In the run-up to the United Auto Workers’ 2026 national officer elections, UAW President Shawn Fain has unveiled a so-called “Stand Up Slate” of thirteen candidates—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, which Fain himself denounced for having “sold out members with tiers, concessions, and plant closures.”
Workers should reject the Stand Up Slate for what it is: a merger of bureaucratic factions that have collaborated with the auto bosses to destroy jobs, wages, and working conditions. Shawn 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 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.
On its website, Fain and his slate falsify the record of the UAW bureaucracy and promote the same economic nationalism that the UAW bureaucracy has long used to justify its collaboration in the destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs and the gutting of autoworkers’ wages, benefits, and working conditions.
Fain’s slate boasts that it has “used the UAW’s political muscle to fix broken trade policies, protecting our work in the Heavy Truck and Automotive sectors.” When Fain says American workers can only have jobs if workers in Canada, Mexico, Germany, and South Korea lose theirs, he is doing the corporations’ work for them. The auto industry is global. Workers at Stellantis Windsor, GM Silao, and Ford Cologne are not our enemies—they are our brothers and sisters. Divide-and-conquer nationalism is the oldest weapon in the bosses’ arsenal, and the Fain administration wields it on their behalf.
Workers in the UAW are part of an international working class rising against exploitation, austerity, and war. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) unites our struggles across borders in a common fight.
The Stand Up Slate says nothing about the ICE roundups terrorizing immigrant autoworkers—many of them UAW members, like University of Washington academic worker Kennedy Orwa. Fain’s slate says nothing about the wars being financed by the austerity now being prepared for the working class. Nothing about the march toward authoritarian rule. Nothing about workers killed on the job. That silence is not an oversight. It is a program—the program of a bureaucracy that has fully integrated itself into the corporate and state apparatus. Its claim, “We aren’t loyal to political parties, only union members,” is a fraud. The UAW bureaucracy is loyal to both corporate-controlled parties and the oligarchy they defend.
The bureaucracy cannot be reformed. It must be abolished. The hundreds of officials drawing six-figure salaries off workers’ 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.
