Called a 'scab' during the campaign, Donald Trump wins UAW backing on tariffs

• A well-designed auto tariffs could bring thousands of jobs back to Michigan “in a matter of months,” the UAW says.
• The UAW's revised stance on Trump is focused on onshoring auto jobs to the U.S.
• Supporting a Republican policy is uncommon for the UAW, which has formally endorsed the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since the union's formation in 1935.

In a stark reversal of its campaign battles with Donald Trump, when it derided him as a scab who would harm workers, the UAW leadership is all in on his tariffs.

UAW President Shawn Fain said in a statement Wednesday evening that the union applauds the Trump administration for following through on 25% tariffs on foreign-made vehicles and parts. The statement said Trump has made history “for stepping up to end the free-trade disaster that has devastated working-class communities for decades.”

The rousing support is a marked change from previous sentiments expressed by union leaders, where only months ago Fain appeared with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and argued that Trump’s reelection would instead lead to automotive factory closures “all over the United States.” 

In addition to praising the tariff plans, the UAW called on U.S. automakers to swallow the additional costs on behalf of their shareholders, workers and customers. 

“After they shift their supply chains and investments to the U.S., auto companies that have enjoyed years of record profits should absorb the cost of these tariffs rather than passing them on to consumers, and the UAW would support legislative or regulatory action requiring them to do so,” the union said in the statement. “Workers must be held harmless during any disruption that accompanies the reshoring process, with financial support from the federal government if necessary.”

While the union rank and file is politically divided, Fain’s eagerness to embrace Trump’s tariffs is not a sentiment shared by all UAW leaders.

At least three UAW leaders told the Free Press that they have concerns that Trump’s broad tariffs will cause the automakers’ costs to escalate to a point that production has to pause, which will lead to their members being laid off.

Trump puts union in awkward spot

Marick Masters, professor emeritus of business in the Department of Management at the Mike Ilitch School of Business at Wayne State University, said Trump’s position boils down to his campaign promise to Make America Great Again, with an emphasis on America.

“Trump has succeeded at putting the union in an awkward position, where they have to support his policies but still probably detest him in other ways,” Masters said. 

Fain had hoped to have a Democrat in the White House in 2026, when the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement was to come up for a joint review by its three member countries. The status of that free trade agreement is unclear in light of Trump's harsh tariffs.

“We sure as hell don’t want Donald Trump to recommit to a deal that kills American jobs,” Fain said at an Oct. 1 rally in Detroit for Harris. “We need people like Kamala Harris at the helm who are allies with us that will demand deals that serve working-class people.”

But moving too closely to Trump's administration now may create confusion and dissent within the union. Josh Pasek, professor of communication and media and political science at the University of Michigan, said the UAW's new position isn’t nearly as dramatic as other examples of industries caving in to Trump’s administration.

“What’s the real risk the UAW sees at the moment, and what are the possible benefits? One strategy is to make it look like they are on the administration’s side,” Pasek said, “It’s clear this administration will take actions with the apparent intent to harm whomever it sees as an enemy.”

UAW: Thousands of U.S. workers can return quickly

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president notified Detroit automakers to “start investing, start moving, shift production here.”

The UAW received that message optimistically, noting the devastating effects that moving jobs over the Northern and Southern borders have had on industry workers. The union’s revised stance is to focus not on politics but on the specific policy it wants to accomplish: onshoring auto jobs to the U.S.

The cost of tariffs mean thousands of jobs can return “within a matter of months, simply by adding additional shifts or lines in a number of underutilized auto plants,” the union asserted. “Right now, thousands of autoworkers are laid off at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis following recent decisions by auto executives to ship jobs to Mexico.”

Singling out Stellantis, which owns the Jeep, Ram, Chrysler, Dodge and Fiat brands, the UAW said that more than 1,000 autoworkers are laid off while "$100,000 Stellantis trucks are built in Mexico for $3 an hour.”

“Our neighbors to the south — Mexican workers — aren't the enemy. They're being exploited and it's because of corporate greed, and that's what's got to stop,” Fain said.

Stellantis had faced criticism for rounds of job cuts last year at its U.S. facilities, and the automaker had a challenging 2024, dealing with issues ranging from lower sales to high inventories.

The layoffs, announced within the past six months, “could be undone.”

“Those jobs could be brought back to Michigan immediately with well-designed auto tariffs,” the UAW said.

Divided viewpoints

Worried union leaders view the tariff war as a disruption to the supply chain and ultimately fear it could slow car sales. When sales drop, a recession could follow, they said, leading to economic hardship for members.

Some have said they wish Fain would characterize the union’s support for tariffs as supporting strategic tariffs that create more U.S.-based manufacturing, rather than cheering for broad tariffs against North American trading partners.

But union expectations that automakers will eat tariff costs are “not particularly realistic,” according to Harley Shaiken, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. 

“You can see the anger from the union’s point of view, but it’s hardly a solution to where the industry is today and perhaps where it needs to go,” he said.

Fain has shown he is skilled at the bargaining table and has created a sense of inclusion among UAW members, Shaiken said, but embracing Trump on tariffs undermines that and sends a mixed message.

“It sends a confused message. Many workers will say if he’s on our side here, why not vote for his successor or allies in the next election?" Shaiken said. “That’s the danger — it gives legitimacy to Trump to create future policies that will harm workers in the future.”

Trump’s Detroit stops on the campaign trail weren’t warmly welcomed by UAW leadership. Fain told the media in 2023 that “every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers.

“We can’t keep electing billionaires and millionaires that don’t have any understanding of what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck and struggle to get by and expecting them to solve the problems of the working class,” Fain said.

The UAW has formally endorsed the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since the union's formation in 1935, according to Gavin Strassel, UAW Archivist at the Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs at Wayne State University. 

Last October in Detroit, Trump said he wanted to renegotiate the USMCA, a renegotiation of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement that Trump signed as president in 2019. 

“They are not going to plunder, rape and steal our car industry,” Trump said in the speech, where he also called Detroit a developing, “once-great city.”

At the time, Fain argued that Trump’s reelection would lead to more automotive factory closures “all over the United States.” 

On the campaign trail

Before winning his first election, Trump said he planned to leverage regulation to keep jobs and wealth in America and made the claim that the surge of regulatory activity in the U.S. since 1980 shrank the present-day economy by 25%. He railed against NAFTA, which is deeply unpopular with the UAW.

“Hillary Clinton has supported the trade deals stripping this city, and this country, of its jobs and wealth. She supported Bill Clinton’s NAFTA ... and she supports the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” Trump said at the Detroit Economic Club. 

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, was an agreement for free trade across 12 countries — the U.S., Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Brunei, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Peru — proposed under President Barack Obama. The idea was to create stronger economic ties among the member nations, cut tariffs and foster trade to boost economic growth.

Trump scored political points tying Hillary Clinton’s political views to her husband's decision to sign NAFTA. 

Pasek's interpretation of Trump's current messaging is as a common strongman tactic, where those in leadership boast of having popular support and claim to represent the people "against the elites."

“The strategy is to divide different groups and put them in a position of trying to get out of harm’s way,” he said. “If unions seem inconsistent in their messaging, that sidelines any future anti-administration messaging. Are the unions focused too much on the short game or the long game?”

How to fix this

Analysts and automakers alike have been vocal about the damage tariffs of this magnitude would do to the industry. Yet short-term supply and demand constraints are nothing compared with the damage the UAW sees from 30 years of free trade.

“We're in a crisis mode in this country,” Fain said Tuesday on ABC, adding the creation of NAFTA “broke” America's trade system and cost the country millions of jobs.

“Tariffs are an attempt to stop the bleeding from the hemorrhaging of jobs in America for the last 33 years,” Fain said. “NAFTA sucks.”

Brian Rothenberg, the UAW’s spokesman from 2014 through 2022, pointed out that the union was the first to propose added incentives to purchase U.S.-made cars, and even more incentives for union-made vehicles, under President Joe Biden’s electric vehicle program. Those proposed amendments were removed, however.

“The only way to fix this is to make sure that the labor costs are equal. Until Mexican wages meet American production costs as well as other foreign countries, it will never level out,” he told the Free Press. “If you were to base the tariff on a fair level wage, there would be no incentive for those companies to go to other countries.”

Shaiken tends to agree, and said tariffs can be a useful tool in trade, for example, with China, where there aren't independent unions and wages are suppressed, leading to discounting abilities U.S. automakers can't match.

“But tariffs as a tool can also be very destructive, and when you’re dealing with close allies in a highly integrated market across North America, you really can do a lot of damage,” he said, adding: “that isn’t to say there hasn't been considerable damage first with NAFTA and then USMCA, but Donald Trump is the one that wrote the USMCA that he’s so sharply attacking right now.”

Instead of adding jobs to the U.S., added costs could push automakers to consider increasing their reliance on robots in manufacturing. Elon Musk, Tesla CEO and Trump adviser, has long espoused the benefits of adding automation to produce high volumes of vehicles.

“The biggest impact on the auto industry in the past few decades is not just NAFTA but also technology,” Rothenberg said. “A stamping plant that needed 5,000 workers to operate, you can now run it with 500.”

In Fain’s view, dismantling certain areas of free trade are worth the cost of cheering Trump on.

“The UAW has been clear: We will work with any politician, regardless of party, who is willing to reverse decades of working-class people going backwards in the most profitable times in our nation’s history,” Fain said. “These tariffs are a major step in the right direction for autoworkers and blue-collar communities across the country.”

This moment may mark a sea change, but one long in coming, according to Masters. 

“It’s been said the autoworkers are the Democratic Party in Michigan,” Masters said. “I don’t think that’s as true today as it has been.”

Senior autos writer Jamie L. LaReau contributed to this article.

Jackie Charniga covers General Motors for the Free Press. Reach her at jcharniga@freepress.com.