UAW President Shawn Fain Is under Investigation for Financial Misconduct and Workplace Retaliation

U nited Auto Workers president Shawn Fain and three other members of the union’s executive board are under investigation by a court-appointed monitor after allegations of financial improprieties and workplace retaliation. The union also stands accused of slow-walking and failing to fulfill requests for documents necessary to conduct the investigations.

Corruption is so integral to the UAW that the Department of Justice doesn’t trust it to operate without a monitor. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan appointed Neil Barofsky as the monitor in May 2021, to fulfill a 2020 consent decree that concluded a yearslong DOJ investigation into the UAW. That investigation culminated in the conviction of two ex-presidents and several other top officials for fraud.

Barofsky, an attorney with the firm Jenner & Block, was previously the inspector general who oversaw the distribution of federal funds under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) after the 2008 financial crisis. He is not a prosecutor, but he can refer UAW misconduct for prosecution or for discipline within the union. No criminal charges have been made against Fain or the other three union officers, and Barofsky’s investigations are ongoing.

In a status report made public on Monday, Barofsky outlined the nature of the investigations. In February, Fain made some policy changes and punished the union’s secretary-treasurer, Margaret Mock, by removing from her remit all tasks not explicitly given to her office under the union’s constitution. The motion that was passed by the union’s executive board to effect these changes alleged that Mock had engaged in misconduct related to financial oversight. Mock claimed that the allegations against her are false. She said that the changes were made in retaliation for her refusing to authorize spending that Fain had wanted. Fain wanted to make her less powerful to deny her the ability to refuse in the future, Mock said.

Barofsky’s investigation also includes claims that Fain retaliated against one of the union’s vice presidents, Rich Boyer. (The UAW executive board consists of Fain, Mock, three vice presidents, and nine regional directors.) Boyer is the vice president who oversees the UAW’s relationship with Stellantis. On May 29, Barofsky’s report says, Fain took over the Stellantis relationship himself. In a memo justifying the change, Fain said Boyer had failed to fulfill his duties on collective-bargaining issues. Boyer and other staff said Fain’s allegations are false, according to Barofsky’s report. Boyer said that he, too, was being punished for refusing to engage in financial misconduct.

A statement from Fain, published on Monday, did not directly address these allegations. “We encourage the Monitor to investigate whatever claims are brought to their office, because we know what they’ll find: a UAW leadership committed to serving the membership, and running a democratic union,” the statement said.

In April, Barofsky opened a separate, embezzlement investigation into one of the union’s regional directors. Embezzlement has been common among UAW leadership. Former president Gary Jones was sentenced to 28 months in prison in 2021 for the crime. In 2022, a local UAW treasurer was found guilty of stealing $2 million over a period of ten years — one of five of Barofsky’s embezzlement investigations that have resulted in punishment.

In his report from Monday, Barofsky said that the union has failed to adequately cooperate with these ongoing investigations. It has improperly asserted privilege over documents necessary to the investigation and been unjustifiably slow to comply with records requests, Barofsky said.

According to the 2020 consent decree, Barofsky has legal authority to access union documents as though he were the union president. This measure is in place to prevent the union from being able to cover up wrongdoing by asserting legal privilege to communications. It exists because the UAW has a record of failing to hold its leadership accountable. Fain himself acknowledged this fact in an August 2023 memo to staff that was reissued in December 2023. Fain said that “the UAW has proven itself incapable of monitoring itself in making sure that its leadership did not engage in criminal conduct.” In light of that, the memo said, staff should cooperate promptly and fully with any record requests from Barofsky’s office.

Since February 2024, however, when the investigations started involving Fain, the UAW has changed its position on requests for documents. Now it asserts that it does have privilege over some documents and that they must be reviewed first by the union’s legal team before they are given to Barofsky’s office. This has resulted in the union’s delayed compliance. Barofsky wrote in his report that his team has been interviewing union officials as part of the investigations without full documentation to adequately question them.

Between February and April 2024, the UAW had produced only 18 of 116,000 potentially relevant documents for Barofsky’s investigations into the executive board. On May 18, it told Barofsky that it had hired outside counsel to review the document requests. Last Thursday, in anticipation of the publication of his report on Monday, the UAW provided 2,100 documents. The vast majority of requested documents are still outstanding nearly four months after the request was first made.

Barofsky wrote that the UAW’s assertion of privilege is wrong, and it directly contradicts Fain’s memo from December that urged cooperation. It also contradicts the plain text of the 2020 consent decree, which gives the court-appointed monitor “all of the powers, privileges and immunities of a person appointed pursuant to Rule 66 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and which are customary for court appointed offices [sic] performing similar assignments.” Barofsky wrote, “With the ‘powers and privileges’ of a Rule 66 receiver, the Monitor has access to all records of the Union, including privileged records.”

The DOJ agreed with Barofsky and described the UAW’s slowness to comply as “unacceptable.” “The Union’s position is making it difficult, if not impossible, for the Monitor to fulfill his mandate to remove fraud, corruption and illegality from within the UAW as required by Paragraph 22 of the Consent Decree,” the DOJ said in a June 6 email to Barofsky. “A continued refusal to produce relevant documents and information to the Monitor threatens to obstruct or otherwise interfere with the work of the Monitor.”

This is not the first time Barofsky has called out the UAW for noncooperation. Barofsky’s status report from July 2022 said that “cooperativeness veered sharply in the wrong direction” between November 2021 and March 2022 in the face of investigations being conducted at that time. He also discovered that the UAW and its lawyers had been working to hide from Barofsky an internal investigation into financial impropriety by a UAW official.

The UAW continues to prove time and again why it is unworthy of workers’ trust. Its membership has been declining for decades, and despite all of the positive press coverage it received last year, its auto-plant-organizing streak in the South ended at one. Workers must be free to refuse to let this corrupt organization take part of their paychecks.