Shawn Fain, UAW’s firebrand prez, was forged in Kokomo’s union hotbed

Shawn Fain seemingly came from nowhere to win the United Auto Workers presidential election in March by a razor-thin margin. He ran on a reform platform promising to toss out the status quo and stand up to the Big Three automakers: GM, Ford, and Stellantis. He took a hard line in contract negotiations, and when the automakers didn’t meet the union’s aggressive demands by the Sept. 15 deadline, the UAW took the unusual tack of striking against all three companies at the same time.

It’s still in the midst of what’s called a standup strike, meaning that it adds more and more of its 145,000 members to picket lines as negotiations continue. The UAW has 13,000 members in Indiana, but no workers in those Indiana plants had been asked to strike as of Oct. 6.

But Fain knows all about the auto industry’s history in Indiana. He grew up in Kokomo, the grandson of two UAW members at General Motors. Another grandparent started at Chrysler in 1937, the year the workers joined the union after a sit-down strike. Fain himself worked as an electrician in a Chrysler foundry in Kokomo and was active in the union for decades. Of course, Chrysler now goes by the name Stellantis, its new parent company, and it employs about 7,000 people in Kokomo and nearby Tipton.

Now 54, Fain is leading a high-stakes battle against the U.S. auto industry, which is remarkable given that he has been such a relatively low-profile player in the union until recently. IBJ reporter John Russell went back to Fain’s old stomping grounds and tried to get a sense of how he was shaped by his decades in Kokomo. It’s worth noting that Fain still carries in his pocket one of his grandfather’s Chrysler pay stubs from 1940. In this week’s episode of the IBJ Podcast, John tells us what he’s learned.

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