Jordyn Grzelewski writes for the Detroit News:
[Shawn Fain] became active in UAW Local 1166, serving five terms as a skilled trades committee person and shop chair. During Chrysler’s bankruptcy in 2009, Fain was elected to serve as a national negotiator, a role he reprised in 2011. He then was hired as an international staff member, starting out assisting with skilled trades training programs at the UAW-Chrysler National Training Center in Detroit and most recently overseeing the center’s operations.
Now, he’s running for president as part of UAW Members United, a slate of candidates backed by Unite All Workers for Democracy, an opposition caucus that formed in the wake of the corruption scandal. The slate’s platform includes ending tiered wage and benefit structures, restoring pensions for retirees, reversing past concessions and organizing new workplaces. In the UAW’s first-ever direct elections for IEB members, UAW Members United candidates won several key victories, effectively breaking the control the powerful Reuther Administrative Caucus had on the union for more than seven decades.
Scott Houldieson, a skilled trades worker at Ford Motor Co.’s Chicago Assembly Plant and UAWD’s steering committee chair, helped vet Fain before caucus members voted to endorse him. Houldieson said that members initially had some concerns about Fain, given his role on the international staff, but that Fain earned their trust.
“What impressed me most about Shawn was that he had the courage to take on the entrenched administration that was surrounding him at work every day,” Houldieson said. “Also what impressed me with Shawn was the fact that he was solidly opposed to the tiered wage and benefit structure that we’d been fighting for so long in the UAW. He had a record of fighting against it when it came into being.”