Editor’s Note: The following is a slightly edited speech by UAW President Shawn Fain, given to the UAW membership in October, 2024 about what’s at stake in the upcoming presidential election. View video here.
Good evening, UAW family. As you know, we’re one week out from one of the most important elections of our lifetime. What we decide as a union, as a working class and as a nation will have impacts for generations to come.
So tonight, I want to speak directly to you, the UAW membership, about this election. I’m going to ask you to do two things. One is to sign up to participate in this election with our union. You can go to uaw.us/gotv. And the second thing, I’m asking all of you to just to hear me out. If you’re on the fence about this election, aren’t planning to vote or not sure who you’re going to vote for, I want you to know where your union stands, to listen to how your UAW leadership thinks about this election, and I want you to keep an open mind.
Now, I know many of us who are tired of hearing about politics. A lot of members are asking me, why do we have to engage in politics? Why can’t we just stick to contracts?
And the answer is because we are up against a billionaire class that will not stop their attack on us to the bargaining table. They will not stop at the workplace. They will not stop at the border. They will take every inch we give them. That’s why our greatest UAW President Walter Reuther famously said there’s a direct relationship between the ballot box and the bread box. And what the union fights for and wins at the bargaining table can be taken away in the legislative halls. And that’s why the founders of our union laid out in great detail our responsibility as a union to engage in the political process.
Tonight, I want to begin with what’s written in our UAW Constitution, and I quote:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, expressive of the ideals and hopes of the workers who come under the jurisdiction of this international union, that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. And that among these are life, liberty, and a pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
It goes on to say, “It is essential, therefore, that the concerns of workers and of society be taken into account when basic managerial decisions are made. The structure of work established by management is designed to make of the workers an adjunct to the tool rather than its master. This coupled with the authoritarian climate of the workplace robs the worker of their dignity as an adult human being. Essential to the UAW’s purpose is to afford the opportunity for workers to master their work environment, to achieve not only improvement in their economic status, but of equal importance is to gain from their labors a great measure of dignity, of self-fulfillment, and self-worth.”
Now pay attention to this part of the Constitution:
“Workers must also participate meaningfully in political and legislative action because government impacts importantly on their lives and on their communities. If government is to be the means by which people achieve a humanitarian and equitable society, it must be a responsible and accountable government. Therefore, the UAW has a duty and responsibility to promote real and meaningful participatory democracy through its members and their families so that free people and their institutions may be heard in the councils of government. And so, the office holders are guided by principle alone. The UAW must play an active role at all levels of government to protect the lives and rights of its members and their families. We must work constantly on the political and legislative problems facing the whole society.”
So, we don’t engage in political activity because we like a candidate. We don’t do it for ourselves as your union leadership. We don’t do it for the Democratic or Republican parties. We engage in politics as a union because it is core to our fight for economic and social justice. It’s core to the founding of our union.
So again, tonight, we’re going to go over two things: What this election’s about and where your union stands, and how you can make a difference in what happens next.
If you are not sure what you’re going to do in this election, I hope you’ll listen.
I want you to think long and hard about which side you’re on. And if you’re ready to get to work electing pro-worker candidates, you can go to uaw.us/gotv. Walter Reuther’s quote about the ballot box and the bread box is not just an observation, it’s a warning. 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, and they’ve been winning. They’ve won battle after battle, both in the halls of government and at the bargaining table from the decimation of the union movement in the 1980s to the disaster of NAFTA in the 1990s. From the sacrifices auto workers and working class people made during the great recession of 2008, 2009, to the new guilded age of the 2010’s.
We’re in a vicious cycle where the billionaire and corporate class take more and more for themselves and rewrite the rules of the game, using their insane wealth to buy off politicians and elections. The lap dogs of the billionaires then pass more laws that restrict unions and keep working class people down. They consolidate the fruits of our labor into the hands of Wall Street and corporate America. And that cycle goes on and on and it’s a bipartisan issue. The billionaire class has done everything they can to buy off both parties. Republicans are open about being the party of big business. They embrace it, but too many corporate Democrats have also cozied up to the rich. We have one party that takes pride in attacking labor and blaming the poor for everything that goes wrong. And we have another party that’s not proud of it, but too often still takes the big money when corporate America comes knocking.
It is an embarrassment to our democracy when billionaires can openly buy elections, but it’s also a devastating situation for the working class. Last week, nine Republican appointees on a federal court ruled in favor of Elon Musk and refused to find wrongdoing when he fired a worker and tweeted that Tesla workers would lose their stock options if they formed a union. It’s no coincidence that Elon Musk has contributed at least $130 million to Donald Trump’s Republican campaign for president. And it’s no coincidence that Elon Musk purchased Twitter itself. It’s no coincidence that Elon Musk is one of the most anti-union auto CEOs in history, and he is buying elections to rig the law in his favor. That’s not democracy, that’s an oligarchy. And that’s what happens when the billionaire class makes the rules. And that’s what happens when working class people stay on the sidelines. The results speak for themselves.
Since Donald Trump’s tax cuts, billionaires in America have seen their share of the pie increase dramatically. Our country has 800 billionaires now worth a record $6 trillion dollars. Just 800 individuals own more of the great wealth produced in our country than the bottom half of American families combined. Some billionaires like Elon Musk saw their wealth increase by over a thousand percent after Trump took office, 80% of Trump’s tax breaks went to the 1%. That’s who the Republican party serves. But to be clear, both parties have allowed corporate influence to distort our national politics, but especially for the last four years, we’ve seen a stark difference.
The Democratic Party is interested in working class people and what they had to say, and they want us to be in to be in their coalition. On the other side, we have the Republicans who on a national level in particular, have embraced a billionaire class. They embraced their billionaire candidate and embrace his billionaire buddies, and they explicitly push policies that help billionaires and hurt anyone who might challenge that system.
We have one party, the Democrats, that will listen when we raise our voices and we have another party, the Republicans, that would love to see us disappear. Every time legislation is put forward to benefit unions or working class people, it’s almost always a straight party line vote. The Republicans vote against us every single time, and the Democrats vote with us, even if it takes a fight sometimes.
That brings me to an age-old truth that every union member ought to know. There are two kinds of power in this country: organized money and organized people.
The billionaire class has more money than they can spend. Spending $130 million for Elon Musk is about the equivalent of a week’s paycheck for him. A tiny handful of billionaires will outspend working class people, but we have something they’ll never have: We have the people. If workers organize and refuse to go to work, if we strike, the world stops. And if we decide to vote together, their money can’t stop us. And the rich know that, which is why they divide and conquer the working class. They talk about Haitians, they talk about the border, they talk about people’s gender. They talk about what books are in the local library. They talk about anything but corporate greed, about how the billionaire class continues to take and take, while the rest of us are left further and further behind.
The billionaires try to divide us by gender. They act like how you live your life or your gender identity is a threat to the person on the assembly line next to you. They talk about who you love, who you marry, which bathroom you use. So, they don’t have to talk about who you go to work for, where the profits go and who benefits. The billionaires try to divide us by nationality. Right now we have millions of people being told that the biggest threat to their livelihood is migrants coming over the border. The threat we face at the border isn’t from migrants, it’s from the billionaires and politicians getting working people to point the finger at each other.
You know that in reality, all working class people are on the same side. When I see destitute and desperate people crossing a border, I think of my grandparents crossing state lines to find a better life. In the 1930s and forties, in the early days of the UAW, they didn’t tell my grandparents, ‘You’re not welcome here. Go back where you came from.’ They said, if you’re ready to fight for a better life, then sign your union card and let’s get down to work.
The billionaires try to divide us by race. You know, Dr. Martin Luther King taught us that the civil rights movement and the labor movement will forever be intertwined. And that’s because as long as you have black and white and working class people of all races divided against each other, the powerful forces of greed and domination will prevail. That’s how the forces of corporate greed and the billionaire class use division to weaken the working class.
Our answer is solidarity. And our answer is unity. And our answer is, in the union.
It might sound simple, and maybe it is. That’s part of the game they play. The billionaires want to make you think this stuff is complicated, that DC is for people with PhDs and legal degrees and $6,000 suits. But let me tell you. Washington’s no different from Detroit or any other city in this country. Every time we meet with a politician, we’re at the bargaining table. Every time we push for a new law to help the working class take back our power, there’s a boss to fight . More than any contract victory or even wage increase, or even plant reopening, what we learned from the standup strike is simple. Working class people have the power. We just need to use it.
We need to make our demands clear. We need to bring the entire working class into a common cause. We need to tap our faith tradition and our deep history as an American working class and our shared culture as working people. We used to be clear-eyed about what justice looks like, on and off the job, and we need to fight like Hell against anyone who would stand in the way of that justice.
We’ve been on the losing side of a one-sided class war for 40 years. But if there’s one thing that’s true about our union, it’s that we aren’t afraid to fight. In the past year and a half, we’ve won a battle or two. We took on the big three like never before in our standup strike, and we won things people thought weren’t possible. We took the class war at Daimler truck, winning profit sharing and cost of living allowance for 7,000 heavy truck workers in North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee. We’ve organized tens of thousands of higher education workers, and when 1000 blue collar workers at Cornell University went on strike, we won the first ever cost of living increase in higher education. And, when we stand up for working class issues for social and economic justice, on and off the job, a majority of America stands with us. And we know we have the people and the power to change things if we can unite in a common cause. And we know that things have to change beyond a single contract or a single workplace or a single sector if we want justice for the working class. Politics isn’t something that just happens on election day. Politics is something that happens every day on the job between you and your boss. And at contract time in every union shop, we see a showdown between corporate America and the working class.
But every four years, we have the biggest contract expiration of all the contract between the American people and those who would seek to lead our country.
This election is where a huge amount of power is going to be decided. And for our UAW constitution, for our union, for our families, and for our communities, we can’t sit this one out. What we decide as a nation and as a nation will have impacts for years to come. Every organizing campaign, every contract, every grievance, settlement will be impacted by this election. If the billionaires take back our presidency through their lap dog, that lap dog Donald Trump, you can be sure that every single CEO in this country will smell blood in the water. The future of the America will not be solved in one contract. To keep good jobs in America, we need to engage in political action. The founders of our union understood this. In the 1930s, they formed the CIO Political Action Committee, the original PAC, to take their workplace fights to the halls of power, and the founders of this union did not go along to get along.
They put their issues on the table and they forced politicians to pick a side. We are no longer going along to get along with politicians. We stated from the outset, our endorsements are going to be earned and our endorsements are going to be based on facts, not opinions, and not party politics. So here are the facts in this election.
On one side, you have Donald Trump, a billionaire with a proven track record of serving himself. And on the other side, you have Kamala Harris who walked our picket line in 2019, who has voted with us in Congress time and again, who voted against Donald Trump’s failed NAFTA 2.0. Who stands with us? But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Donald Trump in his own words and actions over many years. In 2008 when our industry was in crisis, Donald Trump blamed the American auto worker for the Big Three’s failures. He said the unions are hurting very badly what’s going on with the auto industry while we sacrifice for these companies. On the other side, the Democrats in 2008 helped save the auto industry and they bet on the American auto worker.
In 2015, when Trump was running for president, he talked about doing a rotation. He said he wanted to move auto jobs out of Michigan in the Midwest to push auto workers wages down. And when he was President Trump, Trump successfully did move auto jobs out of Michigan in the Midwest and the US entirely when he passed his NAFTA 2.0 trade deal, which has increased the number of auto and auto parts jobs that left this country as companies head overseas to exploit poor workers in Mexico and beyond.
On the other side, you have Kamala Harris and the track record of the Biden Harris administration. Kamala Harris voted against Trump’s NAFTA and was one of just 10 senators to do so. Trump’s NAFTA 2.0 is up for renegotiation in 2026. Kamala Harris has publicly committed that as president, she will fight to fix Trump’s failed NAFTA to protect American workers in our communities.
And let’s talk about auto jobs in this country, because these two candidates have a proven track record in that respect. Under the Biden-Harris administration, we have seen a boom in US manufacturing thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips Act and other legislation. When Donald Trump was president, manufacturing was declining. Even before Covid hit. He said he was going to bring the jobs back. But Kamala Harris’ administration is actually doing it. Look at Lordstown, Ohio. Trump left those workers behind at General Motors Lordstown assembly plant. He said, don’t sell your house. And he did nothing. The Biden Harris administration actually invested in a battery plant in Lordstown, and now those workers are making EV batteries under our national agreement. They were able to return home ,making good union wages. People are afraid, you know that electric vehicles are going to kill jobs, but we’re seeing more investment now than we’ve seen at any point in my lifetime.
Auto and auto parts jobs are at their highest level in nearly 20 years. We have to fight for those jobs to be good jobs, and we need someone who will stand with us in that fight. So how about when the chips are down, and our members are on the picket line? Last year during our strike, Donald Trump held a fake rally at a non-Union auto shop and blamed our union while we were in a fight for our lives. Rather than speaking out against corporate greed at the Big Three, he attacked us. He’s called for members to abandon our union and stop paying dues. He blames the union for the company’s problems.
On the other side, President Biden became the first sitting president in US history to walk a picket line. Our picket line. Biden said on live national TV that record profits should mean record contracts, and that we had sacrificed enough as auto workers. He had our back, and so did Kamala Harris. Back in 2019 when it wasn’t a popular thing to do, when GM auto workers were on strike and Trump was president, Kamala Harris was standing on the picket line shoulder to shoulder was striking workers at GM. How about Donald Trump? When he was president in 2019, again, he said nothing. As GM workers were on strike, he did nothing. As the company closed plants in Warren, Michigan, in Lordstown, Ohio, in Baltimore, Maryland, in fact, he blasted our union while promising Lordstown workers, they get their jobs back. And just last month in a live interview with Elon Musk, Trump praised Musk for being the greatest cutter.
He openly laughed about firing workers on strike, and he said, I quote, “every one of you is gone.” Kamala Harris and Joe Biden stood with us on the picket line. Governor Tim Walls stood with us on the picket line. They stood with us in our fight to reopen Belvedere. They stood with us in our fight to bring jobs back to Lordstown, Ohio. So to me, in their own words and actions, it’s really simple. Donald Trump is against us. He’s against our union, he’s against the working class, and he’s against everything we stand for. Kamala Harris is with us. In her words, in her actions, she has shown us that she’s on our side. And who we elect matters because we have some major fights ahead of us.
We have to fix our broken trade deals if we want to survive as a union and as a working class. In 2026, Trump’s NAFTA 2.0 is up for review. Do you want Donald Trump recommitting to a broken trade deal that kills American jobs in the name of corporate greed? Or do you want Kamala Harris ready, willing, and able to leave a deal that doesn’t work for the working class? She’ll be with us in our next contract fights when we ask that question, who’s going to be there with us in 2028? We have organized to line up our contract expirations covering hundreds of thousands of workers, not just at the Big Three, but teachers, postal workers, healthcare workers, they’ve all heard our call. We’re lining up these contracts to force the question on the American people and our elected leaders. Which side are you on? I know which side Kamala Harris is on, and I know which side Donald Trump’s on. We have to fight corporate greed on every front from the workplace to the bargaining table, to the ballot box. We must stand up, we must speak up, and we must show up because everything is on the line.
So there is a choice before us. There are billions of dollars flowing into this election to sway the outcome, but we in the UAW have what no campaign has. We have each other, our coworkers, our workplaces, and our families. And we know that when we talk to our coworkers about the issues, when we listen and when we don’t give up on anyone, it makes a difference. In September, we ran a poll of our members to see where we stood on this election. And across the UAW, there was a clear majority support for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, but there were a good number of folks who were on the fence and still undecided. So we decided to start talking to our members, putting our issues on the table, and putting these two candidates on the record.
After hundreds of thousands of conversations from the plant gates to the phones, we saw a surge in support for Kamala Harris among UAW members. Her support went from an 11-point lead to a 20-point lead in key battleground states. For people who reported hearing from our union directly about the election, that number went up 29 points. And it wasn’t one group that was driving this among active members at Ford, GM and Stellantis. Harris leads the polls. Among retirees, Harris leads. And the UAW difference is clear among people. Without a college degree who otherwise tend to favor Trump, UAW members in the battleground states are supporting Harris by an 18-point margin. Folks like me, white people without a college degree that tend to favor Trump, but in the UAW where we put our issues front and center and put solidarity first, a clear majority favors Harris.
I say all this to make it clear that what we do in this election matters. What we do as a union matters. When we talk to our coworkers about this election, it has an impact. When we talk to our families about this election, it has an impact. What you do in the next week matters. It matters for the next four years. It matters for your next contract negotiation, and it matters for your next organizing drive. So I’m asking you, once again, if you’re ready to fight from the bread box to the ballot box, go to UAW/US.gov and get involved today.
Finally, I want to say one thing in closing. We all have loved ones on both sides in this election. We know people, people who aren’t going to vote. We know people who aren’t going to vote like us. The beautiful thing about being in this union is that your membership doesn’t expire on election day for us in the UAW, it ain’t about a campaign. It ain’t about one day. It’s about power. It’s about the power we have when we stick together across our differences. No matter what happens in this election, we’re all UAW, and we either rise together or we fall together. You can disagree with me and you can vote however you’re going to vote, but you cannot ignore our duty as a union to fight like Hell for social and economic justice for every single member of this union, and every single member of the working class.
