United Auto Workers (UAW) president Shawn Fain went quiet for a few weeks after Trump was re-elected in November. Just a few months ago at the Democratic National Convention, Fain was calling on workers to rally behind Kamala Harris to “defend democracy” and deriding Trump as a “scab” (though Trump is a capitalist billionaire who would more likely repress a picket line than cross one).

Then, in a surprise twist — a day before Donald Trump’s inauguration — Fain took to the pages of the Washington Post to announce that the UAW is “ready to work with Trump.”

Since the results in November, Trump has been pronouncing his reactionary day-one agenda, with attacks on immigrants and trans people at the top of the list. He’s been stacking his cabinet with billionaires and warmongers with politics antithetical to the interests of the working class. Indeed, Trump has been promising mass deportations, cuts to public services and education, massive public sector layoffs, and the approval of noxious oil and gas drilling projects. He’s playfully threatened to annex entire countries and has recruited tech capitalists like Mark Zuckerburg to allow hate speech to flourish while going after the Left as “enemies from within.” 

And Trump is entering the White House in a strengthened (yet contradictory) position. He’s painted himself as the savior of TikTok and the broker of the very limited ceasefire, all while enjoying the ingratiating support from tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, David Sacks, and Peter Thiel. The Wall Street Journal reported that $12 trillion in market value was standing behind Trump during his inauguration.

Shawn Fain, whose union represents nearly 400,000 workers across the country — from autoworkers to adjunct faculty to healthcare workers — could have called out these reactionary attacks and called on workers to mobilize and fight back. As one of the most significant figures in the new progressive labor bureaucracy, he certainly has the influence.

After all, Fain rose to popularity in the fall of 2023 for leading autoworkers at the Big Three in a strike that, despite being top-down and bureaucratic, made serious gains for workers. That strike put the working class at the center stage of the political conversation: Biden courted the working class vote by becoming the first sitting president to walk a picket line, while the UAW coyly withheld their endorsement (for a time).

With Fain’s “Eat The Rich” gear and combative rhetoric, he has become an appealing figure for many in the labor movement and on the Left. These postures should be seen not as Fain’s positions as an individual, but as a reflection of the heightened aspirations of the working class beaten by neoliberalism and the pandemic and increasingly willing to fight back.

As recently as last spring, the UAW announced that it would provide funding to Mexican autoworkers organizing independent union efforts. In May, Fain was met with a standing ovation at the conference finale of Labor Notes in Chicago for a speech that uplifted and defended immigrant workers.

But now, in the face of pressures from an incoming Trump presidency, Fain is pumping the brakes. He joins alongside billionaire capitalists and the Democratic Party (even Bernie Sanders) in currying favor with Trump, rather than resisting imminent attacks against the democratic rights of workers he supposedly represents by calling for mass working-class mobilization. Rather than promoting working class unity, he is “normalizing” and giving labor cover to Trump’s divisive America First program. Moreover, he is demobilizing the indispensable working-class intervention in the movement against the Far Right. 

Some may play down this capitulation on the part of Fain by justifying his focus on “bread-and-butter issues” or by claiming that he is merely “playing the game.” But this is undoubtedly a major shift to the right — especially given that Fain’s counterpart, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, has spent the past year flirting with the GOP. In July, he became the first Teamsters president in the union’s history to speak at the Republican National Convention, where he called Trump “one tough S.O.B.” A few days ago, O’Brien even attended Trump’s inauguration, which was funded by union-busting tech billionaires.

Let’s be clear: while Fain has represented a progressive phenomenon, this latest development is not surprising given the union bureaucracy’s relationship to the state. Shortly before he was murdered in 1940 and in the midst of World War II, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was working on an article analyzing the increasing co-optation of trade unions by imperialist states, the rise of fascism, and the failure of reformist and Stalinist leaderships to defend workers’ interests and oppose imperialist war. In the incomplete manuscript, he explains how with the consolidation of monopoly capital,

trade unions in the most important branches of industry find themselves deprived of the possibility of profiting by the competition between the different enterprises.  They have to confront a centralized capitalist adversary, intimately bound up with state power. Hence flows the need of the trade unions – insofar as they remain on reformist positions, ie., on positions of adapting themselves to private property – to adapt themselves to the capitalist state and to contend for its cooperation.

In other words, the union bureaucracies play a dual role — they can mobilize workers to fight for their immediate economic interests, but they will restrain those fights within the framework of capitalism, muzzling the potential of the self-organized rank-and-file to spark militant class struggle that could threaten capitalist stability. They “do their level best in words and deeds to demonstrate to the ‘democratic’ state how reliable and indispensable they are in peace-time and especially in time of war.”

We are seeing this play out with Fain before our very eyes. In his op-ed, Fain superficially alludes to Trump’s reactionary politics in half a sentence (“We do not agree with Trump on much of his domestic agenda…”), but he finishes the sentence hoping to find “common ground.” 

Fain spends the rest of the article adapting to Trump’s chauvinistic ideas and supporting Trump’s protectionist agenda to exacerbate competition between U.S., Mexican, Chinese, and other workers. For example, he criticizes Trump’s U.S.-Canada-Mexico Agreement (which replaced NAFTA in 2020) not for its imperialist subordination of the Mexican economy and working class, but rather for increasing the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico. 

While Fain nods to  the low wages of Mexican workers later in the article and makes his usual dig at corporations for “rigg[ing] the deck,” he keeps the rhetoric within an “America First” framework by first and foremost prioritizing the American workers who were “dealt … a losing hand.” He then goes on to call tariffs “a necessary tool” to “serve the national and working-class interest.” It is clear that Fain’s vision of the working class does not extend beyond U.S. borders, even if tariffs did help American workers.

But they don’t. As we recently wrote in a joint statement with our comrades across North, Central, and South America, “It is workers who face the greatest danger from the threat of tariffs against Mexico and Canada. Trade tensions are an opportunity for businessmen and corporations to cut labor rights, wages, and advance the precariousness of the working class. Likewise, the imposition of tariffs leads to higher prices, affecting the price of goods and services purchased by working people.” His entire framework obscures the fact that national borders are really an artificial divide that capitalist governments use to oppress workers and pit us against each other. 

While Fain’s logic not only subordinates the working class abroad to the one “at home,” it totally ignores the internal divisions within the United States that Trump will try to exacerbate — attacking labor rights will first affect the most precarious workers, who are disproportionately Black, brown, and immigrant. Yet Fain’s article says nothing in defense of immigrant workers, who, along with being Trump’s number-one scapegoat and first on his chopping block, constitute 20 percent of the U.S. working class.

By promising to “work together” with the Trump administration, he is sowing illusions in imperialism to concede slightly better conditions for the working class — illusions that are increasingly idealistic as the political situation veers to the right and there is less political pressure to give even lip service to the rights of oppressed groups.

Fain’s op-ed demonstrates the limits of the labor bureaucracy — even those who speak to the progressive aspirations of the working class. While the capitalists exploit, deport, and even kill our class siblings, they try to find “common ground” with the politicians who represent the interests of these very same capitalists.

Fain justifies this stance by writing that “the UAW needs to be at the table to have our concerns addressed” in the renegotiations of the USMCA. But the working class deserves more than simply knowing our union leaderships “have a seat at the table” while the rights of the workers they represent are swept away. Rather than closed-door negotiations, we deserve democratic rank-and-file discussion and decision making. Rather than top-down decrees, we need bottom-up organizing. Rather than separating the “economic” from the “political,” we need to unite our interconnected struggles.

This stance by Fain shows us once again that we can’t depend on the current union leaders or progressive Democrats to do that for us. We have to do it ourselves by organizing from our workplaces and schools with class independence. 

Fain has called for wages indexed to inflation and the reduction of the work week, which have in term contributed to the raised expectations of the working class. To address low wages, overwork, injuries, and the continued precarization of the working class, we need to continue to mobilize workers toward these demands. In a moment where many are looking for working-class political alternatives, these adaptations to a rightward-shifting status quo sets back the movement. 

But the firepower of the labor movement has always been workers. We’re the ones who can bring society to a halt, because we’re the ones who run it. In the face of Trump’s regime, it will take the rank-and-file working class — united across race, gender, tiers, immigration status, and borders — to fight back.