The U.S. Department of Justice has opened a federal grand jury investigation into United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, according to a June 18 email from the lead counsel for the union’s court-appointed monitor, disclosed Sunday, July 12. The probe, described in internal union communications, examines whether Fain used his office to secure financial benefits for his fiancée and her sister, then punished the senior officer who blocked them.
The monitor policing the UAW, New York attorney Neil Barofsky of the law firm Jenner & Block, notified Fain and UAW Vice President Rich Boyer that a grand jury had subpoenaed his office. In a report last month, Barofsky wrote that his office had substantiated the claim that Fain acted improperly to obtain financial benefits for his fiancée, and that Boyer’s refusal to approve a bonus for her may have contributed to Fain’s retaliation against him.
The specifics are unusually personal for a union that spent years trying to shed a corruption label. Investigators are examining whether Fain pushed for a bonus for his fiancée and backed a workers’ compensation claim for her sister, according to the monitor’s findings. When Boyer declined to sign off, Fain allegedly retaliated by stripping him of his role as the union’s chief negotiator with Stellantis, the maker of Jeep and Ram, before Boyer was reinstated to the post early this year. Boyer is now among the candidates challenging Fain for the presidency.
The case sharpens a long-running complaint from Fain’s critics: that the president has steered the UAW toward his own political agenda rather than the shop-floor concerns of the members who elected him. Under Fain, the union’s executive board passed a Gaza ceasefire resolution in late 2023, and at its June convention in Detroit delegates voted 321 to 287 to pull the union’s strike fund out of Israeli government bonds — a move aligned with the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel, pushed onto the floor by a UAW local representing New York University adjuncts. Fain has blamed the monitor’s scrutiny on that stance, saying Barofsky carries a “political grudge” tied to the union’s position on Gaza, after the monitor circulated Anti-Defamation League materials questioning a local’s right to back a boycott of Israel.
Fain has rejected the allegations outright, calling them “bogus” and accusing Boyer of feeding the monitor “false allegations.” He said Barofsky’s reports are politically motivated and that he has hired a law firm to fight them. The UAW declined to comment, and a lawyer for the union said the organization itself is not the target of the grand jury. The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.
The stakes are heightened by the union’s recent past. The UAW has operated under federal oversight since a 2020 settlement that resolved a sprawling corruption scandal, one that sent two former union presidents and other officials to prison for embezzling member funds and taking kickbacks. Barofsky’s monitorship was the price of that deal, and a fresh federal probe of the sitting president revives the specter the settlement was meant to bury.
For the auto industry, the timing matters. Fain built his standing on the 2023 “Stand Up Strike” against Ford, General Motors and Stellantis that delivered roughly 25% wage gains, and the union’s contracts with Ford and GM expire in April 2028. A leadership fight clouded by a criminal investigation injects fresh uncertainty into that bargaining cycle and into stalled organizing drives across the South, where the union followed its Volkswagen win in Chattanooga with a string of losses at plants including Mercedes-Benz in Alabama. Automakers and their dealers, already navigating shifting electric-vehicle plans and trade uncertainty, now face the added question of who will lead the UAW into the next round of talks.
Ballots in the UAW election go out to more than a million members and retirees ahead of an October count, with Fain still viewed as the front-runner despite the mounting legal cloud. Whether the grand jury acts before members vote — and whether it acts at all — remains unknown.
JBizNews Desk | Detroit © JBizNews.com All Rights Reserved. Reproduction or distribution without written permission is prohibited.
