President Donald Trump continues to make inroads with the labor movement, and his protective tariffs have found an ally in United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain.
Fain praised the Trump administration’s new 25% auto tariffs as the end of the “free trade disaster” and released a video calling for an end to deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement.
“You know what’s bad for the economy?” Fain asks while sporting a “KILL NAFTA” T-shirt. “Letting corporations ship jobs to other countries where workers make $3 an hour so the company can sell a truck for $100,000 and pocket the savings.”
Fain claims that 90,000 manufacturing facilities have closed in the United States since NAFTA was ratified, devastating the heartland.
Despite praising his policies, the three-minute clip does not mention Trump by name and stands out for a few other reasons.
One is that NAFTA has not been in effect since it was replaced in 2020 by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement that Trump’s team negotiated. Another is that Fain campaigned hard against Trump last fall.
Union leadership, normally in lockstep with Democratic candidates, was divided in the 2024 contest. Most unions backed former Vice President Kamala Harris, but a handful, including the International Association of Fire Fighters and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, remained neutral.
Teamsters President Sean O’Brien made history by speaking at the Republican National Convention. After the election, he played a major role in helping pro-union former GOP Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer become labor secretary.
Fain, on the other hand, went all in for Harris, even sporting a “Trump is a Scab” T-shirt during an October rally in Michigan, where UAW is headquartered.
“We stand at a crossroads in this country,” Fain said in his endorsement. “We can put a billionaire back in office who stands against everything our union stands for, or we can elect Kamala Harris, who will stand shoulder to shoulder with us in our war on corporate greed.”
Things didn’t work out that way.
A CNN exit poll found that 45% of voters with a union member in their household voted for Trump, compared to 40% in 2020. And despite Fain’s heavy campaigning, Trump won the UAW headquarters’ state of Michigan.
The UAW is one of the largest labor unions in the U.S. and has more than 400,000 active members, according to its website.
Trump always maintained that he was the better candidate for autoworkers, unionized or not. He said he would end former President Joe Biden’s electric vehicle subsidies and that his tariffs would protect workers from subsidized or low-wage foreign imports. Trump even sought the UAW’s endorsement, a call that was soundly rejected.
Now, Fain is touting his alignment with Trump on tariffs even while criticizing some of his other policies. His video does not mention the president but nods to their shared concerns, saying he backed Ross Perot in 1992.
“I was a 22-year-old apprentice electrician in Kokomo, Indiana, watching the Presidential Debate between George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot,” Fain says before a clip shows Perot warning that NAFTA would lead to a “giant sucking sound” of manufacturing jobs going to Mexico. “That’s why I voted for Ross Perot.”
Trump has been calling for higher tariffs for decades, and in 2000, he briefly ran for president on the platform of the Reform Party, which Perot founded.
White House spokesman Kush Desai indicated that Fain’s praise puts him in league with his union’s rank and file.
“We’re glad that UAW leadership has finally recognized what’s long been clear to UAW members: President Trump backs America’s blue-collar workers, and America’s blue-collar workers back President Trump,” Kush said.
Dan Bowling, who teaches labor courses at Georgia State University, said Fain’s video is not about currying favor with Trump but highlighting their alignment on the narrow issue of auto tariffs.
“I don’t know if he’s worried about being in Trump’s good graces,” Bowling said. “I do think it’s a no-brainer for the American auto industry to praise tariffs, which make it much more expensive for foreign competitors. There’s nothing better if I’m an autoworker than saying, ‘We’ll get more money and more jobs in the U.S.’”
“I see it as a plain, logical statement,” he added.
Fain made a similar argument himself during an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, decrying Trump’s anti-union actions while saying his tariffs are spot on.
“Just because we find common ground on tariffs or trade doesn’t mean that everything else goes out the window,” Fain said. “There is no trade-off here.”
The UAW did not respond to questions from the Washington Examiner about Fain’s relationship with Trump.
Not everyone is convinced that Trump’s tariffs are logical or will help America’s autoworkers. For example, Tad DeHaven of the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute holds that tariffs lead to inefficiencies that do not benefit consumers or workers.
“Looking for a good example of government waste, fraud, and abuse?” DeHaven wrote of Trump’s trade war. “The time the Trump administration is spending upending global trade is a waste, the rationale for it is a fraud, and forcing taxpayers to cover the damage is downright abuse.”
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Trump and Fain disagree.
“There isn’t a state in this country that hasn’t been devastated by the free trade disaster of the last 33 years,” Fain said in his video. “The status quo is killing us.”
