Labor

Union Boss At Center Of Warring Socialist Factions In Battle For Control

DimiTalen, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The leftist president of the United Auto Workers seems to be caught between a rock and a hard place as a more extreme faction takes aim at him and his socialist supporters.

President Shawn Fain took the reins of United Auto Workers (UAW) in 2023 after narrowly winning its first direct presidential election. He promised to end corruption in the union and make it a more bottom-up system, but some rank-and-file members have since shown opposition to his leadership.

The president ran with support from a now-defunct union reform group founded in part by socialists, the Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), which contributed to his successful election. However the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), has pushed back on Fain, emphasizing the divide between him and its preferred UAW presidential candidate, socialist Will Lehman, in the 2026 UAW election.

WSWS claimed that the online UAW presidential candidate forum held July 30 “laid bare the gulf between” Lehman, who it called a “rank-and-file Mack Trucks worker,” and the other candidates such as Fain “who are contending for control of an apparatus sitting atop $1.25 billion in net assets.”

In an article about the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) grand jury investigation of Fain, WSWS claimed that a federal monitor’s findings about the union boss “underscore the significance” of Lehman’s campaign, as he is “running on a platform of abolishing the bureaucracy and transferring power to the rank and file.”

With the 2026 UAW election around the corner, a federal grand jury has been probing claims about Fain that he abused his office as president to financially benefit his fiancée and her sister.

Fain claims that the federal monitor’s claims are completely false and the monitor has a “political grudge” against him, according to the Detroit Free Press. However, the WSWS believes that the federal monitor has actually “gone out of his way to prop him up.”

Some Democrats are looking to Fain to run for president, but he has not indicated an intent to do that yet, according to Politico.

The UAW, the WSWS and Lehman each did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.

The WSWS has acknowledged Fain’s links to socialism, reporting that Fain’s former chief of staff, Chris Brooks, and a current union official Jonah Furman, are both Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members. Furman also previously served as the former communications director for the UAW and was brought on board as Fain’s top assistant after Fain ascended to the union’s presidency, according to Sage Journals.

Furman previously worked for the 2020 presidential campaign of socialist Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders as well as the congressional campaign of Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, according to Sage Journals. Brooks left UAW leadership in 2023 after a federal monitor reported him to be involved in improperly attempting to have the duties of the UAW’s secretary-treasurer removed, Reuters reported. He is now a columnist at Jacobin, a socialist magazine.

WSWS condemned the DSA in 2017, saying that it has “anti-socialist politics.” According to the Socialist outlet, the DSA “is a pro-capitalist organization steeped in a tradition of anti-communism and bitterly opposed to the political independence of the working class.”

The DSA represents a wider cast of socialists, claiming that its members are “building progressive movements for social change while establishing an openly democratic socialist presence in American communities and politics,” according to the DSA website.

The WSWS also denounced the UAWD claiming in May 2025, days after at voted to dissolve, that it “was built to block rebellion” and has now “collapsed in on itself.”

Lehman is campaigning to “mobilize the rank and file” to “abolish the corrupt UAW bureaucracy” and “put all power in the hands of workers,” according to his February X post announcing his 2026 presidential bid against Fain.

“Class struggle, not class collaboration!” his post at the time added.

Lehman’s campaign website states that the UAW is “in crisis” under Fain’s leadership, mentioning that more than 5,000 workers have been laid off during Fain’s presidency “while bureaucrats kept their salaries.” He further added that 470 of these UAW “bureaucrats” are paid salaries in the six figures, while Fain himself makes $276,000 annually.

The upstart socialist previously ran in the contentious 2022–23 United Auto Workers international union election in which he finished in a distant fifth place out of five candidates, winning only 4.6% of the vote. Incumbent president Ray Curry and Fain came in first and second place, respectively. Fain narrowly unseated Curry in the runoff.

As it happened, Lehman called the election a “sham” and noted its low turnout saying, “You have 10% of the members participating,” The Detroit News reported at the time.

A paid UAW organizer who publicly supports Fain posted an AI-generated image to Facebook showing a bound and gagged Lehman with a rifle pointed as his head, the Detroit Free Press reported. The Fain supporter received a two-year suspension after posting the image, which WSWS said amounted to a death threat.

“The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) calls on workers and all defenders of democratic rights to denounce this incitement to violence against Will Lehman and demand its unequivocal public repudiation by the UAW,” a July 20 WSWS article stated regarding the post.

Lehman is not considered a major threat to unseating Fain in the ongoing 2026 election, as the embattled incumbent union boss faces challenges from Tricia Geiger — who has the endorsement of three former UAW presidents including Curry — and Vice President Rich Boyer. However, Lehman’s support among the leftist grassroots could complicate Fain’s path to another term as support from socialist adjacent groups such as the UAWD were integral to his insurgent 2023 win.

The UAWD was founded in 2019 by members of the DSA, Labor Notes — a “media and organizing project” founded by socialist labor activists — and other advocates claiming to want to reform the UAW amid leadership corruption revealed by a UAW court-appointed monitor, WSWS reported.

The UAWD, before its 2025 dissolution, was supported by the DSA in its reform efforts, according to a 2020 statement from the prominent socialist group. The DSA encouraged members to support the UAWD in 2021, calling it an “emerging movement inside” the UAW, in a newsletter. This DSA newsletter, which has the tagline “We must struggle together,” urges members to donate to the UAWD, claiming it is “exciting to see rank and file members organizing to take back power in this important industrial union.”

The Rank-and-File Strategy approach of the DSA — which is currently live online and branded with the DSA logo — offers “[a] Game Plan for DSAers” in which it encourages members to “[s]upport union reform caucuses.” It lists the UAWD as one of the two such caucuses it highlights.

The WSWS is run by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), which states its goal is “to put an end to the capitalist system and establish socialism on a world scale.”

At the dissolution of the UAWD, the chair and other leaders began “a new, union-wide network to carry on the work of transforming” the UAW called UAW Member Action, the UAWD website notes. The UAW Member Action website claims that Fain has been “steering our union back into the fight,” and includes him as its endorsed presidential candidate for the 2026 UAW election.

UAW Member Action did not respond to the DNCF’s request to elaborate their stance toward socialism and the DSA.

Fain and his UAW endorsed now-Democratic Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed during his contentious primary campaign. While a self-professed capitalist, El-Sayed was the furthest left candidate in the race’s Democratic primary field and received endorsements from several prominent socialist figures.

The union boss also, during a Facebook Live in 2023, notably wore a t-shirt bearing the words “Eat The Rich.” The phrase has its origins in the French Revolution and is now often used as an anti-capitalist slogan.

The UAW has more than 400,000 active members and more than 580,000 retired members in the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico, the union’s website reports.

Fain traveled around Michigan, the automotive capital of the U.S. where UAW is headquartered, with Sanders to rally for Kamala Harris in 2024, according to multiple X posts from Sanders.

Fain entered UAW leadership with the promise to help the rank and file members of the union; his platform boasted “No corruption. No concessions. No tiers.” In his first year as union president, he led the UAW in a major strike against the Detroit “Big 3” automakers, wherein he fought for cost of living adjustments, ending tiers, and job security, the UAW website claims.

WSWS emphasized how Lehman separated himself from the rest of the candidates, including Fain, by claiming that the UAW’s 2023 strike against the “Big 3” automakers was not a “victory,” as the other candidates claimed.

“It was not a real strike. It was a disaster. It was a Hollywood strike,” he said, according to WSWS.

Arianna Hooker and Senior Investigative Reporter Emily Kopp contributed to this report.