good for Canada, for the
United States, and for Mexico.

A new trade deal should fix the race to the bottom in the supply chain
also — we don’t want our independent parts suppliers members, who
are just as essential to this industry, to be left behind. We need
enforcement mechanisms to make sure that trade is tied to how these
companies treat their workers, and we need a trade agreement that
guarantees that labor rights are protected in Canada, the US, and
Mexico.

That’s what we’re fighting for, and already dozens of members of
Congress have called for renegotiating the USMCA. But we also know
that new trade policy won’t fix it all. We also need a plan to
rebuild the auto industry beyond fair-trade rules. We need to invest
in America.

Under the Biden administration, we started to see some of that
investment. We need to be there when rules are put in place, to make
sure investment isn’t abused by corporate America to undermine
workers or the auto industry standards we’ve won. We had to spell
that out for the Biden administration, because when it started their
trade deals, again, working-class people were an afterthought.

We also need new labor policy. We’ve talked for years about the
broken labor laws in this country that make it nearly impossible for
millions of workers who’d like to join a union to actually do so. It
wasn’t corporate America that built the American dream; it was the
labor movement, and it’s the labor movement that will save the
American   dream. But our laws have to change in order to do that.

 

Finally, we need to seriously take on Wall Street. There was a time in
this country when it was illegal to do stock buybacks to pump up your
share price. You couldn’t just strip companies for parts and sell
them off to make a buck for shareholders corporate executives had
reasonable limits on compensation. There was a time when there was a
corporate tax rate that pushed companies to reinvest in their
companies instead of looting them.

Putting Workers First

Right now, trade is on the table — think about it as collectively
negotiating job security with the federal government. But we’re not
stopping at trade. We’re coming for our fair share across the board,
and we’ve been clear about what that looks like. It goes back to our
four core issues.

One, a living wage for everybody. Not a minimum wage, a living wage
— a wage you can support a family on. Two, health care for all. We
can’t keep living like this, where people can’t afford to go to
the doctor or risk bankruptcy. Three, a dignified retirement. The
majority of the working class in this country have no retirement
savings. We need to expand Social Security and Medicare so people can
actually have a life after they give decades to these companies.
We’re going to the mat in May 2028 to win that at the Big Three
after years of being left behind. Four, a life off the job. Nobody
should have to work two or three jobs or spend eighty hours a week in
a factory just to live paycheck to paycheck.

We disagree with 99 percent of what the Trump administration is doing,
when it comes to attacks on labor and working-class people and attacks
on free speech. We are supporting national mobilizations against the
Trump administration’s attacks on federal workers and immigrants.
We’ve joined lawsuits against the Trump administration’s attacks
on higher-education institutions. And I cannot stress enough how
strongly we oppose this administration’s attacks on our freedom of
speech and basic civil liberties.

We also oppose the free-trade disaster. We oppose these policies under
Republicans and Democrats, and we will support their reversal under
Republicans and Democrats. We aren’t going to change our position on
ending free trade just because Trump is president.

But no matter what party you voted for, understand there is a direct
line between the free-trade disaster and the political chaos in this
country. Plant closures and mass layoffs resulted in intense pain and
suffering and anger for hundreds of thousands of working families in
our country. All that pain and anger had to go somewhere — a lot of
it went to support Donald Trump for president, and now it’s being
directed at immigrants, at transgender people, at higher education.

That’s the wrong target. The right target is corporate America, and
the sooner both parties understand this, the sooner our country will
begin to deal with our real issues. We need to build a political
movement that can put the working class first, and to do that we’re
going to need working-class people to step up, to speak up, and take
on corporate America, from the bargaining table to the ballot box. No
matter who’s on the other side of that table or in that office,
we’re going to have to stand up and stand strong with integrity on
our issues.

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* UAW President Shawn Fain
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* Trump tariffs
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* workers
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