DETROIT – United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain declared last night that while his union supports some use of tariffs in the auto and other industries he opposes most of the Trump agenda for its harmfulness to workers. He said that the pain caused by anti-worker policies over the years was at least, in part, channeled into support for Trump by many of those hurt by those policies and that what is really needed are policies that put workers first.
He hosted a live-streamed address Thursday night to discuss the UAW’s position on tariffs and trade under the second Trump administration.
Fain’s address occurred two weeks after the UAW applauded Republican President Donald Trump’s tariffs on auto imports. Prior to the sweeping tariffs Trump announced on April 2–which he declared as “Liberation Day” and has since scaled back–he announced 25% tariffs on imported cars, light trucks, and auto parts.
Fain described the auto tariffs as “a major step in the right direction for autoworkers” against the “free trade disaster” of the last 30 years. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), an agreement between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico that was in effect from 1994 to 2020, saw the U.S. lose more than 950,000 jobs to outsourcing.
“Our mission, no matter which industry, which company, which president’s in the White House, is to take our power back and raise the standard for the working class,” Fain said.
Fain said the UAW has been criticized by some for “aligning” with the Trump administration and by others for supporting the Democrats. He said politics is similar to contract negotiations. He was a longtime negotiator for his home UAW local in Kokomo, Ind.
“We don’t sit down to negotiate with corporate executives because we like them or because we trust them,” Fain said. “We focus on what we need as a working class and what the hell it’s going to take to get it. And we do that whether we’re sitting across from the friendliest CEO or the meanest Wall Street con artist.
“Politics are just like contract negotiations. You win what you have the power to fight for, and that’s exactly the situation we find ourselves in right now,” Fain said.
Fain said he and other UAW members “disagree with 99% of what the Trump administration is doing,” specifically condemning the arrests of Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He also condemned what he called the Trump administration’s “absolute trampling of constitutional rights,” from mass deportations to undermining federal workers’ collective bargaining rights.
And while the UAW supports “some use of tariffs on auto manufacturing and other similar industries,” the union does not support “reckless, chaotic tariffs on all countries at crazy rates.
Designed for a specific purpose
“The difference is, the auto tariffs are designed for a specific purpose,” Fain said. “They raise the cost on the companies that have killed good jobs in a race to the bottom for cheap labor elsewhere, while Wall Street makes a killing.”
“Specifically, we have industries where right now, there are active plants operating under capacity in the US, while workers outside the U.S. are exploited for $3 an hour,” Fain said. “We have excess auto production capacity in the U.S. We could bring back tens of thousands of jobs in a matter of months.”
Fain said that if the “big three” automakers–General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, formerly FiatChrysler–operated their active plants at 100% capacity, this would result in 50,000 additional jobs, as well as “hundreds of thousands” of jobs at part suppliers and other businesses. Instead, the Detroit-based automakers moved jobs to low-wage nations overseas.
So Fain called for immediate talks to renegotiate the U.S.–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) which went into effect in 2020 and replaced NAFTA. USMCA is up for review in July of next year.
As previously reported by People’s World, USMCA established an autoworker minimum wage and instituted a rapid-response mechanism for labor disputes. Under the Democratic Biden administration, that produced wins for some Mexican autoworkers, with free—not company—unions and a higher minimum wage.
“The fact is, under the USMCA, auto workers are still living under a race to the bottom,” Fain said. “Mexican auto workers are still having their union rights trampled on. American auto workers are still under constant threat of plant closures. We want to sit down at the bargaining table and renegotiate the USMCA trade deal today.
“We need enforcement mechanisms to make sure that trade is tied to how these companies treat their workers,” Fain said. “And we need a trade agreement that guarantees that labor rights are protected in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico.”
Toward the end of his address, Fain said there is a “direct line” between NAFTA’s impact on U.S. jobs and the current “political chaos in this country.”
“Plant closures and mass layoffs resulted in intense pain and suffering and anger for hundreds of thousands of working families in our country,” Fain said. “All that pain and anger had to go somewhere.”
“A lot of it went to support Donald Trump for president. And now it’s being directed at immigrants, at transgender people, at higher education, and that’s the wrong target. The right target is corporate America. And the sooner both parties understand this, the sooner our country will begin to deal with our real issues,” Fain said.
“We need to build a political movement that can put the working class first and to do that, we’re going to need working-class people to step up, to speak up and take on corporate America from the bargaining table to the ballot box,” Fain said.
Fain’s address, titled “Our Economy, Our Country, Our Union,” was live-streamed on the UAW’s YouTube, Facebook, and X accounts.
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