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'He's the Real Deal': UAW Endorses Graham Platner in Maine Senate Race
One union official described the Democratic candidate as "a voice for the people of Maine fed up with the corrupting influence of the oligarchy and money in our politics."
Oct 15, 2025
On the heels of Maine Gov. Janet Mills entering the Democratic primary race to face Republican Sen. Susan Collins next year, the United Auto Workers on Wednesday endorsed Graham Platner, the oyster farmer and working-class champion who's been railing against the oligarchy since he launched his campaign in August.
" Inequality is out of control in our country. Today, the top 1% have more wealth than the bottom 95% of humanity combined," said UAW president Shawn Fain in a statement. "Graham understands this, and at a time when too many politicians take their cues from billionaires and corporate lobbyists, he has chosen to stand with the working class."
In Platner's first campaign ad, the military veteran pointed to his four infantry tours and declared: "I'm not afraid to name an enemy, and the enemy is the oligarchy. It's the billionaires who pay for it and the politicians who sell us out—and yeah, that means politicians like Susan Collins."
Fain said Wednesday that Platner is "focused on the real problems facing workers across this country—not the distractions the billionaire class uses to divide us. His campaign is rooted in the same core issues our union fights for every day: a living wage, affordable healthcare, retirement security, and time outside of work to actually live our lives. The UAW is proud to endorse candidates like Platner taking on the broken status quo."
Trent Vellela, president of the UAW's Maine Community Action Program Council from Bath Marine Draftsmen's Association, said that "I think he's the real deal," a sentiment shared by Platner's supporters across the country.
"Graham directly addresses the hard issues in a straightforward and relatable way," Vellela noted. "He is clear about his principles and his plan to achieve positive outcomes for the working people of Maine."
The UAW represents nearly 2,000 workers across the state, from marine draftsmen at Bath Iron Works to employees at the Portland Museum of Art and the University of Maine System. Maine is part of the union's Region 9A, directed by Brandon Mancilla.
"Graham Platner has emerged as a voice for the people of Maine fed up with the corrupting influence of the oligarchy and money in our politics," Mancilla said. "More importantly, he is building a mass movement that will not only power his campaign but will be ready to take on the challenges facing working families in Maine and across the country once in office."
"Our members are ready to hit the ground running with Graham's campaign and take back the power for Maine's working class," he said.
While the UAW and working-class Mainers rally behind Platner, Mills is already getting a boost from the Democratic Party establishment. On Tuesday, just hours after her announcement to enter the race, news broke that the Mills campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) formed a joint fundraising committee.
Platner's first TV ad—set to "air statewide on MSNBC starting Wednesday," according to Axios—takes aim at his primary opponent. It begins with a woman saying: "Janet Mills again? She was a good governor, but I think it's time for change."
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Why Not Take Over the Hollowed-Out Democratic Party?
Any effort by backers of an authentic working-class politics to seize the party will be like elbowing your way into a crowded subway car: lots of company and perhaps impossible to find a seat.
Oct 10, 2025
At a recent conference at Oberlin College, I tried to make the case that the Democratic brand is so tarnished that the only option left is to build a new formation—which I have been calling the Independent Worker Political Association.
One of the academic panelists, who had been a member of the now defunct Labor Party in the 1990s, argued in response that because the Democratic Party had been hollowed out, progressives should march in and take it over. This would have a better chance of success than building something new and separate, which he claimed has failed repeatedly in the past.
That’s a double-barreled critique that deserves a response. Is the Democratic Party really hollowed out? And is creating a third party really impossible?
After the conference I was forwarded an article by Philip Rocco, called Why the Democrats are So Useless, on the current structure of the Democratic Party. Rocco argues that the party has been hollowed out in the sense that it no longer has its own grassroots base, formed into clubs, precincts, and the like. That is technically true, but that doesn’t mean the space is empty. In fact, the party is chock full of non-profit groups that support very specific programs and compete for the attention of the party leaders.
Whereas once the labor movement formed the glue between the party and a mass base, today it is an assortment of non-profits with narrower concerns that balkanize, rather than hold the party together. In this group you will find hundreds of non-governmental organizations, largely foundation-funded, with non-elected leaderships that fight hard for their special issues. From the Sierra Club to the ACLU to AARP, each makes sure its voice is heard. Unlike the Republicans, these siloed groups have no ideological glue that binds them all together.
In practice, this means the space is loaded with the leaders of these organizations who are uniformly members of the professional class—well-educated and decidedly not working class now, even if they were while growing up. Among them, thousands of lawyers.
Meanwhile, the upper echelon of the party provides differential access to wealthy donors who have enormous influence on which candidates are chosen and the platforms they run on.
So, taking over the hollowed-out Democratic Party is a bit like elbowing your way into a crowded subway car. You’ve got a lot of company, and it will be very difficult if not impossible to find a seat.
Don’t third parties always fail?
My next book, tentatively called “The Billionaires Have Two Parties: We Need One of Our Own,” will deal more directly with why the Labor Party failed to take root. But here let’s examine the idea that the U.S. winner-take-all electoral system does not allow third parties to succeed.
While that may very well be true at the presidential level, it sure isn’t the case at the local level. I went back and checked on the Socialist Party of America (1897-1946). In 1911, the party elected more than 1,100 local officials in 353 cities and towns. It also elected two members of Congress: Victor Berger, from Milwaukee (1910, 1918, 1922, 1924, 1926), and Meyer London, from New York City (1915, 1917, 1921). Both ran exclusively on the Socialist Party ballot line, not as fusion candidates with either the Democrats or the Republicans.
Socialist Party mayors include Danial Weber Hoan, who was unbeatable in Milwaukee, reelected repeatedly from 1916 to 1940. More than 70 Socialist Party candidates were elected mayor in the United States between 1901 and 1948.
The Socialist Party was successful because its platform rang true to working people. And when you look at it, it still sounds like something Bernie Sanders would pitch:
- Public ownership of railroads and utilities as industries controlled by “monopolies, trusts and combines,” with revenues used to increase wages, cut hours or work, and improve services;
- Reduction of the hours of labor;
- National insurance “in case of accidents, lack of employment, sickness, and want in old age";
- Inauguration of a system of public industries for the employment of the unemployed;
- Education of all children up to the age of 18 years, and state and municipal aid for books, clothing, and food;
- Equal civil and political rights for men and women;
- Initiatives and referendums, proportional representation, and the right to recall of representatives by their constituents.
One-party districts and states demolish the spoiler argument
Today there are 132 Congressional districts that Republicans won with a margin of at least 25 percentage points, and 112 districts that were won by Democrats with a margin of at least 25 percentage points. That means that in 244 ultra-safe districts there is only one party now!
A new progressive populist formation that chose to run against Republicans in any of those 132 districts would be a second party, not a third party. There is no way that the new party will spoil the chances of the Democrats and enhance the Republicans. There is no Democratic Party in these districts to spoil!
That’s exactly the story in Nebraska, where Dan Osborn ran 15 points ahead of Kamala Harris for the Senate seat in 2024. He’s trying it again in 2026, and polls show him now in a dead heat.
Osborn is a working-class independent who is not shy about taking on the billionaire class:
“Less than 2% of our elected leaders are from the working class. Special interests and billionaires own our politicians. That’s why both parties have lost touch with regular people.”
His platform is called “The Billionaires who Control Washington Have Built a Billionaire Economy.” And it is loaded with working-class positions:
- Protect Social Security;
- Support strong public schools;
- Ban billionaires from buying elections;
- End wasteful government handouts to the pharmaceutical industry;
- End profiteering off senior health care.
He shows promise not just because he’s a gifted union man who still works as a manufacturing mechanic. He is running totally independent of both the Democrats and the Republicans, and that’s the key to his race. He’s running against billionaire domination of politics, and it rings true to the voters in bright red Nebraska.
Building something new won’t be easy. But it could start and grow with an association of independent working-class candidates who attack the “hollowed-out” Democratic Party, rather than joining it.
What still amazes me is the number of very committed progressives who just can’t let go of the Democrats. I guess it wasn’t easy to jump off the Titanic either.
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Union Fury After Trump Suggests Not All Furloughed Workers Will Receive Shutdown Pay
"The livelihoods of the patriotic Americans serving their country in the federal government are not bargaining chips in a political game," said the president of the country's largest union of federal employees.
Oct 07, 2025
The American labor movement erupted in outrage Tuesday after President Donald Trump appeared to go back on the government's promises to provide back pay to all of the estimated 750,000 furloughed federal workers when the government shutdown ends.
Last month, as a shutdown loomed, the US Office of Personnel Management, an independent government agency that oversees the country's civil service, published guidance for federal agencies stating definitively that "after the lapse in appropriations has ended, employees who were furloughed as a result of the lapse will receive retroactive pay for those furlough periods."
This follows a federal law, the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act signed by Trump during the last shutdown in 2019, which requires that furloughed employees "shall be paid for the period of the lapse in appropriations.”
But the Trump administration has begun to walk back that promise. A memo from the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) obtained by Axios on Tuesday stated that the administration's position was that employees were not all entitled to back pay, and that the money would have to be specifically appropriated by Congress.
"Does this law cover all these furloughed employees automatically? The conventional wisdom is: Yes, it does. Our view is: No, it doesn't," a senior White House official said, adding that despite what guidance other agencies may have given, "OMB is in charge."
When asked by reporters Tuesday if furloughed employees would all be paid, Trump seemed to confirm the OMB position, saying that "it depends on who we’re talking about.”
“For the most part, we’re going to take care of our people," he said. “There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way."
When asked why some workers would not get back pay, Trump told reporters to “ask the Democrats that question.”
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), a union representing over 820,000 federal workers, argued that by denying back pay to furloughed employees, the Trump administration was contradicting both the law and its own assurances to employees.
“The frivolous argument that federal employees are not guaranteed backpay under the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act is an obvious misinterpretation of the law," said Everett Kelley, the AFGE's national president. "It is also inconsistent with the Trump administration’s own guidance from mere days ago, which clearly and correctly states that furloughed employees will receive retroactive pay for the time they were out of work as quickly as possible once the shutdown is over."
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the chamber's Appropriations Committee, said on social media that the White House memo was “another baseless attempt to try and scare and intimidate workers by an administration run by crooks and cowards."
“The letter of the law is as plain as can be," Murray said. "Federal workers, including furloughed workers, are entitled to their back pay following a shutdown."
The National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE), which represents about 110,000 employees, also chimed in with outrage over the decision by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to send members of Congress home last week as shutdown negotiations stalled. Johnson has maintained that he will not negotiate on Democrats' demands to reverse cuts to a critical health insurance subsidy unless they agree to fund the government first.
"Congressional leaders should come back to Washington to negotiate an end to this shutdown immediately. Federal employees, our men and women in uniform, and the American people are all suffering. Skipping town in the middle of a crisis is unconscionable," said NFFE's national president Randy Erwin. "At this point, House Republicans have refused any meaningful negotiations. It appears to me that Speaker Johnson and his colleagues have no intention of ending this shutdown anytime soon. It seems they would rather sit back and play the blame game than undertake the necessary work to pass bipartisan spending legislation."
Last week, Trump suggested that, alongside OMB Director Russell Vought, he would use the government shutdown to set about "laying off a lot of people that are going to be very affected, and they’re Democrats. They’re gonna be Democrats.”
Trump added Tuesday that if the shutdown continues much longer, many government jobs would be on the chopping block “in four or five days" and that "a lot of those jobs will never come back."
On NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday, Johnson has described the potential layoffs of thousands of workers as "regrettable," adding that it was "not a job that [Vought] relishes... But he’s being required to do it by [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer (D-NY).”
On Thursday, however, Trump had described the shutdown as an “unprecedented opportunity” to carry out Vought's proposals for cuts to programs and employees across federal agencies.
"The livelihoods of the patriotic Americans serving their country in the federal government are not bargaining chips in a political game," Kelley said. "It’s long past time for these attacks on federal employees to stop and for Congress to come together, resolve their differences, and end this shutdown."
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