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Already legendary little more than a year into his tenure, United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain brought delegates to their feet repeatedly with his vision of labor’s fight for a better America for all, saying, “We are up against the most powerful forces in the world, and our mission is to take that power back.”
Fain opened by thanking AFT President Randi Weingarten, who’d noted the AFT and UAW’s long history of mutual support: “There’s only a handful of what I would call … badass union leaders in this country … and Randi’s one of them. … I lean on her a lot.”
A proud product of public schools, son of a school nurse, and brother of a teacher and local union president, Fain highlighted public education’s vital role in our democracy: “There’s nothing more the billionaires would love to take away from working-class kids in this country than a free public education.”
Fain outlined the lessons the UAW learned from its historic, wildly victorious “stand-up strike” against the Big Three automakers last year. He described his union’s winning formula as: “Unite the membership, unite the working class, fight like hell and let everyday working-class people lead our movement.”
He described how, after years of granting concessions (including detested, inequitable wage tiers), “America’s auto workers said we’d sacrificed long enough. … We hit [the Big Three] with a UAW they haven’t seen in decades. So we put our foot on the gas. We never looked back.” Fain said the union won overwhelming national support by making the strike about the entire American working class.
Referring to the AFT’s fight for a better life for all, Fain said, “If you follow these principles … you’re not going to lose, and … the UAW will have your back every step of the way.”
The UAW is carrying these principles into its current campaign to organize automakers nationwide, which in April faced down vicious fearmongering from Southern governors to win what Reuters called “a seismic victory” at Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tenn. The UAW is committing $40 million to the campaign over the next two years.
Fain called for a global workers’ movement, including aligning contract expiration dates for May 1, International Workers’ Day, in 2028. Yesterday, AFT delegates overwhelmingly passed a resolutionsupporting the UAW’s call for coordinated bargaining, which would enable powerful leverage strategies such as general strikes. As Fain put it, winning even bigger requires fighting even bigger.
“It’s very clear a Donald Trump White House would be a disaster for the working class,” he said. Fain, who has long labeled Trump “a scab,” said Trump “will ruthlessly fight for a vision of America in which the wealthy rule everyone and everything, and the working class is … forced to settle for the scraps. … For us in the labor movement, what’s at stake in November isn’t just about November, … [it] will impact every single contract negotiation, every new organizing campaign, and it’s going to determine whether we go forward or backward as a nation for generations to come. … What’s at stake here is simple to me. Everything is at stake.”
[Chris Bartolomeo, photo of Fain by Russ Curtis, crowd by Suzannah Hoover]