The city of Kokomo, Indiana, has always been a conservative stronghold. Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale in Kokomo. Bill Clinton lost twice. So does Barack Obama. The current mayor, a Republican, is running for re-election unopposed. It’s a city known for something it would prefer to forget: a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1923 that was the largest ever.
Yet somehow Kokomo produced a union leader whose rhetoric was aimed at overthrowing the conservative and wealthy classes – a rebel who rejected the niceties of an earlier era in favor of sharp confrontation.
“Billionaires, in my opinion, have no right to exist,” said Shawn Fain, who is leading the United Automobile Workers in a multifront labor dispute against the Big Three automakers that has little precedent and is generating high profile.
In interviews, in speeches and on social media, Mr. Fain repeatedly criticizes the rich, making the cause of the 150,000 union autoworkers at General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis something much more far-reaching.
“There’s a billionaire class, and there’s the rest of us,” he said at an impromptu news conference outside a Ford plant in Wayne, Michigan. “We’re all expected to sit back and take the leftovers, one paycheck at a time,” to get through. We are second class citizens.”
Before Mr. Fain took power in March, the UAW leadership did not so much despise billionaires as strive to emulate them. An executive spent $2 million in embezzled funds on gambling, cocaine and fancy cars. Another bought $13,000 worth of cigars in one day. A federal investigation resulted in 17 convictions against the leadership.
Mr. Fain narrowly defeated the incumbent. That might have given another candidate an incentive to keep a low profile, secure a decent contract and declare victory.
Not this guy. He is playing a game with very high stakes.
First, there are the aggressive demands and the unusual tactics. The union is calling for a 40 percent pay increase over four years to offset much smaller increases in previous years, a four-day week, annual cost-of-living adjustments, paid health care for retirees and the elimination of a lower pay scale for newer retirees workers. To secure these advantages, the UAW is challenging all three companies simultaneously, something it had never done before, by conducting a targeted, escalating strike.
Mr. Fain, 54, has made himself the face of the strike, which is now in its third week. On Facebook Live in August, he literally threw out a contract proposal from Stellantis, the automaker that had acquired the former Chrysler. “That’s where it belongs: in the trash,” he explained.
During a rally with President Biden last week, Mr. Fain invoked President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s hallowed phrase that American factories are the arsenal of democracy. “Today the enemy is not miles away, but right here in our own area,” he said, casting the automakers in the role of the Axis powers. “It’s corporate greed.”
Whether Mr. Fain’s fiery words will lead to effective negotiations is an open question. Fiery words can inspire, but they can also make you angry. Stellantis said union leaders seemed “more interested in pursuing their own political goals than negotiating.” GM condemned the union’s “rhetoric and theatrics” and Ford said the UAW should focus on conversations and not “planning strikes and public relations events.”
“I’m subtle as a hammer,” Mr. Fain admitted in an interview. “Probably always has. That’s how it is in my working life. Personally, I’m a bit shy.” Even his official UAW biography calls him “outspoken” and says he was “silenced” at union meetings because of his controversial claims.
The people who knew him in high school in Kokomo in the 1980s definitely didn’t expect this rise to national fame. They remember a laid-back guy with great respect for authority.
“I don’t think Kokomo was a breeding ground for radicals,” said Paul Nicodemus, another member of the Class of 1987, adding that the city was “known for having the biggest log and the biggest stuffed bull.” two long-standing local landmarks. Malcolm X, whom Mr. Fain called recently, was not on the curriculum.
But a closer look shows that Mr. Fain’s upbringing may have helped create a confrontational figure who denigrates automakers while alarming Wall Street. “Like watching a slow-moving car crash on black ice,” Wedbush analysts wrote as the strike spread to more factories last week.
Mr. Fain’s great-grandparents, Gordon and Effie Fain, were economic migrants who moved from Kentucky to Kokomo in the 1920s.
“My grandparents came from poverty,” Mr. Fain said. “When I see people from Mexico or Venezuela being vilified, I see my grandparents. They were born in Kentucky and Tennessee and not across the border, but I don’t see them as different.”
When the Fains arrived, the auto industry in Kokomo was consolidating. In 1937, Chrysler purchased a disused automobile factory to produce transmissions. Stanley Fain, Shawn’s grandfather, worked for Chrysler for 35 years. Other relatives worked for General Motors.
Shawn’s father, Rodger, broke with tradition. He was the police chief of Kokomo; his wife Stella was a nurse. There are echoes of his son’s situation in Rodgers’ career. He was hired to clean up a mess.
There were several high-profile murders in Kokomo in the 1970s that made the population even more fearful, but it was also a time when relations between the police and the city were strained. There were allegations that the police were hostage to political whims, leading to the resignation of a police chief. Police protested low wages by driving past the mayor’s house with sirens blaring and similar antics, according to a 2014 history of county law enforcement. They also went on strike for a day.
Rodger Fain, who became chief in 1980, is credited with professionalizing the force and eliminating the acceptance of tips. When the Klan decided to march through the city shortly after he took office, there was great tension. There were vivid memories of a march in North Carolina in 1979 where Klan members shot and killed five participants in a counter-demonstration organized by the Communist Party.
The Kokomo March passed without incident and Chief Fain was praised for the absence of violence. Still, the work was not what he expected of his son.
“My father discouraged me from pursuing a career in law enforcement,” Mr. Fain said. “When he retired in 1987 he told me that back then the only thing you had to worry about was if someone pulled a knife. Now everyone armed themselves.”
The 1987 Taylor High School yearbook had the theme “…loving every minute of it!” There was nothing Shawn loved more than sports. He played basketball all four years of high school. Football, golf, cross country and baseball occupied other seasons.
“There’s only one option in Indiana, and that’s basketball,” Mr. Fain said. “It was religion. Fathers pushed their sons and even their daughters to play basketball. I had a pretty die-hard basketball coach who was in your face all the time, and I largely adopted that mentality.”
This aggressive attitude on the field benefited him and the team in some ways. The yearbook made a good impression, calling it an “educational” season, but the record was 5-16.
His teammates remember the good moments.
“One game we were down by one,” Brian Tate said. “The ball came back to us, I dribbled down the court, looked to my right and saw Shawn was open. I said, ‘That’s the guy.’ I told him and he did it at the last second – game over. He was a real eye-catcher.”
Dr. Tate, now an endodontist, can’t remember any budding activists.
“We were pretty simple kids,” he said. “I don’t remember Shawn ever expressing a political opinion at all. We never talked about billionaires.”
There weren’t many billionaires to talk about. In 1982, Forbes found only 13 when it began listing the richest people in the country. In 1986 there were 26. In 1987 Forbes listed 49.
In Kokomo, non-billionaires weren’t doing so well. The economy had recovered from the devastating recession of the early 1980s, when one in four workers in the region were unemployed. But things didn’t progress. Local average wages stagnated, the Labor Department reported.
Mr. Fain had no idea what to do with his life. “A lot of young teenagers are pushed in eighth grade to choose a career, but they haven’t experienced life, they haven’t experienced reality,” he said. “Some of them may have known what they wanted to do since they were kids, but I wasn’t one of them.”
He attended the Kokomo branch of Indiana University, not a top basketball school. He gained some attention for a good game or two, but dropped out before graduating.
There were difficult times. Mr. Fain married a high school classmate in 1991 and had two girls. “When you go through hardship and get laid off, living on $80 a week of unemployment and applying for government assistance to get formula and diapers for your child, you realize what it takes to survive in this world,” said he. (The marriage ended in divorce. He is engaged to Keesha McConaghie, a UAW financial analyst.)
It was an electricians’ union neighbor who put Mr. Fain on a viable path. “If you had asked me, ‘Do you want to be an electrician?’ – I probably would have laughed. I knew nothing about this trade. I applied, got in and the rest is history.” He started working for Chrysler in 1994.
His father provided a final element that shaped the future union leader. Rodger Fain ran for the Indiana legislature as a Democrat in 1986. His programs included supporting economic development, creating high-paying jobs, and breaking down the “walls” between workers and management. The vote was close, but as usual, Kokomo went Republican.
Shawn Fain, who was raised to be active in the community, ran for school board in 1998. He wasn’t elected, but he liked the idea of the service.
“Some people make it happen when they see things happening that they don’t agree with,” said Mr. Nicodemus, the former classmate. “And there are others like Shawn. Instead of sitting back, he steps forward and says, ‘I’m going to be the guy.'”
That was the case at the UAW, even though the union leadership didn’t want the guy for a long time.
“I didn’t like the way things were going at my plant, I got elected and the rest was history,” said Mr. Fain, who won five terms as a skilled trades committee member and held other posts.
In 2007, he led a grassroots campaign to reject a contract with Chrysler that provided new workers at lower wages and made other concessions. When he accepted the deal, he told UAW leadership, “You might as well take a gun and shoot yourself in the head.”
The treaty was approved, but Mr. Fain gained a reputation as a rebel. Eleven years ago he moved from Kokomo to Detroit to work directly for the union. In the years that followed, corruption scandals at the top of the UAW resulted in two union leaders being jailed one after the other and a court-appointed monitor being given the mandate to elect the top positions by popular vote for the first time.
It was an opportunity for reformers, and Mr. Fain led a group of insurgents that pushed out the old guard. He promised not only to put an end to corruption, but also to abandon the hands-on, participatory approach that he denounced as “corporate unionism.” One of his first public acts was to reject the traditional handshake with automakers at the start of negotiations in July.
He calls his acerbic attitude “a migration” that he adopted “simply from experience.” Likewise with his political journey. “I never intended to run for UAW president,” he said. “It wasn’t on my radar. But things are changing.”
The unstoppable rise of billionaires provided additional motivation. There are now an estimated 750 of them in the United States, and they are a lot richer than they used to be. “We are all tired of watching the rich get richer,” Mr. Fain said recently. (His own income was $160,000 last year; the UAW lists the president’s base salary at $207,000.)
Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian, said he viewed Mr. Fain as a step backwards.
“He uses more forceful rhetoric than any UAW leadership in a long time, going back to the 1930s and 1940s,” Lichtenstein said. “The idea of mutual understanding with companies has disappeared.”
Mr. Fain took Senator Bernie Sanders, the progressive independent from Vermont, to a rally in September and cites Walter Reuther, the postwar UAW leader, as an inspiration, along with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the “Pyramid.” of Success,” developed by John Wooden, the coach who created a UCLA basketball dynasty. The wooden principles include a suggestion at the top about “Enjoying a Difficult Challenge.”
A strike is a double-edged sword, said Patrick Anderson, chief executive of the Anderson Economic Group in East Lansing, Michigan. The larger the number of striking workers, the greater the pressure on the employer. But the longer the strike goes on, the worse things will become for workers, giving them incentive to settle down. Automakers know this, of course, which is a really difficult challenge.
Mr. Fain deals with stress by exercising and listening to music that covers the entire spectrum – hip-hop, ’80s rock, Metallica, Frank Sinatra. He’s still getting used to the job and the fact that Shawn Fain of Kokomo Local 1166 is the UAW president.
“Surreal,” he calls it. If there’s anything keeping him grounded, he suspects it might be this: “In the past, UAW leaders have tended to forget who they represent here. I do not forget.”