A Scab Running for President Calls for Firing UAW President Shawn Fain

As the current Republican presidential nominee, he reprised that billionaire boss role, using the spotlight of the party’s national convention on July 18 to call for United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain to be ​“fired immediately.”

“Last night, Donald Trump once again attacked our union on a national stage. That should tell you everything you need to know about the man, and the candidate,” Fain said. ​“As we’ve said for many months, he stands for everything we stand against.”

Fain endorsed President Joe Biden in January after the president walked a UAW picket line in the fall, joining autoworkers on strike at the Big Three automakers: Ford, General Motors and Stellantis. Trump also traveled to Michigan during the strike — but to stand with nonunion auto-parts workers at the invitation of the company’s boss and coordinated by nonunion manufacturers who oppose the transition to electric vehicles.

“Donald Trump is a scab,” Fain told UAW members in his January endorsement of Biden. ​“Donald Trump is a billionaire and that is who he represents. If Donald Trump ever worked in an auto plant, he wouldn’t be a UAW member, he would be a company man trying to squeeze the American worker.”

At the RNC in Milwaukee, Trump also plumbed the depths of his exuberant hatreds to stoke nationalist anger against China for building auto plants across the U.S. border in Mexico. ​“The United Auto Workers ought to be ashamed for allowing this to happen,” he said, with no evidence of how exactly the UAW would be responsible for another country’s foreign trade policies.

The world’s largest electric-vehicle maker BYD has announced an electric pickup truck in Mexico, but the Chinese EV company is building them for the Mexican and South American market, not for export to the United States. Cars must have at least 75% North American content to qualify for tariff-free entry to the United States. So Trump’s claim is false.

“But even though the claim is false, the growth of auto and auto parts imports to the U.S. from Mexico is surging, and the UAW must take aggressive steps to help Mexican autoworkers raise labor costs, or the U.S. industry will go the way of the apparel and footwear industries,” said Jeffrey Hermanson, union organizer and officer since 1977, working with the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (later UNITE!), and the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center.

Besides playing reality TV’s top boss, Trump has a history of inflaming violence against immigrants, dehumanizing migrants coming to the country for ​“poisoning the blood of our country” and calling them ​“killers” released from mental institutions and prisons. Meanwhile, former Trump White House advisor Peter Navarro spoke at the convention on July 17, hours after he was released from a Miami federal prison, where he served a sentence for contempt of Congress.

“Joe and Kamala, they threw out the woke blue carpet across the Rio Grande, opened our borders, to what? Murderers and rapists,” Navarro said. Using his Latino identity as cover, he rebuked critics calling Trump a racist for denigrating Mexicans as ​“rapists” in 2015. ​“We read the papers,” Navarro said. ​“It’s murderers and rapists. Drug cartels. Human traffickers. Terrorists. Chinese spies. And a whole army of illiterate illegal aliens stealing the jobs of Black, brown and blue-collar Americans.”

Instead of letting the auto bosses pit U.S. and Mexican workers against each other, the UAW is putting resources into building solidarity across borders. In February, the union announced it would support Mexican autoworkers’ efforts to move away from corrupt company unions that bargain contracts behind workers’ backs to a new roster of independent unions fighting to raise wages and standards across the auto sector.

The night before Trump spoke, convention delegates shouted and waved signs that read, ​“Mass Deportation Now!” That hateful repertoire is Trump’s stock-in-trade. ​“You know who’s taking the jobs, the jobs that are created?” Trump asked on Thursday night. ​“One hundred and seven percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens.”

That’s a lie. ​“The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that 29.9 million foreign-born workers —both authorized and unauthorized — and 131.1 million native-born workers were employed in 2023,” according to the New York Times. ​“That is an increase of 5.1 million in employed foreign-born workers and 8.1 million native-born workers since 2020.”

“Rather than thinking of Mexican workers as our adversaries, we need to see each other as partners in the struggle for worker power,” wrote Brandon Mancilla, the UAW’s Region 9A director. ​“No worker benefits from the international race to the bottom that the companies like to call ​‘global competition.’ Just like we did during the Stand-Up Strike, it’s time to whipsaw the companies against each other — but this time across North America.”

In Mexico, companies routinely fire union supporters and put them on blacklists with little consequence. Under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the UAW recently joined a complaint against a subsidiary of the agriculture equipment maker Caterpillar for such actions.

The complaint accused the Caterpillar subsidiary of retaliating against striking union members and putting them on a blacklist. One reason U.S. companies are offshoring jobs to Mexico is because they can get away with rampant labor abuses because of weak labor protections and toothless company unions.

Unlike Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, the UAW isn’t being taken for a ride on the false promises of an ​“America First” nationalist agenda.

“Last night, Donald Trump once again attacked our union on a national stage,” Fain said in a statement Friday. ​“As we’ve said for many months, he stands for everything we stand against. Trump claims to be attacking us in the name of protecting American autoworkers. So tell us why, when Lordstown, [Ohio], closed in 2019, when Trump was President, and our members were on strike for 40 days, he said nothing and did nothing.”

Ohio’s deindustrialization and the accompanying urban decline have become fodder for right-wing populists. Manufacturing jobs are ​“all coming back,” Trump said soon after taking office in 2016. ​“Don’t move. Don’t sell your house.”

“He lied,” Trish Amato, who worked at a General Motors plant in Lordstown, said in 2019. ​“He told everybody it’s all coming back. … It’s not. It’s harder and harder to find a job.”

“Tell us why Trump pushed to move auto jobs out of Michigan to drive down wages,” Fain continued in the statement. ​“Tell us why Trump ​‘renegotiated NAFTA’ for the disastrous USMCA, under which manufacturing jobs continue to leave the country and the trade deficit with Mexico has gone up, not down.”

Trump touted his record on trade at the RNC, saying ​“I got rid of NAFTA, the worst trade deal ever made, and replaced it with USMCA, which is, they say, the best trade deal ever made.” Biden has continued some of these policies, including putting 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs.

“Tell us why Trump blamed the 2008 auto crisis on the autoworkers,” said Fain. ​“We’ll tell you why. Because Donald Trump always has and always will side with the billionaire class against the working class. … He wants to pad the pockets of the ludicrously wealthy auto executives. He wants to cut the corporate tax rates of his golfing buddies, and keep the stock buybacks and Wall Street manipulation going. He wants autoworkers to shut up and take scraps, not stand up and fight for more. He talks about the electric vehicle transition as the reason our industry is under threat.”

Lordstown Motors, the U.S. electric truck manufacturer Trump once promoted as bringing back jobs to Ohio, filed for bankruptcy last year. Meanwhile, the UAW opened a shuttered Stellantis plant in Belvidere, Illinois. The Biden administration said Stellantis will receive $335 million to expand electric vehicle manufacturing in Belvidere.