UAW Rank-and-File to Elect Top Officers for First Time

The UAW reaches a milestone and a crossroads when it opens its constitutional convention July 25 under the watchful eye of a court-appointed monitor who will oversee the first-ever union-wide vote for top officers by the UAW’s 371,000 members.

Four candidates are vying for the union’s presidency once held by the legendary Walter Reuther (pictured, below left). But Reuther’s UAW has been badly tarnished by corruption and embezzlement scandals dating back to 2017.

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The list of declared candidates includes incumbent President Ray Curry, the preferred candidate of the administrative caucus, which has controlled the union’s internal politics for more than 70 years.

Curry (pictured, below left), then the UAW’s financial secretary, took over as president in July 2021. He goes into the election carrying the weight of the scandal, as well as the union’s recent failure in organizing new members and at the bargaining table, which embedded a detested two-tier pay system in union contracts with the Detroit Three automakers.

Ray Curry UAW

Nonetheless, he has the advantage of incumbency, which he leveraged recently to raise strike pay for union members to $400 per week and sweeten the contract of members of UAW’s staff council by eliminating the two-tier pension system in place since 2007.

Challenging Curry is Sean Fain, a member of the UAW’s professional staff, who served five terms as a skilled trades committeeperson and shop chair at Local 1166 in Kokomo, IN, and 10 years as an international representative.

“I am running because we are fed up with tiered pay and benefits, concessions and the erosion of our livelihoods through restructuring, outsourcing and plant closings. We can either elect fighting leaders to take on the companies or we can continue to go down the same road and die a slow death, plant by plant, job by job,” says Fain (pictured, below left), who is supported by the reform-oriented UAWD caucus, which successfully campaigned for one-member-one-vote last autumn.

Sean Fain UAW screenshot

Two other candidates, Brian Keller and Will Lehman have been vetted and approved by the monitor’s election officer but will have to be formally nominated at the convention. Both are rank-and-file candidates with little formal administrative or negotiating experience.

Keller, a Stellantis employee and union activist, has been an outspoken critic of the UAW’s entrenched leadership and has built up a following on social media among UAW members and retirees. He also has the distinction of having run for UAW president against Jones in 2018 when he was overwhelmed in the delegate-only vote on the convention floor orchestrated by the administrative caucus.

Lehman, 34, is an outsider who seems to have struck a chord among some of the union’s newest and youngest members. “Let's build a network of rank-and-file committees in plants across the auto industry so workers can fight for what we really need, not what the corporate executives and UAW bureaucrats say is acceptable,” he says on his campaign’s Facebook page. Getting rid of two-tier wage schedules should be the union’s top priority, he says.

Meanwhile, the monitor is watching the union’s internal politics. The monitor’s hotline received an allegation that the UAW had branded certain merchandise with the names of executive board members seeking re-election and had distributed, or planned to distribute, the branded merchandise to attendees at UAW conferences.

The monitor later confirmed that about $95,000 in union funds were used to pay for 1,500 backpacks for two conferences, branded with the name and title of Secretary-Treasurer Frank Stuglin, and that 800 of them were distributed at the first of these conferences.

The monitor says that, given the upcoming election, the distribution of UAW-purchased branded merchandise bearing the name of a candidate could be viewed as a violation of the Labor-Management Reporting & Disclosure Act, which prohibits the contribution or application of union funds to promote the any person’s candidacy in an election.

The monitor says it recommended the UAW cease distribution of any other merchandise that is branded with the name of a candidate, informed the union that the monitor would prohibit such practices in the future and recommended the UAW independently implement its own policy to prohibit the use of union funds to promote UAW officers or candidates for office in such a manner.