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Brothers and sisters, | ||||||||
Shawn Fain has unveiled a so-called “Stand Up Slate” of thirteen candidates for the UAW’s 2026 national officer elections—all veterans of sellout contracts and collusion with management. In fact, four of the thirteen ran on Ray Curry’s Solidarity Team slate in 2022–23, the same slate Fain himself denounced for having “sold out members with tiers, concessions, and plant closures.” This is not a break from the old bureaucracy. It is a reshuffling of it. | ||||||||
Fain was not democratically elected. He was installed in 2023 through a rigged process that excluded 90 percent of members. He promised historic gains and delivered layoffs, preserved tiers, abolished the eight-hour day at Allison and Mack Trucks, and covered up the deaths of Stellantis workers Antonio Gaston and Ronald Adams, Sr., and Ford worker Gregory Knopf. The rhetoric about a “member-driven” union has been exposed as a marketing campaign for the same apparatus. Fain mouths phrases about “eating the rich” while serving as a reliable instrument of the rich against the working class. | ||||||||
The Stand Up Slate says nothing about the ICE roundups terrorizing immigrant autoworkers. Nothing about Trump’s march toward authoritarian rule. Nothing about the wars that the government forces the working class to pay for both in lives and our tax dollars. Nothing about workers killed on the job. That silence is not an oversight. It is a program of a bureaucracy that has fully integrated itself into the corporate and state apparatus. | ||||||||
The bureaucracy cannot be reformed. It must be abolished. The hundreds of officials drawing six-figure salaries off our dues must be removed, and the resources of the union placed under the democratic control of workers on the shop floor through a network of rank-and-file committees: elected by workers, accountable to workers, and answerable to no one at Solidarity House. That is the program of my campaign for UAW president and of all those rank-and-file workers who are joining the Insurgent Slate. | ||||||||
Read more of my recent statements | ||||||||
William Lehman for UAW President | ||||||||
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Sunday, April 19, 2026
UAW President Shawn Fain’s “Stand Up Slate”: A bureaucratic merger of pro-company hacks
