Shawn Fain Is Done Making Nice

The combative new president of the United Auto Workers has emerged as the strongest voice in a resurgent labor movement in America

- JOHN KENNEY

IT ALL STARTED WITH A HANDSHAKE, OR at least it was supposed to. For as long as anyone can remember, contract negotiations between the United Auto Workers and Detroit's Big Three have kicked off with a ceremonial handshake between union leaders and the CEOs of GM, Ford, and Chrysler (now Stellantis). A genial show of decorum. This past July, though, Shawn Fain, the newly elected president of the UAW, wanted to set a different tone.

Standing in front of a news camera outside a plant before a meeting with CEOS, Fain announced he was snubbing the traditional make nice. "We don't see a reason to shake hands," he said before cataloging what he decried as two decades' worth of unfair contracts, abusive treatment, and gross inequity. Leaning forward, in sharp-rimmed glasses and a buzz cut, Fain continued, growing visibly more agitated as he went on. "I hear some of the CEOs talk about 'Our workers are like family.' That's nothing but a lie." 

As an opener to a parley it was, to borrow a line from Braveheart, rather less cordial than the auto executives were used to.

"I just felt it wasn't right to walk into a room and shake hands with people that weren't treating our members right," Fain explains now in a video interview. "The big thing I was trying to do is change the narrative." From the moment he took office last March, Fain has marked a stark departure from recent generations of UAW leadership. He staked out an aggressive contract position and signaled hard that the union wouldn't shy away from a strike if terms weren't agreed to by the September deadline. Steve Rattner, Obama's car czar, in an op-ed in The New York Times, called the union's demands "overly ambitious" and labeled it "militant." Fain didn't back down, and as the deadline approached, he contemplated doing something that had never been done before in the annals of American labor: a simultaneous strike against the Big Three auto companies.