DETROIT—One week out from one of the most consequential elections in U.S. history, United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain rallied his membership to increase participation in the elections in order to block a second Trump presidency and to defend the union movement and the working class from unconstrained billionaire rule.
Speaking from the UAW International Headquarters, the Solidarity House, off Jefferson Ave. in downtown Detroit, Fain spoke bluntly on the stakes of this election and why the UAW is mobilizing across Michigan and the Midwest to elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
“Who we elect matters. What we do as a union matters. What you do in the next week matters,” he said. “We are up against a billionaire class that will not stop their attack on us at the bargaining table. They will not stop at the workplace, they will not stop at the border, and they will take every inch we give them.”
Fain called attention to the direct relationship between the “bread box and the ballot box.” What the labor movement fights for and wins at the bargaining table with the bosses can be stripped away in the legislative halls, as the old adage goes, he reminded his audience.
That’s why the Auto Workers are sounding the alarm at the danger a Trump victory spells not only for the UAW and organized labor but for the entire working class. The union is working overtime to make sure its members and friends don’t forget how Trump has treated them in the past.
During the UAW’s Stand-Up Strike against the Big Three automakers in 2023, he held a campaign rally at a non-union company in Detroit with paid supporters masked as auto workers.
At the Republican National Convention this summer, Trump directly called for the firing of Fain, blamed the union for the 2008 financier-caused Great Recession and subsequent auto crisis and suggested moving auto jobs out of the Midwest to lower wages.
Later, Trump degraded the work that UAW members do while speaking at the Economic Club of Chicago in front of his billionaire friends, by comparing workers assembling cars to kids pulling parts of toys out of boxes and putting them together.
“They get away with murder because they say, ‘Oh, yes, we are building cars!’ They don’t build cars,” Trump told his audience of big-money donors. “They take them [parts] out of a box and assemble them. We could have our child do it.”
In his Tuesday address, Fain called on his membership to participate meaningfully in political and legislative action because the decisions of the government have major impacts on the lives and communities of the working class.
“Right now, our country is in a vicious cycle. For 40 years, the ruling class has waged a one-sided class war on the working class,” he said. “And they’ve been winning.”
With his remarks, Fain emphasized when working-class people are left out of the electoral struggle and broader political process—either by choice or by repression—the results are detrimental: The billionaire class gets unhindered control over what laws and regulations get enacted, and the outcome speaks for itself.
For example, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of the 1990s and the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), or NAFTA 2.0, passed under Trump, saw massive job losses and devastation to working-class communities in the Rust Belt.
The USMCA is up for renewal in 2026, and whoever wins the 2024 elections will have a say over whether or not the “free trade” deal is renegotiated, prolonged, or even made worse.
“From the decimation of the union movement in the 1980s to the disaster of NAFTA in the 1990s…from the sacrifices that auto workers and working-class people made in the Great Recession of 2008-09 to the new Gilded Age of the 2010s…the billionaires use their insane wealth to buy off politicians and elections,” Fain said.
“We have one party [the Republicans] that takes pride in attacking labor and blaming the poor for everything that goes wrong. And we have another party [the Democrats], and not proud of it, but too often still takes the money when Corporate America comes knocking. It’s an embarrassment to our democracy.”
Blood in the water
But the MAGA-dominated Republican Party takes unfettered billionaire control over every aspect of workers’ daily lives to a whole new level. “In this election, the stakes are clear. The GOP is fully embracing the billionaire class,” Fain said.
Since Trump’s tax cuts in 2017, there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the working class to the billionaire class. Roughly 80% of Trump’s tax breaks went to the top 1% of earners. There are 800 billionaires in the U.S. with a total net worth of $6 trillion. This section of the ruling class now owns more wealth than the bottom half of U.S. working families combined. After Trump took office, billionaires like Elon Musk saw their wealth increase by up to 1,000%.
“The Republican Party embraces the billionaire class. They embrace their billionaire candidate, his billionaire buddies, and they explicitly push policies that help billionaires and hurt anyone who might challenge that system,” Fain said.
“Every time legislation is put forward that benefits unions or working-class people, it’s almost always a straight party-line vote” meaning the Republicans vote against such measures as a bloc.
Janine Hilton, a member of UAW Local 4911, asked why there are greedy corporations that are also supporting the Democratic ticket. In response, Fain acknowledged that there are Democrats who are indeed influenced by big donors and the billionaire class, but by and large, there is an overwhelming tilt toward Trump by those at the top when it comes to the class struggle between the workers and the billionaires, he said.
“Trump supports only the billionaire class and Corporate America. Under Trump, our elections are for sale,” alluding to Trump’s bargaining with Big Oil executives to donate $1 billion to his re-election campaign in exchange for the destruction of all Biden-approved environmental protections and an end to electric vehicles (EVs) once and for all.
The EV issue is particularly troubling to auto workers because of their victory in securing a just-transition from combustion engine car production to electric vehicle production in their Stand-Up Strike
“If you can’t beat it, you buy it,” Fain said about the billionaire class and their anti-democratic political maneuvering to create the best conditions possible for maximum profits.
“Politics isn’t something that happens every four years on Election Day. It happens on the job, in a contract fight, in a grievance battle—it happens every single day in this country. We can’t sit this one out…every organizing campaign, every contract, every grievance hinges on the results of this election,” he declared. “If Trump wins, every CEO will smell blood in the water.”
“There are two kinds of power in this country,” he went on, “organized money and organized people.
“But we have something the billionaire class can never have. We have the people. If workers organize and refuse to go to work—if we strike—the world stops moving. If we decide to vote together, their money can’t stop us, and the rich know that.”
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