That 1% also can be forced to respond to public pressure. Fain gave two examples, then urged the delegates to mobilize their members when they return home to provide that pressure, especially in an election year.
One was after UAW won big raises in its “StandUP!” rolling strike against the Detroit 3 automakers Ford, GM, and Stellantis (formerly FiatChrysler), foreign “transplant” automakers raised their pay, too.
And when fast food workers walked out nationwide or left for better-paying jobs during the coronavirus pandemic, even bottom-payers such as McDonald’s and Burger King “started paying workers $20-$25 an hour.”
And the same big hikes occurred just the week before at a foreign “transplant” auto factory, the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., he added. The first-ever tentative agreement there, covering 3.200 workers in the usually anti-union South, calls for a 20% raise over four years, lower health care costs in 2030 than in 2024, and big bonuses, along with job security guarantees (see separate UAW-Chattanooga story).
In a notable statement, Fain, who hails from a deep-red section of red state Indiana, declared the UAW endorses Medicare For All, to revolutionize the U.S. health care non-system by abolishing the private insurance industry, their high premiums, huge profits, skyrocketing co-pays, and denial of care.
A later speaker, Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., spent her address pounding away at that cause, too.
“What else unites the working class?” behind those four causes, Fain rhetorically asked the crowd. “The fight for health care for all. The right to see a doctor of your choice and not go broke…And we’ve got to expand Social Security and Medicare,” and not cut them as the Trump regime and its lapdog GOP congressional majority did last summer with the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill.”
But to achieve those goals, the working class must stay united and resist the “divide and conquer” strategy of the capitalists who are their foes, Fain warned. Too often, however, workers have been split and pitted against each other, history shows. Plus “our health care ‘system’ is designed to keep the working class down.”
And the corporate greed plays into Trump’s hands, he said. It doesn’t help workers that “the majority of our politicians are bought off” by corporate campaign contributions, dark money, and other influence. “We have to reject corporate dictatorship.”
“We can’t count on either party,” Fain added. “We have to do it ourselves. But every once in a while, you get an elected leader who fights for you,” the UAW president admitted.
Though Fain didn’t name him, that “once in a while” includes former Democratic President Joe Biden. Biden walked the picket line in 2023 with UAW in Michigan during the union’s rolling—and successful—“StandUp!” strike against the Detroit 3 automakers.
But Fain admitted workers repeatedly make the same political mistake by electing pro-corporate politicians–of both parties–and expecting them to enact pro-worker legislation. That must stop, he stated. More unionists should run for office, citing one former UAW local leader now seeking an open U.S. Senate seat in Nebraska, and two members running for the House, both in pro-Democratic districts.
“Half of America doesn’t even vote. We have to get them motivated, and we have to get them activated,” Fain urged.
Like dictators—Fain used that word—Trump and his corporate backers play on worker fear, including fear of “the other” and, now, fear of their own government, symbolized by Trump’s ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and Border Patrol agents in their military occupation of the Twin Cities. The occupation has cropped up elsewhere in Minnesota, from St. Cloud to Duluth to Rochester.
The backdrop to the union’s conference is Trump’s “open war” on workers in general and unions in particular. Trump agents murdered poet and activist Renee Good and Veterans Administration nurse—and unionist—Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. That set off mass national protests and vehement opposition to ICE, including demands for its outright defunding and abolition.
An ICE agent shot Good, a mother of three, sitting in her car. Trump’s Border Patrol agents murdered Pretti, who was trying to help a woman suffering from tear gas inhalation. Both were observing protests against Trump’s militarization in the Twin Cities with 3,000-plus troops. County coroners ruled both deaths are homicides.
The ICE agents “lack humanity and compassion,” Fain said. “The government is violently assaulting and killing its own people.”
The explosion of nationwide outrage against ICE and the Border Patrol agents who shot Pretti seven times in the back after wrestling him to the ground shows, “We’ve got the power to shut this shit down,” Fain said. Trump has since retreated from his insults about Pretti, though not about Good.
Among the other speakers, Dingell spent her entire address lauding the benefits of single-payer government-run Medicare For All, following Fain’s endorsement. Dingell has been one of its prime agitators for years, along with National Nurses United.
Not only would Medicare For All lower costs for workers and eliminate insurer greed and discrimination, but it would also take health care costs off the bargaining table, enabling workers to seek higher raises while firms wouldn’t have to pay the freight for health care premiums—or offload them on workers. They do so now, and their international competitors don’t.
And David Heurta, president of the Service Employees in California, raised ICE’s assaults on workers and bystanders. ICE agents had assaulted him while he was observing anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, gassed him, knocked him semi-conscious, and then arrested him. He spent a night in an L.A. hospital being treated for a concussion. And Huerta, not the agents, faces misdemeanor charges.
“This administration has developed open warfare on working people, in L.A., in D.C., in Chicago, and in New Orleans,” said Huerta. “Families are being torn apart and traumatized…This administration full of grifters is betraying every American citizen and the foundations of our democracy. And it pisses me the f— off.”
The crowd responded with repeated chants of “F— ICE!”
“Working people are being criminalized by this president. They’re trying to silence people so workers will accept crumbs from the billionaires,” Huerta concluded.
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