The federal court-appointed official overseeing the UAW is taking sides in the union's upcoming presidential election.

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/2026/07/14/monitor-amok-uaw-shawn-fain-investigation/


Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers, speaks during the Democratic National Convention, August 19, 2024, in Chicago. Credit: Paul Sancya/AP Photo

There’s a long history of federal government intervention in the internal affairs of unions. The grounds for such interventions have usually run the gamut from ideology and politics (e.g., the Taft-Hartley Act’s purge of Communists from the ranks of union leaders) to corruption (the control of various unions by organized crime, e.g., much of the Teamsters until roughly 1990). But the personal pique of a government official was never really the reason behind any such intervention—until today.

In the past three weeks, the federal monitor charged with overseeing the United Auto Workers has become, in effect, the most significant supporter of UAW Vice President Rich Boyer’s campaign to unseat UAW President Shawn Fain in the union’s upcoming quadrennial election, to be decided by a vote of the rank and file in the next few months. In a settlement reached in federal court in 2020, the union consented to the oversight of a federal monitor, not because there were any allegations of mob involvement, but because two former presidents were in the process of being convicted for spending union funds on their lavish lifestyles. The agreement stipulated that the union’s leaders would be chosen by member elections rather than at conventions, and that its books would be open to inspection to ensure there’d be no misappropriation of union funds as had been the case in the 2010s. The court appointed New York attorney Neil Barofsky to serve as the federal monitor overseeing the union lest any such misdeeds reoccur.



No such misdeeds have reoccurred, but Barofsky has plunged himself into internal UAW politics despite that. As I chronicled in an article that ran in our April issue this year, Barofsky’s involvement in the union’s politics began in December of 2023, when the union’s executive board, at President Fain’s urging, passed a resolution calling for a cease-fire in the Gaza war. That night, Barofsky called Fain from Switzerland, where he was working on a different case, to voice his dissatisfaction with the resolution, acknowledging that he wasn’t calling in his official capacity. The two had words, and Fain’s recollection of the call was that Barofsky called him antisemitic. Shortly thereafter, Barofsky forwarded a statement from the Anti-Defamation League to all members of the union’s executive board about what the ADL claimed was the antisemitism of a UAW local. At the board’s February 2024 meeting, members asked why Barofsky was involving himself in the union’s politics, while Barofsky protested he was not really seeking a policy change from them. Infuriated by both Barofsky’s charges and his denials, Fain said, “For anybody to ever fucking say I’m antisemitic, brother, I’ll fight your ass in front of this building in a heartbeat.”

Within weeks of that meeting, Barofsky initiated an investigation of Fain’s interactions with several UAW leaders, chiefly Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock, from whom Fain had stripped control of specific UAW departments (a power which the union’s constitution grants its president). Fain and Mock were both members of a union reform slate that had swept into power in the UAW’s 2022 election, but the clash between Fain’s break-things-to-win-victories staff and Mock’s by-the-book staff had been fierce. Fain had also stripped union Vice President Boyer of his control of the UAW’s Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) division. In his report issued some months after their dispute at the February executive board meeting, Barofsky charged Fain with unfairly taking power from Mock and Boyer, focusing chiefly on Fain’s clashes with Mock. Fain then agreed to restore the assignments to Mock and Boyer, and Fain’s chief aide, Chris Brooks, agreed to leave the union lest Barofsky ask Donald Trump’s Department of Justice to investigate both Fain and the union.

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