For most of labor union history, the surest route to becoming a union president was to be born the son of one. Some less endowed aspirants, like current Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, got there through a life of expert politicking, winning elections, doling out favors, and building their brand. Very few union leaders have taken the high road like Walter Reuther did. Reuther, the man who built the UAW, dedicated and risked his life to improve the lives of others through the now-lost art of organizing.
And then there are the cogs. Every union machine has dozens of them. These are the Assistant to the Assistant Regional Managers of the labor movement. They are the faithful yes-people who keep their mouths shut and their heads down while building a career out of assisting administrations in looking good. A few cogs cap their careers by gliding into a presidential vacancy, installed into office because they do what’s expected of them and know where all the bodies are buried. SEIU’s Mary Kay Henry is just such a former cog, as are most of today’s top union officials.
Newly elected UAW President Shawn Fain is one damn lucky cog.
In the UAW’s runoff election this spring, held after the machine weeded out all the riffraff, Fain won by just a few hundred votes — out of one million ballots mailed — over the appointed president and former cog Ray Curry. Let that sink in. Fain wasn’t swept into office by any rank-and-file mandate, and he certainly wasn’t the first choice of autoworkers. Fain won because, one, he wasn’t Ray Curry; two, voting retirees bought into his ludicrous promise to restore their pre-Obama health care plan; and three, Fain presented himself as just a humble union rep and Chrysler electrician from Kokomo.
Listening to Fain now, one might think he’s been in a coma since 1999 and woke up to a UAW in dire need of a nerdy messiah last fall. In fact, for nearly a decade, Fain had a C-suite view (as did Curry) of the once mighty UAW staggering around like a drunk monkey, hemorrhaging members, money, political clout, and bargaining power. And while never implicated in any wrongdoing, for much of his time assisting the administrators of what the Department of Justice called a “culture of corruption,” Fain was involved with the Solantis joint training program that served as the funnel for payola.
Fain might have been many things during his rise to the top, but reformer wasn’t one of them. A true reformer that high up the food chain would have warned the members about the stench in Solidarity House long before the FBI did. But there’s an unwritten rule in big labor – you never rat on the machine, lest you “hurt the cause,” members’ welfare be damned.
Shawn Fain is going to need more than luck in the coming weeks. A ten-day strike against the Big Three could steer Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana into a recession and drag the rest of our tenuous economy down. And the man steering our fate through these treacherous waters has again resorted to brandishing a wastebasket during a Facebook live stream to appear leaderlike. Here’s hoping he figures out how to think like a real leader soon.
