Enter Fain, the first UAW president to be directly elected by the membership, after two of his predecessors and their underlings did prison time for spending union funds on golf clubs, luxury lodgings and steak dinners with champagne and cigars.
Months after his swearing-in this March, Fain bucked convention by not holding handshake ceremonies usually attended by the three companies’ CEOs and union leadership to kick off contract negotiations.
yes, but part of managing a conflict is allowing escalation to develop slowly. ultimately, class consciousness has to develop to the point where the class realizes they don't need the capitalists and are better off expropriating them. but to get there you're going to have to negotiate in the mid-term or you're going to get replaced by the people you represent because it looks like you're not actually fighting for their interests. demands that the workers want but which the bourgeoisie can never grant are critical jn this process.
Anyone else read the last paragraph and think it's cringe that the great grandson of Henry Ford can still be in a high up position after four generations? Didn't Ford have to get bailed out?
Tangentially related fact: most of the land on anglo island is apparently still owned by the descendents of the norman conquerers, a literal millennium after the event
We don’t live in a monarchy, it’s perfectly normal for eighteenth-generation failsons to control every major company in the country because the MARKET decides!
Fain should push back against this the same way Lynch did in the UK. He's an elected representative of his members and the membership collectively votes to perform these actions. There's more democracy in what they're doing than in what the company wants to do.
Giving him a nickname like "Hurrican Fain" and constantly making this his decisions and his ideas is about covering up the fact this is the collective discontent of 150,000 workers. It makes it sound like it's just about 1 man and plays into the union barons shit they always want to push.
It makes him sound cool as fuck and it's good that they have actually good leadership but pushback is needed.