Every mobilization requires a leader. Shawn Fain was born to take on that role, although no one seemed to sense it. Not even the.
That discreet student, not given to public harangues, today is, as president of the automobile workers union (UAW), the face and voice of the thousands of employees at the companies Ford, General Motors (GM) and Stellantis, the Big Three of Detroit, the motor town of Michigan, which for the first time in history have coordinated to strike. They are there. Among other improvements, they began demanding a 40% salary increase, which is how much the managers’ benefits have increased.
“I am subtle as a hammer,” he ironized. His rhetoric targets the conservative and wealthy classes, “a rebel who rejects the niceties of an earlier era,” according to The New York Times.
His hammer hits the rich again and again, amplifying the cause of the union’s 150,000 members. “Billionaires, in my opinion, do not have to exist,” he proclaimed at one of the rallies. “There is the billionaire class and the rest of us,” he added.
“In private I am much more shy,” he stressed. Fain, 54, is the son of Rodger, who became police chief of his town, Kokomo, Indiana, in 1980. He is credited with professionalizing the force and putting an end to acceptance of tips.
Rodger was clear that any job was better for his son than joining the security forces. So he decided to connect with his ancestor Gordon Fain, who along with his wife Effie emigrated from Kentucky to Kokomo in the 1920s. Then the automobile industry began to consolidate. Gordon went to work for Chrysler (now Stellantis), which had just acquired a factory to manufacture transmissions. And then Stanley, his son and Shawn’s grandfather, spent 35 years in that same company.
In all four years of high school he played basketball. The team experience enriched his personality and mentality. He entered Indiana University, but dropped out before graduating. He married his high school sweetheart in 1991. They had two children and there were bills to pay. (They divorced and today he is with Keesha McConaghie, a UAW financial analyst.)
Despite the legacy, he did not rely on family references to find work. An electrician friend opened his eyes. Fain joined Chrysler in 1994.
In the company he gained a reputation as a rebel. His current leadership was forged in 2007, in the serious financial crisis and the automobile industry, which survived the great recession due to the government bailout. That year, when he had been an electrician for 13 years, Chrysler was heading toward suspension of payments and asked for concessions from employees. The union leaders accepted. A similar lawsuit spread to Ford and GM. Fain was not willing to bow his head and voted against, the starting point of his projection
So 11 years ago he moved to Detroit to work directly at the union. He was crowned last March, when he became president of the UAW. Until then, union bosses had not looked down on billionaires. Rather they wanted to emulate them. One of the directors diverted two million of the funds into casinos, cocaine and luxury cars. Another spent $13,000 on expensive Havana cigars in one day. Two UAW presidents ended up in prison.
That is where his obsession is based when he denounces that the rich are getting richer. On the day that US President Joe Biden joined a picket line, the likes of which this nation had never seen before, Fain recalled the words of another president, Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Today, the enemy is not countries miles away, it is here, in our territory. “It’s corporate greed.”
