Socialist-Aligned UAW Leader Shawn Fain Sets Sights on Tesla

United Auto Workers leader Shawn Fain, fresh off a highly publicized face-off with the Big Three automakers in Detroit, is shifting his attention to their non-unionized competitors, including Tesla. According to the Wall Street Journal:

The prospect of the UAW trying to organize the world’s most valuable automaker and other nonunionized carmakers in the U.S. follows the union’s winning record contracts with General Motors, Ford Motor and Chrysler-parent Stellantis last month.

 

If Fain now tries to get nonunion auto shops organized, as he is suggesting without naming names, the rules and players would be much different and risks for individual workers possibly perceived as greater.

 

At companies such as Tesla, Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen or Nissan, he would be counting on workers to stick out their necks in tussles with companies that hold a lot of power to squash such efforts—and, in some cases, a history of vigorously fighting back. On the heels of the UAW deals, for example, Toyota announced this week that most of its U.S. factory workers would get a 9% pay increase, bringing their pay closer in line to unionized rivals’ hourly rates.

 

This year, Fain prodded Motor City executives on the behalf of his 146,000 autoworker members for the biggest wage increases in generations. It involved his calling their employers “our one and only true enemy,” poking at the CEOs over their paychecks and wearing a shirt that read “Eat the Rich.”

Fain’s extreme anti-capitalist rhetoric is unsurprising. As NLPC has previously pointed out, some of Fain’s advisors have previous connections to socialist activist groups and Bernie Sanders. Tesla has been one of the leaders in American technological innovation. A prolonged battle with UAW would have massive ramifications for Tesla, and for the American economy as a whole.