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United Auto Workers Leader Shawn Fain Vows to 'Fight Back Hard' Against Trump DOJ Probe
"This is what happens when you go against corporate America and their allies," said the United Auto Workers president.
Jul 13, 2026
United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain issued a fiery statement on Sunday vowing to "fight back hard" as President Donald Trump's Justice Department launched a probe into allegations that the union leader abused his authority to seek benefits for his fiancée and her sister.
Fain rejected the claims as "false" and accused UAW vice president Rich Boyer, who is vying for the union presidency, of "trying to weaponize these bogus allegations to steal the upcoming UAW election." Fain also hit out at court-appointed federal monitor Neil Barofsky, whom the union president accused of harboring "a political grudge against me because the UAW took an anti-war stance about what was happening in Gaza."
"Rich Boyer has fed the monitor false allegations about me," said Fain. "We're going to fight back hard."
In 2023, Fain emerged as one of the most prominent union leaders in the nation during the UAW's weeks-long "Stand Up Strike" against the Big Three automakers, which yielded historic contracts for UAW members. On Sunday, Fain suggested that the union's successes under his leadership are fueling his opponents' attacks.
"This is what happens when you go against corporate America and their allies," said Fain, "and I'm not going to be intimidated or harassed out of serving our membership."
Bloomberg reported Sunday that the US Justice Department has launched a grand jury probe into allegations that Fain "sought a financial bonus for his fiancée and pushed for a worker’s compensation claim for her sister."
"He allegedly retaliated against Boyer for refusing to approve the benefits by stripping the official of his duties as chief negotiator with Stellantis NV, the maker of Jeep and Ram vehicles," Bloomberg noted. "The allegations became public last month in a report by the court-appointed monitor."
Fain on Sunday denied retaliating against Boyer. "The truth when it comes to Boyer," Fain said, "is that I didn't want him running the Stellantis Department because he wasn't doing a good job for our members."
The UAW president went on to accuse Boyer of trying to "hire family members into UAW positions" and failing to enforce the union's contract with Stellantis.
"Boyer is bad for our union and I'm not going to let him use the monitor's bogus investigation so he can try to fail upwards into a bigger title," said Fain. "Our election is in six weeks. Neil Barofsky will not run our union, no matter how hard he tries. And no company sellout like Boyer is going to dictate our elections."
Barofsky was appointed as UAW monitor in 2021—around two years before Fain was sworn in as union president—as part of a consent decree with the Justice Department in the wake of a corruption investigation.
Relations between Fain and Barofsky have reportedly been strained since late 2023, when the UAW became the largest union in the US to call for a ceasefire in Gaza as the Palestinian enclave faced a massive Israeli assault.
Shortly after the UAW's demand, according to The Detroit News, Barofsky "called Fain for a personal conversation related to the ceasefire statement and other issues around the war—a call Fain would later indicate made him uncomfortable, and that a union lawyer told Barofsky was out of line."
In February 2024, weeks after the UAW's ceasefire call, Fain and Barofsky had an "expletive-laden discussion" that Fain says "led to the monitor launching an investigation into him," The Detroit News reported last week. Fain reportedly said at one point during the February phone meeting that Barofsky accused the union leader of being antisemitic, which Fain furiously denied.
"For anybody to ever f------ say I'm antisemitic, brother, I'll fight your ass in front of this building in a heartbeat," Fain said, according to The Detroit News. "I do not f------ like that, and I don't appreciate it."
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'A Strong Working-Class Agenda With Moral Clarity': UAW Endorses Abdul El-Sayed
In what could be his most important endorsement in the tight Senate primary, Michigan's largest and most influential union said El-Sayed was "someone we can trust to have our backs."
Jun 05, 2026
Momentum behind Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive hopeful for Michigan's US Senate seat, continued to build on Friday when the candidate won a major endorsement from the state's largest and most influential labor union, the United Auto Workers.
"The UAW is proud to endorse Abdul El-Sayed for US Senate," the union said in a post to social media. "UAW members in Michigan want a fighter in Washington, DC who isn’t afraid to push forward a strong working-class agenda with moral clarity."
"Having never taken a dime from corporate PACs, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is someone we can trust to have our backs," the union continued. "From Medicare for All to banning stock buybacks, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is ready, eager, and well-equipped to move our core issues in the US Senate."
Despite stronger establishment backing for his opponents, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D-8), recent polls show El-Sayed, Detroit's former health director, as a narrow frontrunner for the Democratic primary scheduled for early August, where the winner is expected to face the Republican former US Rep. Mike Rogers for the vacant Senate seat.
El-Sayed has won the endorsements of other unions, such as National Nurses United; progressive groups, including the Working Families Party; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.); and several like-minded Democrats, such as Michigan’s US Rep. Rashida Tlaib; Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.); and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison.
But the endorsement of the storied UAW, which boasts over 350,000 active and retired members in Michigan, might be his biggest yet as he seeks to transition fully from insurgent to frontrunner.
"I am so honored and humbled," El-Sayed said on social media as he prepared to join striking UAW Local 2093 American Axle workers on the picket line in Three Rivers on Friday. "Michigan union autoworkers built the American middle class and proved that when people stand together, there’s nothing we can’t accomplish. Solidarity forever."
Dan Merica, a reporter at The Washington Post, noted that losing the UAW endorsement to El-Sayed was a particularly big blow to Stevens, "who is running as a technocrat, often referring to herself as a 'manufacturing geek' because of her work as one of President Barack Obama’s top officials on the 2009 auto rescue."
It could have major implications in a race that is not only critical for deciding the balance of power in the Senate this November, but is widely perceived as a battle for the future of the Democratic Party.
Michigan's importance is surely not lost on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). The New York Times reported on Friday that despite a public stance of neutrality, he is working behind the scenes to push party donors to support Stevens, the most conservative Democrat in the three-way race. The representative for suburban Detroit recently came under scrutiny over her backing from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the for-profit health insurance industry.
In response to what The Washington Post described as the establishment’s “concerted bid to hew to the political center,” the progressive advocacy group MoveOn said, “Once again the Democratic establishment seems to think it knows what’s best for voters [more] than voters themselves,” and congratulated El-Sayed on his endorsement.
"There’s a reason his campaign is inspiring people all over the state," said MoveOn's chief communications officer Joel Payne. "His economic populism resonates with Michiganders who are sick of lip service, dark money, and politicians who don’t seem to get their day-to-day struggles."
"Those in congressional cloakrooms and in the establishment class in DC may not like it," he continued, "but real Michiganders continue to make their support for El-Sayed’s economic populism and people-centered agenda clear.”
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Unions Condemn Executive Order Allowing Trump to Replace Federal Workers With 'Political Loyalists'
The head of America's largest federal workers union called it "a blatant attempt to corrupt the federal government by eliminating employees’ due process rights so they can be fired for political reasons."
Jun 05, 2026
Labor unions are warning that an executive order signed this week by President Donald Trump will allow his administration to replace thousands of career civil servants with "political loyalists."
The order, signed on Wednesday, converts around 8,000 federal workers—most of whom are at senior levels in the civil service with major influence over policy decisions—to Schedule Policy/Career (P/C) status, formerly known as Schedule F, effectively making them "at-will" employees whom the president can fire at his discretion.
While a small number, around 4,000, of the roughly 2 million federal workers are considered political appointees, most federal employees cannot be removed purely for failing to serve the agenda of the president and can usually only be fired for issues like inadequate performance or misconduct, which involves an appeal process.
But as part of the Trump administration's effort to dismantle what it's described as a "deep state" of disloyal bureaucrats, a major objective of the Heritage Foundation's right-wing manifesto Project 2025, those 8,000 employees may now be fired for "subversion of presidential directives."
According to the US Office of Personnel Management, this could be just the beginning—with as many as 50,000 employees potentially in consideration to be rescheduled.
A fact sheet released by the White House said that despite the reclassification, “these remain ‘career’ positions and the non-partisan hiring processes, competitive status, and other aspects of these roles will not change,” while “removal decisions will also be made without respect to political affiliation.”
But Trump-loyal department heads—everywhere from the Department of Justice to the Pentagon—have systematically purged employees across executive departments that are perceived as Trump's political enemies.
AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler said on Thursday that "Schedule P/C is the next phase in Trump’s anti-worker agenda to replace government workers with political loyalists who answer only to him."
"As we’ve seen from his first day in office, the president is determined to tear down the architecture of our federal government and replace it with a system of corruption to benefit powerful CEOs and billionaire union-busters," she said.
It's part of a broader attack on the federal workforce in Trump's second term. Through a combination of firings, layoffs, and forced resignations, he has reduced the number of government employees by nearly 300,000, causing chaos and understaffing at many agencies. He's also stripped more than 1 million unionized federal workers of their right to collective bargaining, though courts have blocked the implementation for some workers.
Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents more than 800,000 federal workers, said Wednesday's order was "a blatant attempt to corrupt the federal government by eliminating employees’ due process rights so they can be fired for political reasons."
"The practical implications of this action are clear. Workers who once felt comfortable reporting waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement at their place of employment because they were protected from retaliation will now be afraid for their jobs if they speak out," he said. "That is a disservice to them and to the millions of Americans who rely on the federal government every day."
William Shackelford, president of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, added that the order "threatens expanded political cronyism, increasing the risk that executive actions will be decided by the size of political contributions rather than the faithful execution of the law."
"That increases the risk of politically motivated enforcement of laws, threatening individual liberty; politically determined tariff exceptions and contract and grant awards, threatening greater corruption and waste of taxpayer dollars; and politically selective provision of services, threatening failure of government operations for disfavored groups or localities," he said.
The legal watchdog Democracy Forward has filed a lawsuit against Trump's rebranding of Schedule F as Schedule P/C at the start of his second term, which the group argued allowed several positions in the traditional nonpartisan civil service to be effectively recast as political appointees.
"For generations, our country has relied on a professional, nonpartisan civil service," said Skye Perryman, the group's president and CEO on Wednesday. "The people responsible for protecting our public health, safeguarding our environment, delivering our mail, managing our airports, protecting our public lands, and enforcing our laws should be allowed to do their jobs, not targeted by the same government they serve."
“When government experts can be fired without cause,” she added, “it’s not just federal workers who are harmed—it’s the people across the country who rely on these essential services every day.”
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