Last week, while speaking at the General Motors Milford Proving Ground, Donald Trump called out UAW President Shawn Fain, who has been embroiled in a series of high-profile scandals regarding retaliation against union dissidents.
"Michigan finally has a president who stands up for Michigan auto workers and puts America first.You had a leader, I don’t know if he’s still with you, Shawn Fain or something,” joked Trump. “This guy was bad news.”
As a federal grand jury has been impaneled in Detroit to look into corruption charges against UAW President Shawn Fain, the union has been buried in an avalanche of bad press. Already, some top UAW officers have called on UAW President Shawn Fain to resign as they believe that the scandals around Fain have led to the UAW’s organizing stalling in the South.
“Shawn Fain is hurting organizing,” says UAW Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock. Mock was demoted from many of her key responsibilities after dissenting from Fain. A year and a half later, in 2022, after an investigation by UAW Federal Monitor Neil Barofsky, she was reappointed to her position.
Mock claims that Fain has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees on purging allies rather than implementing the democratic reforms that he promised when he ran with Mock on their election slate in 2022.
Now, with Fain in a close reelection campaign against five challengers, Mock says that Fain has created a “smokescreen” in the left press by alleging Barofsky sought political retribution against Fain for his public stances related to Israel, Palestine, and Gaza. The allegation stems from feedback that Barofsky made about language in the UAW’s Gaza ceasefire appeal.
Barofsky, who gained fame as a progressive watchdog against Obama’s bailout, was asked by the UAW’s Executive Board members, including Chuck Browning and Margaret Mock, to give some feedback on how to be sensitive to speaking about the ceasefire among Jewish audiences. The UAW’s Executive Board also asked Barofsky to come up with an antisemitic expert to speak during a union teach-in on Palestine.
Neil Barofsky on The Bill Moyers Show discussing his book Bailout
“Neil Barofsky has a political grudge against me because the UAW took an anti-war stance about what was happening in Gaza,” Fain told the Detroit Free Press.
Many influential left-wing publications have repeated this story, without noting that Barofsky was on record supporting the UAW’s call for a ceasefire. In these stories, Barofsky’s mild critique of the UAW’s statement is amplified into evidence of a Zionist lawfare campaign against the UAW, while Mock’s complaints are dismissed as unreasonable without even interviewing her.
However, none of the publications have interviewed Mock, the first Black woman ever elected as a national officer of the UAW.
“If you’re going to report a story, then how about reaching out to the subject of the story?” said Mock. “Because this is not about the monitor hurting Shawn’s feelings. It’s about what Shawn did. The monitor had no choice but to investigate. Shawn stripped me of my duties, and the Compliance Director sat there and told a whole lie.”
Three of the publications that failed to reach out to Mock- Jacobin, Labor Notes, and Drop Site News- all have direct financial ties to the Fain Administration, and two of them have ties to UAW officials who conspired to remove Mock from office. (See Payday’s long form exploring the deep financial connections of all three publications)
Drop Site News did not reveal that its editor, Nausicaa Renner, was married to former UAW Communications Director Jonah Furman. Furman was suspended and demoted from his position as a top UAW officer after it was revealed that he had trumped up charges against Mock in a failed attempt to gain more control. Despite numerous attacks on the monitor that excluded Mock’s perspective, Jacobin never disclosed that its lead labor columnist, Chris Brooks, was forced to resign as UAW’s Chief of Staff after it was discovered that he had lied in smearing Mock.
In addition to Brooks resigning and Furman being demoted, UAW Compliance Director Marni Schrader also was forced to resign last year when it was found that she had worked with Brooks and Furman to fabricate charges against Mock.
None of this was disclosed, despite all of this information being readily available in court documents and UAW executive board meeting transcripts (which Fain has attempted to suppress against Mock’s wishes). While publications like the Detroit Free Press and Reuters and even the hometown newspaper of Chris Brooks, Chattanooga Times-Free Press, have covered the scandal accurately, Fain’s allies in the left press have largely suppressed Mock’s claims of retaliation for questioning Fain’s top lieutenants, Jonah Furman and Chris Brooks.
“Here’s the thing with Jonah and Brooks,” says Mock. “They’ll say anything to control the narrative, and anything that they think will take you down a peg. They’ll make up whatever they have to say in order to have their narratives out there.”
Around the same time that Jacobin began attacking Barofsky, Labor Notes’ Jane Slaughter joined in the fray. In her piece published on June 25th, Slaughter quotes Nick Licktick, a member of the UAW Member Action network, telling her, “The monitor told Fain to support Israel. Fain told him to kick rocks. It’s clear this has all been personal since then.”
As one of four directors of the Social Justice and Solidarity Fund, Slaughter is responsible for giving out nearly a million dollars in grants a year to labor organizing, including the UAW Member Action Network, which is backing the Fain campaign. Nowhere does Slaughter disclose this in her reporting.
Mock laughs as I recount to her the Nation’s attack on her in the piece written by Brooklyn-based writer Ella Fanger, a Yale graduate, titled “The War on the UAW”. The piece echoes the allegation that Barofsky investigated Fain in retribution for the UAW’s position on Gaza. (Nowhere in Fanger’s piece does she mention that Bhaskar Sunkara, the president of the Nation Magazine, also serves as the editorial director of Jacobin, where Brooks is employed).
“Mock angered Fain’s staff by delaying approvals for organizing-related expenses, and denying reimbursements for petty charges like a $151 pizza bill,” wrote Fanger. “Mock told Fain she was running a tight ship to avoid even the appearance of corruption. But comments she has made suggest that her hostility also stemmed from resistance to the new leadership of the union, many of whom were hired from outside of the union’s membership”,.
“Seems like some shady reporting to me. Once again, creating a narrative, a false narrative, but it just seems shady,” says Mock.
**$38,000 in Moving Expenses & No Bid Contracts to DC Media Firm**
UAW Sec-Treas Mock (left) and UAW President Shawn Fain (right) (CBC)
Mock says that top UAW staffers like Brooks and Furman were using UAW funds as their own personal slush fund. Brooks, who was making $ 200,000 a year as the UAW’s Chief of Staff, requested a whopping $38,000 in relocation expenses so he could buy a house in the trendy suburban Detroit community of Ferndale.
Court documents show Brooks expressed his frustration to Furman about Mock’s attempt to restrict him from having an enhanced credit card that would have allowed him to charge $12,000 to the union’s tab without pre-approval. Mock says that she was concerned that he was using the cards to curry political favor outside of the normal procurement process and using them to purchase expensive dinners and drinks to win over political allies.
Neither Brooks nor Furman had worked in an auto plant, and both enjoyed a lifestyle that was far more lavish than those lived by rank-and-file UAW members. Mock, who joined UAW as an auto shop floor worker, clashed regularly with them about spending union dues on personal expenses.
“I’m disgusted by it,” says Mock. “I think it’s terrible. It’s atrocious. Because I come from the shop floor, and to just give away money like that, it’s almost like stealing.”
Things came to a head in December of 2023, when Brooks and Furman tried to push Mock to approve a no-bid contract to a DC media firm with no experience in union organizing. According to text messages and emails obtained by the UAW Federal Monitor, Fain, Brooks, and Furman said that Mock needed to go after she blocked their attempts.
UAW debated whether spending $500,000 was an effective use of resources, especially given that the no-bid contract was awarded to a media firm, Conexión, with no experience in union organizing. The firm was founded by Adrian Saenz, who served as the White House’s Director of Public Engagement under President Biden, and was staffed primarily by DC-based Democratic Party officials.
Indeed, the firm had only ever had one client before the UAW. Mock thought the contract was excessive, raised questions about the firm’s inexperience, and suggested that Brooks and Furman look at other firms that were more connected to Chattanooga and likely less expensive.
Mock also raised concerns that an expenditure this large would have to be publicly filed before a union election happened. She was worried that the union busters could use the $500,000 expenditure to a DC media firm as “proof” that the union drives in Chattanooga were being used to line the pockets of former top Biden aides.
Former UAW Chief of Staff Chris Brooks (left) with Senator Bernie Sanders (right) (UAW)
For weeks, Mock continuously pushed Furman and Brooks to seek out more local firms down South, but Brooks and Furman insisted on the DC firm. They wanted Mock’s sign-off to get an exemption from the UAW consent decree; a risky legal move for Mock.
“You pass all these other companies that are ad-related companies that can do the same work. So why are we going with this brand new company when there are companies that are established with the experience?” asks Mock. “Then there were companies that we’ve used that were right down there. Why didn’t we go and use them? I mean, it was ridiculous to say that they were the only companies qualified, and I knew that that was not true.”
Mock also denied a no-bid contract to Feldman Strategies, another politically connected DC firm.
She felt that too many decisions in the union were being made by high-priced outside consultants from big East Coast cities and that not enough debate was given to what the members themselves would want to do. She believed that her role as an independently elected union official was to provide a “check and balance.”
“My job was making sure that the members’ sacred dues dollars were properly spent, invested in terms of organizing, in terms of whatever we were doing," says Mock. “My job was just to make sure that the members were adhered to and heard. You know, making sure that the money from their blood, sweat, and tears was properly utilized.”
Routinely, Brooks and Furman, who had never worked in a UAW shop, would lecture Mock, who was a shop floor leader in the UAW, on how she didn’t understand organizing.
“I think it’s a little disheartening,” says Mock. “It doesn’t include the voices of the members, It includes a lot of outsiders.”
Fighting the UAW and Chrysler at the Same Time
Unlike Fain, who had been a member of the incumbent Administration Caucus and a top staffer for years, Mock had always been an outsider within UAW’s bureaucracy.
In 1947. Walter Reuther founded the Administration Caucus to create a state that selected the UAW’s leadership by delegate vote selections for decades. The Administration Caucus controlled the delegation selection process.
Not until the UAW Consent Decree in 2021 did the UAW agree to allow national union officers to be elected by popular vote, enabling outsiders like Mock to win high-level positions.
Rather than join the Administration Caucus, Mock had worked her way up from the shop floor, in turns battling both the company and the International to keep her job and secure the health and safety of her coworkers.
Her first auto plant job was at Detroit Axle in 1994. She says that she got the job because her son’s grandmother wanted to see her with a secure union job. Prior to that, Mock had worked as a bank teller.
“At that point, the heaviest thing I had to lift was a box of quarters,” says Mock. “I wore high heels and pantyhose and dresses to work. I changed all that for heavy-duty axles, picking them up and grinding the top of them as a machine operator wearing steel-toe boots with leggings and cut-off T-shirts, so it was a big change for me.”
In 1998, Mock got elected to local union office and began working as a health and safety representative at Detroit Axle. The role released her from regular responsibilities to work one day a week focusing on safety issues around the plant.
In the mid-2010s, Mock began working at Chrysler’s plant in Marysville, Michigan, which was managed by the German company ZF. Immediately, Mock says that the company began writing her up as she raised concerns about health and safety. “They were the ones that constantly violated all kinds of OSHA rules and regulations. They didn’t care, they always put us in harm’s way,” says Mock.
ZF attempted to “disqualify” her from working at their Marysville plant. She began to file grievances, but the company kept blocking them from being heard. At one point, they even dismissed her (a technical term short of full termination), despite not taking her grievances to arbitration.
“They disqualified me because I was doing my job. None of the grievances were valid because they were all lies,” says Mock.
To make ends meet, Mock got a temporary position with the UAW National Training Center as a health and safety representative.
Eventually, an international UAW representative contacted her to tell her that they wouldn’t take her case against “dismissal” to arbitration, saying that they had both “good news” and “bad news.”
“They said, ‘We got you your job back at the Marysville plant,’” recalls Mock. “So I said ‘okay.’ He says, ‘but when you go back, you won’t have a health and safety job.’ So the first word out my mouth was, ‘Why?’”
Mock told the union that she was outraged that the UAW was backing down and kicking her out of the leadership role as a health and safety representative at the Maryville plant. When she asked the UAW representative to explain why, she was told that the company no longer wanted her in that union position.
“He says, ‘Well, you know, we got reports that you were a bad health and safety rep.’ I said, ‘A report from who? Where is it?’ He says, ‘Well, you know, I just heard about it.’ I said, ‘Well, wait a minute. You’re telling me I won’t have my job as health and safety, the little one-day-a-week job, but then you tell me that there’s a report, but you haven’t seen it and you won’t get it, so that I can see it?’”
Mock decided to fight the UAW because she had taken pride in her work as a representative.
“I was so distraught that I didn’t know how sad I was. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat, but I was mad and sad at the same time. No, you can’t do this to me.” So in 2011, Mock decided to run for the top committee person at her plant in Marysville.
“I ran for that job, beat out five people without a runoff the first time, and then I ran again, and nobody ran against me,” says Mock. Mock would be elected twice more as a committee person and eventually get elected as her shop chair, never receiving Administration Caucus support in any of these elections.
As some Fain supporters try to paint Mock as part of the old guard, she says those charges are “laughable,” especially given that Fain, a long-time UAW staffer, had been a member of the Administration Caucus, while she had never joined it.
“It’s just laughable that they would say that I was part of the old guard,” says Mock. “If you look at some of my old literature when I ran for [Secertary-Treasurer], I said that if I was the only one on the board, I did what I was supposed to do. I mean, I was elected to protect the members’ money in the best interests of the members.”
She says that her experience taking on the UAW International prepared her for standing up to Fain’s demands as the UAW Secretary-Treasurer.
“I went through all of these trials and tribulations, and fighting with (the) International or fighting the appeals that International applied to me or put on me, and that prepared me for modern day as the UAW’s Secretary Treasury,” jokes Mock.
Fain’s Unlikely Alliance with the Reformers
UAW President Shawn Fain (Brittany Greeson/New York Times)
In 2022, Mock and some veteran UAW reformers, some of them veterans of the New Directions Movement, decided to form a reform UAW Members United slate to run against the incumbents for international office.
Neither Boyers nor Mock had ever been members of the Administration Caucus. Instead, they operated as outsiders, allied with other reformers. Mock would later pick Bill Parker as her Chief of Staff, one of the founders of the New Direction Movement, who helped to organize the slate with many long-term union reformers.
While they had several candidates for other offices, they had trouble finding one for President, given the popularity of previous incumbent Ray Curry, a genial Black Army veteran from North Carolina.
After their slate was formed, Fain approached them about picking him for President. Both were surprised, as Fain had previously been a member of the Administration Caucus and had not been publicly supportive of taking on the union’s incumbent leadership.
Indeed, in 2015, when UAW Vice President General Holiefield died, Fain gave a eulogy at Holiefield’s funeral. After his death, both Holiefield and his wife were implicated in a scheme to embezzle more than $2 million from the UAW. His wife was later sentenced to 18 months in prison for her role, with Holiefield no longer alive to take the burden of punishment.
Still, Fain persuaded Boyers and Mock to let him join their slate in 2022 in order to bring together many different parts of the union.
“He said all the right things when we were interviewing because it was never Shawn’s slate. Let’s be clear,” says Mock.
Both won the election, with Mock winning in the first round with over 62,000 votes, garnering 62% of total UAW member voters. Fain, though, struggled in his campaign for President, being pushed to a second-round runoff, which Fain won by only a 625-vote margin.
Fain Threatens to “Slit The Throats” of Union Dissidents
UAW President Shawn Fain testifies infront of Congress (Tierney L. Cross/Bloomberg)
Now, Mock says that Fain is replicating many of the UAW’s Administration Caucus’ worst practices in creating a cult of personality while casting out nearly anyone who might question his plans.
In late 2023, meeting with over 300 UAW staffers, Fain asked his half-dozen top brass, including UAW Chief of Staff Chris Brooks and UAW Communications Director Jonah Furman, to stand in front of the room. He then pointed to them and declared, “If anyone ever messes with them, I will slit their fucking throats.”
Mock witnessed the scene firsthand; she was standing next to Fain on the podium, and says that this threat was indicative of a culture of uncollaborative domination based on the edicts of Fain and his outside consultants.
“If you didn’t fall in line, you would fall underneath the sword,” said Mock.
In one incident, described in a federal monitor report, the UAW’s print shop was printing a flyer describing the details of a tentative agreement between Stellantis and the union, when Fain burst into the room, seething mad. He berated a staffer because they had included a photo of the UAW’s elected Secretary-Treasurer Mock alongside Fain.
“Who told you to put [Mock’s] motherfucking photo on there? This is my motherfucking membership,” Fain yelled.
Fain later admitted that he did this, telling the UAW’s monitor that he felt bad about “getting shitty” with the staffer.
UAW Compliance Director Resigns Over Fain Smears of Mock
UAW Secretary-Treasurer Mock (left) and UAW President Shawn March during “The Stand Up Strike” (Jim West/Alamy Live News)
Tensions between Mock and Fain boiled over in February of 2024, when Fain led an effort to remove Mock from her duties overseeing 11 different departments within the UAW. To justify Mock’s demotion, then-UAW Compliance Director Maria Schroeder prepared a report accusing Mock of politicizing the expenditure approval process.
The report from Schroeder persuaded the UAW International Executive Board to demote Mock. However, the federal monitor found that the report contained multiple fabrications.
Mock was not informed of the charges against her before being called before the Executive Board. The report completely blindsided her.
“It was just shocking, I had no idea what the charges against me even were,” says Mock.
Schroeder claimed that her report, which was used to justify Mock’s demotion, was entirely independent with no input from Fain or his top staff. However, an investigation by the federal monitor Neil Barofsky found that hundreds of text messages between top UAW staffers had been deleted and that then-UAW Chief of Staff Chris Brooks lied to the federal monitor, a serious and illegal offense.
The monitor accused Fain and Brooks of deleting at least 123 text messages from their phones during the period when they were orchestrating the demotion of Mock, in an attempt to hide their conspiracy from the union’s membership.
Even more shocking, every text message on UAW Compliance Director Schroeder’s phone was deleted from the period between November 25, 2023, and March 23, 2024, when the plan to remove Mock was hatched.
According to the monitor’s report, neither Schroeder nor Fain could explain why so many of their text messages had been deleted. At one point, Fain told the federal monitor that someone might have broken into his office and deleted the messages.
Emails, text messages, and sworn statements obtained by the federal monitor show that Furman and Brooks took a lead role in drafting the Special Compliance Report to oust Mock. However, Fain got Region 1A Director Laura Dickerson to present the report at the International Executive Board meeting as if it was an investigation that she personally undertook.
Dickerson admitted to federal investigators that she had no idea what was contained in the charges against Mock. She stated that she had followed the orders of Furman and Brooks.
Her motion was seconded by LaShawn English, who later admitted to federal investigators that she also did not know what was contained in the charges.
Mock believes that Fain, Brooks, and Furman, who are all white men, wanted to avoid controversial racial optics, so they put two Black administrators up to the task of presenting their sneak attack against Mock, who is also Black.
“I was disgusted by it,” says Mock. “How dare you do that? And how dare those two Black women jump at the opportunity to do that to another Black woman?”
“He needed the Black women to do it because he didn’t want the blowback from him being a white man doing that to a Black woman,” says Mock.
The UAW’s federal monitor, Neil Barofsky, found that Fain intentionally misled the UAW’s rank-and-file about who authored the report.
“As further evidence of retaliatory intent, Fain made statements to the Monitor that confirmed his intent to deliberately conceal his commanding role in the effort to remove Mock’s departmental responsibilities,” wrote UAW’s federal monitor Neil Barofsky in court documents filed in federal court in Michigan.
Brooks Brags About “Slam Dunking” on Mock
Former UAW Chief of Staff Chris Brooks (Matt Hamilton/Chattanooga Times-Free Press)
However, not all UAW staffers deleted their messages. Brooks and Furman continued congratulating one another, in texts, for secretly orchestrating the illegal demotion of Mock.
According to a federal monitor report released last December, “text messages between Brooks and Communications Director Jonah Furman showing that they (a) had editorial control over the Special Compliance Report, (b) used that control to insert false and inflammatory allegations against Mock that Fain later used to justify the retaliation against her.”
After their plan to demote Mock was successfully executed in February, Brooks texted Furman to brag about it.
“Can I just take a moment and say: my strategy was flawless this week. Like everything went perfectly to plan,” texted Brooks. “It feels really good. Like how [I] imagine it feels to epically dunk on another player in basketball.”
Brooks may have celebrated too early, but he continues to use his influence as Jacobin’s lead labor columnist and their large social network to shape the left media narrative, which has ignored the story of Margaret Mock. Brooks was aided by several publications, Labor Notes, Drop Site News, and the Nation, which have refused to disclose their financial conflicts of interest in their reporting.
Fain Blocks Mock’s Appeal on UAW Constitution Committee
Mock at UAW’s headquarters Solidarity House in Detroit (Eric Seals, Detroit Free Press)
Mock says that she is going to continue to fight Fain and has several charges against Fain pending with UAW’s Convention Appeals Committee (CAC). However, for more than two years, Fain has blocked Mock’s charges from being heard.
“I’ve put in regular appeals, and guess where my appeals are at? In abeyance, they won’t hear them,” says Mock. “They’ve been in abeyance for a couple of years now for some of the things that he’s done.”
“The (UAW) Constitution guarantees the fact that we’ll have a fair process put in place for any of our grievances, and we’re just going to ignore that due process,” says Mock.
Despite being shut out by the left press from interviews, Mock says that she is going to make her case directly to rank-and-file autoworkers like herself.
“Shawn, you cannot attack somebody viciously with lies and think that I’m just supposed to sit back and take it because it’ll hurt organizing. Shawn, you’re hurting organizing,” says Mock, who says she is determined to fight on against Fain no matter the cost.
“The members, they didn’t elect me to take this easy path,” says Mock. “They elected me, the members did, to protect what they have earned. So everything, every decision that I’ve made over these last few years, three and a half years, almost four, has been guided by that responsibility, and every decision that I will make in the future will be guided by that same thing. I have to protect what they earn.”
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