Ohio senator-elect who has Trump’s ear rips Fain as a corrupt hack

The first car dealer to be elected to the U.S. Senate, Bernie Moreno, shares President-elect Donald Trump’s disdain for UAW President Shawn Fain, and given Fain’s strident disapproval of Trump, it creates a significant challenge for the two sides to work together over the next four years.
In an exclusive interview with the Detroit Free Press last week, Moreno, the Republican senator-elect from Ohio, said the party wants to work with UAW membership. But he said UAW leaders, whom he called “stooges for the Democrat Party,” make that difficult.
Both Moreno and Fain did leave room for conversation in their comments to the Free Press.
Trump and Fain have traded insults and accusations on many occasions, especially after the UAW threw its support behind President Joe Biden and then, later, Vice President Kamala Harris in the election campaign. Trump has said Fain should be fired. Last month, Fain said Trump is “a billionaire who’s never worked a real job in his life” referring to Trump as “a scab” who is unfit to be president.
Moreno, 57, unseated longtime pro-labor incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown with the help of more than 1,000 auto dealers backing him in a campaign that cost him and his rival a record $500 million.
In his interview with the Free Press, Moreno outlined Trump’s plans to overhaul the auto industry, an agenda he said he shares with Trump. It includes possibly freezing fuel economy standards for at least a decade — which would slow EV adoption and anger environmentalists. It may also look to take away California’s ability to set its own strict emissions standards. Also, it is likely to repeal parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, including the $7,500 tax credit consumers receive now toward the purchase of some EVs, a benefit that has helped the Detroit automakers sell the cars.
More:Car dealer elected to US Senate: Trump and I share vision for overhauling auto industry
During the interview, Moreno also had choice words for Fain, referring to him as “probably one of the most corrupt UAW leaders” ever and saying Fain is not looking out for his members.
The UAW represents some 400,000 workers, 150,000 of whom build cars, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Moreno credited Trump for remaking the Republican Party as “the party of the working class.” He said that while the party wants to work with the union, the leadership, namely Fain, is more interested in being “a celebrity and a political hack” than looking out for his memberships’ best interests.
Moreno cited an investigation of Fain by a monitor appointed after the union’s 2019 corruption scandal. The independent UAW monitor this summer started an investigation of Fain’s actions as well as those of Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock in the wake of a shake-up in union leadership earlier this year. The monitor also is launching a separate probe into an unnamed International Executive Board member for alleged embezzlement.
Fain came to power following last year’s first direct election of top UAW leaders. His national profile rose after negotiating a strong new contract with the Detroit Three last year following a targeted 40-day strike. Fain also led a successful campaign to organize the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, this year. 
But the investigation puts the UAW’s leadership in an uncomfortable spot and reminds the world that the union remains under federal oversight stemming from the wide-ranging corruption scandal that landed former top union leaders and auto executives in prison. The scandal even led to a conviction for FCA US, the U.S. operating arm of Stellantis.
In the meantime, Stellantis has come under fire for numerous job cuts this year as it has struggled to manage its inventory levels. Last week, the automaker announced it would eliminate a shift at the Toledo Assembly Complex, meaning layoffs for 1,100 workers. The company has also confirmed it is expanding its truck plant in Saltillo, Mexico.
“His members are suffering. His members are losing their jobs,” Moreno said. “He should have been at the top of the list saying EV mandates are killing the auto industry. Instead, he’s playing footsie with Democrat leaders so he gets invited to the strategy parties in D.C. and does the whole Democrat circuit. This is not a guy who is looking out for working Americans.”
Moreno called on UAW members to elect a new leader, but added that if Fain did reach out to him, Moreno would be an ally in working together to grow the U.S. auto industry and union membership.
The Free Press requested an interview with Fain. Instead, a union spokesman texted a statement from Fain addressing Moreno’s criticism. In it, Fain noted that the union has been fighting job cuts at Stellantis “for years.”
“The Big Three has closed 65 plants in the past two decades,” Fain said in his statement. “We welcome Senator Moreno to join that fight, and anyone else who’s ready to hold corporate America’s feet to the fire and deliver results for the working class. But attacking our union while we’re in the fight for our lives at Stellantis doesn’t help autoworkers in Toledo or anywhere else.”
Fain went on to say of Moreno, “If he’s serious, he needs to be working with us, not trashing us.”
Moreno did try to save jobs back in 2018 when General Motors announced it would permanently close its Lordstown Assembly plant in northeast Ohio, which built the Chevrolet Cruze sedan. As the Free Press reported in 2019, Moreno met with GM leaders, proposing to buy 150,000 to 180,000 Cruze cars to start a global ride-hailing company similar to Uber. GM CEO Mary Barra rejected the idea. GM shuttered Lordstown that spring.
At that time, then-President Trump targeted GM and a local UAW president in tweets urging the carmaker to reopen the plant. But GM sold it to electric truck maker Lordstown Motors that year. Lordstown Motors filed for federal bankruptcy protection in June 2023.
Foxconn, a Taiwan-based electronics assembler, now owns the 6.2-million-square-foot auto assembly plant in Lordstown, but it sits idle. Moreno drives past it often and said it serves as inspiration for his auto industry overhaul plans.
“I want to see that plant producing automobiles again,” Moreno said. “It is symbolic of what we need to do.”
Fain, who has frequently noted that Trump was president when the Lordstown plant closed, wore a “Trump is a Scab” T-shirt when he spoke at the Democratic National Convention.
While it’s unclear if Trump would actually push for federal investigations of Fain once he’s sworn in to office, one labor expert noted that the mechanisms to do so are available now.
Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University, pointed to the fallout from the corruption scandal involving the UAW and former officials with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, the company that merged with Peugeot to form Stellantis. As part of a federal consent decree, an independent monitor, selected in 2021, was tasked with rooting out corruption in the union and overseeing the election that brought Fain to the presidency.
“That entire system or network of monitoring is already in place. So they already have people who are assigned to do that,” Wheaton said.
But Wheaton noted that Fain’s support for Harris did not make him an outlier among labor leaders.
“The conflict was whether or not Shawn Fain thought that President Trump would be better for autoworkers or whether Kamala Harris would be better, and the overall feeling in the labor movement in the majority, not unanimous, was that Kamala Harris would have been much more friendly to unions and the auto industry than President-Elect Trump.”
Wheaton said Trump got higher-than-expected support from labor, but he also noted that “Trump is notoriously anti-union.” He also pointed to what he called condescending comments Trump has made suggesting that auto assembly work is not very difficult.
He said he expects Trump to appoint more anti-union members to the National Labor Relations Board.
As for the talk of adding significant tariffs to what is produced elsewhere and shipped to the United States, “that would be something that the UAW would probably be in favor of. So it’s always a bit of good and a bit of bad. If President Trump follows through on his desire to have more product built in the U.S. then I don’t think he’s going to have as much conflict with Shawn Fain.”
Contact Jamie L. LaReau: [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. Read more on General Motors and sign up for our autos newsletter. Become a subscriber.
The story was updated to fix a typo.