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UAW PRESIDENT SHAWN FAIN ON WHY HE SUPPORTS TARIFFS  
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Shawn Fain, David Sirota
April 10, 2025
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ In an interview, United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain argues
that the era of “free-trade” deals like NAFTA has been a disaster
for the US working class and that smart tariffs can help bring back
good auto jobs. _

United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain speaks to autoworkers at the
Community Complex Building on November 9, 2023, in Belvidere,
Illinois., Scott Olson / Getty Images

 

Interview by David Sirota

In the past week, Donald Trump’s ambitious yet erratic announcements
on tariffs have roiled financial markets and provoked a flurry of
panicked commentary in the media. But qualified support for Trump’s
trade policy has come from what is in some ways an unexpected corner
— the United Auto Workers (UAW), whose president, Shawn Fain,
campaigned fiercely against Trump in the 2024 election.

Though the UAW has criticized Trump’s attacks on federal workers and
the National Labor Relations Board as well as other administration
policies, the union has been supportive of the president’s attempts
to use tariffs to bring back domestic manufacturing jobs. In an
interview with David Sirota for the _Lever Time_
[[link removed]] podcast,
UAW president Fain spoke about the destructive effects that
“free-trade” deals like NAFTA have had on American autoworkers and
unions and how tariffs might help fix the damage. This transcript has
been edited for length and clarity.

The Effects of NAFTA

David Sirota

Make your case about how exactly NAFTA and other free-trade deals
harmed autoworkers and those other manufacturing jobs. It dovetails
with what’s on [the shirt you’re wearing] right now, [which says]
“Ross Perot was right.” Why was Ross Perot right?

 

Shawn Fain

It’s completely decimated the manufacturing base in this country,
and it’s a big reason why we have the situation politically we have
right now. When I grew up in Kokomo, Indiana, General Motors was a
major employer there. As a child growing up, most of my family worked
there — two of my grandparents, aunts and uncles. There were
15–17,000 jobs in GM, just in my small town at that time.

When NAFTA was put in place in 1994, you started to see those jobs
disappear. And not just there, but all over the Midwest, all over this
country. Since NAFTA’s inception, over 90,000 manufacturing plants
have disappeared in this country. When you talk about auto in
particular . . . the Economic Policy Institute did a study years ago.
For every 100 automotive jobs, there are 700 secondary jobs born out
of them. So when those 100 auto jobs disappear, 700 other jobs
disappear.

You multiply that times millions, it’s not hard to see why we’re
in the situation we’re in. Look at Flint, Michigan. Look at Ohio.
Look at Wisconsin; look at Pennsylvania. Look all over the Midwest and
really all over the country: all those industries have just vanished,
and not because it’s better for working people. The argument for
NAFTA back then was all these Nobel laureate economists and former
presidents saying, “It’s gonna be great. It’s gonna create
400,000 jobs in America in the first year. It’s gonna raise the
standard of living for Mexican workers and American workers.”
Everything that played out is exactly the opposite.

It’s what Ross Perot said in the debate between Bill Clinton, George
H. W. Bush, and Perot back in 1992, when he said, “We’re going to
hear a giant sucking sound of all of our jobs going south.” It’s
exactly what happened. We’ve seen that the standard of living for
Mexican workers has been cut in half since NAFTA went into effect, and
also the standard of living for American workers has been reduced.

In this past election, we talked about the swing states; the core of
the swing states that were going to deliver the election was
Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio. You look at how all those
states went, and there’s a reason why. In my first twenty-eight
years as a UAW member, working at Chrysler, all I saw was plants
closed year after year, and I feel a rage to this day about how
we’ve been cheated. So when you see a person like Donald Trump come
along and start talking about tariffs and trade, and people still are
[being threatened with] their plants being closed, that spoke to
people.

Trump’s Tariff Policy

David Sirota

I think a lot of people who aren’t keyed into or don’t feel
connected to manufacturing industries say, “All Donald Trump is
doing is raising prices for goods by slapping on these tariffs.”
What do you say to them about how tariffs, strategically used, can
boost manufacturing jobs, in a way that maybe allays some of those
fears?

Shawn Fain

Prior to NAFTA, we had tariffs in place in a lot of these sectors. But
it wasn’t just a carpet bombing of tariffs, where they just put a
tariff on everything everywhere. They were strategically put in place
to to encourage people buying our products. And they worked somewhat
reciprocally between countries, but at the end of the day, there were
a lot of tariffs in place in auto and different industries. NAFTA
eliminated all those tariffs [that we] had in place for decades.

Wall Street is a driver behind a lot of this fear that’s being put
out about tariffs. The people who benefited over the last thirty years
from these broken trade deals have been the corporate class and the
wealthy. Because as they drove a race to the bottom by shifting all of
our manufacturing to low-wage countries and drove their profits up,
they didn’t pass those profits on to the consumer. They didn’t
pass those profits on to the workers; they didn’t pass those profits
on to the communities where these companies reside. The profits all
[went into] stock buybacks and increased CEO pay and dividends and all
that.

The last fifteen years, we’ve seen record profits in the auto
industry: I believe it’s $1.6 trillion in profit for the top ten
automakers in the last fifteen years. Instead of investing back in the
communities where they reside, instead of investing in the workers who
generate those profits, instead of paying more in taxes — or
companies that have been given a lot of government assistance [paying
that money back] — they’ve put $367 billion in stock dividends and
buybacks and over a billion dollars in CEO pay.

The people who benefited over the last thirty years from these broken
trade deals have been the corporate class and the wealthy.

That’s the problem here. So when we talk about how tariffs are going
to drive the cost of things up, they don’t have to; it’s a choice.
Going back to roughly 2019 or 2020, over a four-year period,
automotive companies took advantage of the pandemic — and anytime
there’s a crisis in this country, the corporate class and the
wealthy find ways to extract more wealth for themselves — the price
of automobiles over those four years went up 35–40 percent on
average. There was no reason for it. They came up with the excuse that
they needed parts and things like that. That wasn’t the issue. Wages
didn’t go up; nothing changed for workers. They didn’t invest more
in our communities. [The automakers] saw an opportunity to jack prices
up, to price gouge the consumer and make more profits.

As proof of that, Stellantis alone got really aggressive with its
pricing. The sticker on a Ram truck that I leased in 2020 was $62,000,
which is a lot of money. In 2023 when my lease was up, that same truck
was $82,000. It went up $20,000 over a three-year period, and nothing
really happened. They don’t have to raise the price of anything.
It’s a choice.

Now that the stock market’s been impacted somewhat by all this
doomsday-scenario [talk], you hear Wall Street crying and leading the
battle cry that [tariffs are] going to drive prices up and it’s the
end of the world. This is one thing that I do know. For workers who
have 401(k)s, such as myself, yeah, there’s concern. But ultimately,
you know whose 401(k)s have been suffering for the last thirty-five
years? The millions of workers who have lost their jobs due to the
offshoring of this factory work.

David Sirota

What do you make of the free traders who are waving around, for
instance, Stellantis’s announcement that it’s temporarily pausing
production at two assembly plants and that the nine hundred US
represented employees at supporting plants are going to be temporarily
laid off? I’ve seen this presented as proof that Trump’s tariffs
are actually hurting the autoworkers that Trump purports to be
defending and helping.

Shawn Fain

First, I don’t find it coincidental that as Trump was announcing the
tariff, Stellantis was announcing a layoff. Things didn’t change
that quickly; the tariffs weren’t even in place yet. I think it was
intentional. Rather than Stellantis being proactive, knowing full well
for three months now that tariffs were coming . . . it had been
warned. It could have been more like GM and Ford, who were looking at
ways to adapt to this. GM announced it is increasing product at the
Fort Wayne assembly plant for trucks. They’re not talking about
that. They’re not talking about Ford coming up with employee pricing
for everyone.

Ford and GM chose to get creative, and they’re looking at ways to
bring work back and to work with the consumer. Meanwhile Stellantis
shows the same old tired philosophy of making workers pay for its bad
decisions. So I do believe that Stellantis will bring work back. I do
believe these tariffs will result in auto work coming back to this
country. Free traders are using that layoff as their battle cry to
say, “See, we told you.” But they’re not saying, “Wait a
minute, what about the GM plant in Fort Wayne, Indiana that just
announced it’s going to bring back more product?” They’re not
talking about that.

Trade, Tariffs, and Unions

David Sirota

What are you hearing from your rank-and-file members about the
tariffs?

Shawn Fain

I think a majority of our members understand. They’ve lived it. You
can talk to many of our members, and many of their lives have been
disrupted. They’ve had to pack up their families and move more than
one time, because a plant closed in in Missouri and they moved to
Ohio, and then their plant in Ohio closed — now they’re in
Indiana. People have already experienced the broken trade system in
this country more than once, and they’re fed up with it. So a lot of
them understand it.

I think a lot of them believe that tariffs aren’t the end-all,
be-all solution to this. Tariffs are a tool. They’re a mechanism to
force these companies to start doing the right thing and looking at
American workers and looking at American jobs, which have been left
behind for three decades now. So a lot of workers support that.

Now, when you talk about blanket tariffs on everything — I can’t
go in depth enough on breaking down every tariff in place and every
product. There’s concern, because the corporate world is being very
apparent that their reaction is just going to be to jack prices up and
find another way to price gouge consumer. But that doesn’t have to
happen. So people are concerned about the price of things going up.
But ultimately, the price of things doesn’t matter when you don’t
have a job.

 

David Sirota

What do you say to the question: Why should it be a priority for
America to manufacture things? There’s been this glib idea that we
don’t want to bring back factory work to this country, because the
US has sort of advanced beyond it. That’s what you see said very
flippantly by a lot of people: NAFTA happened; China PNTR [Permanent
Normal Trade Relations] happened; the jobs that we didn’t want went
offshore. Better-paying jobs in the information sector are what we
should want, and by trying to reverse that, we’re trying to get back
jobs that we shouldn’t necessarily be prioritizing as an advanced
industrialized country.

Shawn Fain

My first question would be, where are all the jobs in this advanced
sector? I’m not seeing them.

I graduated high school in 1987. When I was in high school, all we
were told was, college was the path to the future — you’ve got to
get a college degree. I went to trade school. I became an electrician.
I’ve got a lot of friends who went to college and got master’s
degrees and everything. And I see a lot of people nowadays going
hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for an education, and they
can’t find a job where they can live. So where are the jobs?

That’s a fallacy to say that we have transformed out of a
manufacturing [economy]. The manufacturing sector has been a
lifeblood. It’s what built what we used to call “the middle
class” in this country. I don’t believe in the middle class; I
just believe there’s a working class and there are the rich — and
if you’re not an owner and you don’t own the business and you
don’t make all the decisions and you don’t have massive wealth,
then you’re a working-class person.

We hear this debate about national security, and this administration
is using fentanyl production and border security as an issue. I
don’t believe those are really issues with national security. But I
do believe, when we eliminate our manufacturing base in this country,
we’re going to be in big trouble if we have to defend ourselves.
Because when you can’t produce anything, you’re opening yourself
up for attack from anyone. I go back to the arsenal of democracy in
World War II: the way that World War II was won when the United States
got involved was, we utilized the excess capacity at our auto plants
in this country to build bombers, to build tanks, to build jeeps.

So our manufacturing base is key to national security — and to
good-paying union jobs. Prior to NAFTA’s inception in 1994, just
over 20 percent of the workforce was union. Less than 10 percent is
union now. So it hasn’t just been an attack on manufacturing; it’s
been an attack on good-paying jobs that have pensions, that have
benefits, that have high wages, that people can live a decent life off
of.

Manufacturing has always provided that. A lot of people that go into
these information-type jobs . . . what kind of money are they making?
What kind of benefits are they getting? We have to ask those
questions.

David Sirota

A poll that came out earlier this week that found 65 percent of those
surveyed from union households say they disapprove of these tariffs.
What do you make of that number? Is there big disagreement in the
labor movement?

Shawn Fain

I think [with] a lot of polling, you have to take into account the
politics of it. During the election, a majority of our members
supported, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, but over 40 percent supported
Trump. A lot of our members, when we would do polling over other
issues — plant issues or working issues — they were polling along
the same lines, just because they were pissed about us not endorsing
Trump. They were saying they disagreed with our stance on, you know,
wanting to take action at this plant.

I think politics feeds into it, and you’ve got to think about
what’s going on right now. While we are applauding the tariffs for
auto, you look at the [other] things that this administration is doing
— ripping up the contracts of 700,000 federal workers. You look at
the attacks on the National Labor Relations Board, the Department of
Labor, and the Department of Education. You look at the threats to
Social Security with Elon Musk being involved in all this. Part of
that [polling] could be impacted by those things that are going on
right now, because people are seeing a negative impact out the gate on
other things that are affecting them.

But at the end of the day, I look at it this way: Nothing has impacted
working-class Americans in this country more in the last thirty-plus
years than our broken trade system, and nothing has been done to
address that in the last thirtysome years. So it’s not that we
applaud everything that this administration is doing, but it’s the
first administration in my working life that’s tried to do something
to address this broken trade system.

Tariffs and the Democrats

David Sirota

There has also been an argument that the Biden administration tried to
strategically use tariffs in ways that boosted parts of the
manufacturing economy: for instance, its tariffs on China when it
comes to the domestic solar manufacturing industry. There is an
argument that the Biden administration strategically tried to use
tariffs in a smarter way, as opposed to such a blunt or blanket way.

Did we see some of that from the Biden administration? And what do you
make of the argument that Trump has taken those seeds of a
constructive industrial policy and taken them way too far?

 

Shawn Fain

I believe Trump put tariffs on China in his first presidency, and I
know the Biden administration continued those tariffs. But when it
came to the electric vehicle (EV) transition, the Biden administration
put a 100 percent tariff on China due to national security issues and
theft of information, things like that. We applauded that when it
happened. But the problem with those tariffs was that — and the
Biden administration doesn’t get enough credit for this, with the
transition to battery EVs — a lot of factories were being built, a
lot of work was being put in place. . . . A lot of that is still in
process right now. So I don’t think we fully recognize the benefit
of that and won’t for a couple years.

That’s when you hear this argument now from the people that are
crying a lot about the tariffs, who are saying, “It takes two to
three years to build a new plant.” What they’re not talking about
is the excess capacity we have in this country right now when it comes
to our auto industry. Take Stellantis alone: the Toledo Jeep South
plant — it could put new product in there. Take Warren Truck right
here in Michigan, where I am right now, where they made Ram trucks for
eight years. It quit making them there a year ago and shifted that
work to Mexico. It could put that work back in that plant tomorrow,
where 3,000 people are laid off right now.

We project, just looking at the Big Three alone, they could bring back
50,000 jobs using the excess capacity they have in their plants in
very short order. It doesn’t take two to three years to retool and
adjust what you already have. You can just throttle up.

We project, just looking at the Big Three alone, they could bring back
50,000 jobs using the excess capacity they have in their plants in
very short order.

Yes, the Biden administration did strategically use tariffs. But we
asked it to put auto tariffs on the companies that exist now to try to
stop the bleeding of the millions of jobs that have been leaving in
the last thirty years. And [the administration wasn’t] willing to go
that far.

We’ve said from day one in politics, we’re going to call balls and
strikes, and no matter what party it is, when you take an issue like
trade — which is the biggest issue that has impacted working-class
Americans in this country, in my thirty-six years as a worker —
it’s a big deal for someone to to go this hard on tariffs. And like
I said, we agree with strategically doing tariffs, in the right areas
and the right industries, and not punishing everyone. Canada pays
decent wages; they have good standards; they have good health care.
They’re not the enemy in this.

Even our neighbors in Mexico — the workers aren’t the enemy here.
The workers are the victims, because the standard of living was
supposed to come up for these workers, and just the opposite happened.
They don’t have insurance, they don’t have retirement security,
and their wages have went down with the inception of NAFTA. So I
don’t blame the workers. I blame corporate greed, and that’s where
the focus of this has to be. We have to have standards in our trade
policies, that if we’re going to do business with someone, they need
to lift up the standard of [living of] working people. And if the
workers get left behind in that equation, then we shouldn’t be doing
business with them.

David Sirota

I feel like there’s been a culture created in Democratic Party
politics, or non-Republican politics where there is this expectation
that the labor movement simply parrot anything that is politically
good for the Democratic Party. Which is to say that the labor movement
is not perceived to be an independent force that is trying to push
both parties to do what the labor movement believes is in the interest
of workers. What do you say to folks who say, “The only thing
anybody should be saying is that Trump is bad” — that even trying
to say some tariffs are good, some tariffs are bad, is helping him,
and by helping him, that’s eventually, ultimately bad for workers?

Shawn Fain

When you talk about the labor movement and unions . . . for the UAW,
complacency has ruled the day for the last several decades. And a lot
of the labor movement has been asleep at the wheel while things have
been happening. We’ve not been fighting the fights we should be
fighting.

So when I came in as president with our new International Executive
Board, we pledged that we’re putting members first. We’re getting
back to our roots, and we’re going to fight like hell. In my first
month of being president of the UAW, I remember getting a call from
the AFL-CIO, and it said, “President Biden’s going to make his
announcement for reelection, and we’re going to try to get all the
principal unions to come in and announce their endorsement as he makes
the announcement.” I said, “I can’t do that. There’s a lot of
work that’s got to be done right now, and we’re going to make sure
that we’re on the right side of this, and we have expectations.
We’re not going to freely give our endorsement to somebody.”

A big problem in this fight all along has been, the Democratic Party
has come to take labor for granted when it comes to elections. And it
was always this mantra, “What are you going to do, vote Republican?
They don’t support unions.” I go back to these Midwest states that
are always the swing states: Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania.
You look at what’s happened in those states over the last three
decades, and they’ve seen their futures disappear. All we’ve been
told by the other side and by the Democrats mostly is, “It’s
okay.” No one’s been leading that fight.

There have been some really good, strong Democrats that have stood
with us in those fights. But there’s a huge faction in the
Democratic Party that, under the Clinton administration and since,
became basically corporate Democrats. They’re taking money from the
wealthy — the same people that fund both [Democratic and Republican]
campaigns hedge their bets. Working-class people have been left
behind, and working-class people are tired of being told that the
Democrats have your back when, when we go to fight these fights, they
haven’t.

We’ve been very clear over and over since I’ve been president,
with everyone in Congress who we talked to, Democrat or Republican.
This is our expectation. Our mission is not going to change no matter
who’s in the White House or who’s in Congress. We expect you to go
to bat on these issues, and if you don’t, we’re not going to be
there for you no matter what party you are. If you support these
issues, if you stand up for workers and a better life for
working-class people, we’ll be there no matter what party you are. I
believe the Democrats came to take us for granted, and those days are
over in the UAW.

What Happens Next?

David Sirota

A lot of people who are listening to this are looking at the stock
market. They’re looking at that line going down and saying, “I’m
five or seven years from retirement. I’m trying to save for
retirement. I’m seeing my 401(k) go down.” And this is
terrifying,  and it’s clearly being prompted by a panic over the
Trump tariff policy. They see the UAW say, the auto tariffs
specifically — I’m not saying you’re saying you’re for all the
tariffs, but the auto tariffs specifically — are something that we
support, and we’re happy that this is the potential end of the NAFTA
free-trade era. What do you say to those listeners?

Shawn Fain

They’re justifiably worried. Everyone is, because there’s
uncertainty, and the reason we have this uncertainty is because our
manufacturing base in this country has disappeared. It’s been ripped
out from under us for thirty-plus years, so we have to change that.
There may be some short-term pain in this, but we have to get this
right. 

We have a chance now to redefine what trade looks like in this country
— the thing that’s had the biggest impact on all of our 401(k)s,
on all of our pension plans — and we have to get it right. Again
I’m not saying that this administration has all the right solutions
to this, because what has to happen as we bring these jobs back . . .
they also have to be good-paying jobs with adequate health care, with
retirement security — with people not having to work two and three
jobs or work seven days a week just to live paycheck to paycheck. We
have to have a social policy. 

When it comes to the stocks and 401(k)s: yes, there’s going to be
some temporary pain involved in this transition right now. But I do
believe we have to look at the long term, and long term, we have to
bring back the manufacturing base in this country. I go back to what I
said earlier. When every 100 manufacturing jobs creates 700 secondary
jobs that support all that, that’s how you generate wealth, that’s
how you generate income, that’s how you generate security for a good
future and for a decent retirement. Without those things, we’re
going to see more of the same. And right now, 60 percent of Americans
have no retirement savings, so I don’t know what the hell they’re
going to do when they retire.

David Sirota

When you say we have to get it right, is there a danger that, in Trump
getting it wrong — going too far, too broad, too volatile, too
inconsistent, and so on — that ultimately he sets back the argument
that you’re making about the smart, strategic use of tariffs? That
if he gets it wrong and creates too much pain, the narrative then
becomes “All tariffs are bad. Tariffs are the problem.” And then
we’re back to where the trade debate was after NAFTA and after China
PNTR.

 

Shawn Fain

I know what risk there is in doing nothing, because we’ve seen it
play out for thirty to thirty-five years. Doing nothing has basically
driven our economy and our working class’s ability to have a decent
life off a cliff.

There are risks with anything that we do. But when I say we have to
get it right, this isn’t going to happen overnight. It’s going to
take time. There are elections coming up in 2026, so we have to put
the things out there that are important. We have to push for the
things that matter, like decent wages and having standards involved in
bringing this work back where people can have a decent quality of
life. And the politicians that support those things we go to war for,
and the ones that don’t we go to war against. All those things are
going to play into this.

Prior to NAFTA’s inception in 1994, just over 20 percent of the
workforce was union. Less than 10 percent is union now.

We’ll see the impact when companies are bringing jobs back, if they
choose to utilize excess capacity and act now and really change things
for the good. If they’re going to cry, “We’ve got to build new
plans. It’s going to take too long,” then it’s going to be a
struggle. But we’ve seen time and time again, tariffs have been used
in this country: back in the 1960s with President Lyndon B.
Johnson’s chicken tax, prior to NAFTA in the ’80s and ’90s with
the auto industry, and they’ve been successful.

So tariffs do work, but again, it’s about how we implement them and
how we go about ensuring that they’re used in the right way. It’s
not perfect what’s happening right now, but it’s a hell of a lot
better than what we’ve seen in the past thirtysome years.

_SHAWN FAIN is the president of the United Auto Workers._

_DAVID SIROTA is editor-at-large at Jacobin. He edits the Lever and
previously served as a senior adviser and speechwriter on Bernie
Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. _

_You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism
project, the Lever, here [[link removed]]._

_JACOBIN is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist
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web audience of over 3,000,000 a month._

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* Tariffs
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* Auto Workers
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* unions
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* UAW
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* Free Trade
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* NAFTA
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* corporate profits
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* Rank and File
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* union jobs
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