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As far as I know, there has never been a Wonkette’s Sexiest Man Alive, or a Wonkette’s Sexiest Woman Alive. Sure, we all have our crushes, perhaps on a certain Senator who is very handsome but also maybe a little too tight with the pharmaceutical industry for our taste. But one fella in particular swept us (and by us, I mean me, Rebecca and Rebecca’s mom) off our feet this year, which was fairly ironic given that the thing that made him most famous was his “stand-up strike.” That man? Shawn Fain, who is not an Irish political party, but a human person who is president of the United Auto Workers union.
This year, a Gallup poll found that 67 percent of Americans said they supported labor unions, and that number increased to 75 percent when people were directly asked who they sided with in the UAW strike — workers or management.
A poll conducted by the AFL-CIO found support from 71 percent of Americans, with 88 percent support from those under 30.
This is all a very big deal given that as recently as 2009, support of unions was at 48 percent.
No one would look at Shawn Fain and think “Boy, that guy seems like he would be the kind of radical who would take on the Big Three automakers, win, and then set off a tidal wave of unionization efforts across the auto industry and beyond.” But that’s what he did, because it was what workers needed and deserved.
He rallied public support by hammering the fact that workers had graciously taken a financial hit to help save the American auto industry and that when the industry did recover and was posting record profits, it did not occur to management to share that bounty with their workers. That struck a nerve due to the inherent unfairness of it all and the fact that we know that right now, many corporations are also posting record profits for themselves while jacking up prices for consumers (and not paying their workers more either).
Fain said, openly, in a New York Times profile, that he does not believe that billionaires have a “right to exist” — upending the phrase long weaponized by billionaires and temporarily embarrassed billionaires to suggest that mere criticism of how they became billionaires is practically genocide against their kind. As if there is not some difference between taxation and regulation and busting out the literal guillotines and actually murdering them all, or that such regulation would be akin to “punishing them for being successful.”
But Fain has long been a bit feisty. His UAW bio even notes that “at council meetings, he was ostracized for speaking up against the agreements as they didn’t serve the best interest of the Membership” and that he “has been a long-time fighter for the members on the plant floor, many times putting his own job on the line for standing up against vice presidents that wanted to implement policies that would have a negative impact on the membership.”
It takes a lot of guts to do that, especially for someone who personally knows how hard it is to struggle financially. “When you go through hardship and are laid off, live on $80-a-week unemployment, apply for government aid to get formula and diapers for your child, it makes you realize what it takes to survive in this world,” Fain said in the same New York Times profile.
“There are some that are trying to say that I’m raising members’ expectations too high. They think it’s dangerous to tell the working class that they deserve more. I want to be clear: I didn’t raise our expectations. Our broken economy is what’s raising our members’ expectations.”
“They pretend the sky will fall if we get our fair share of the quarter of a trillion dollars the Big Three have made over the past decade. It’s the billionaire economy — that’s what they are worried about.”
“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 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.”
“We’re all fed up with living in a world that values profits over people. We’re all fed up with seeing the rich get richer while the rest of us just continue to scrape by. We’re all fed up with corporate greed and together, we’re going to fight like hell to change it.”
“I believe that great things are possible, but only if we are able to shed our fear. Only if we stop letting the billionaire class define what is possible and what is realistic. They have spent decades convincing us that we are weak. Convincing us that it’s futile to fight. Convincing us that we should be grateful for the scraps they give us. I’m here to tell you, those days are behind us and today we take the next step in leaving that past behind. But to do that, again, we must have faith in each other.”
“Our union just showed the world what’s possible when workers unite to fight for more.”
“The very existence of billionaires shows us that we have an economy that is working for the benefit of the few, and not the many. It feels like we’ve gone so far backwards that we have to fight just to have the 40-hour workweek back. Why is that? So another asshole can make enough money to shoot himself to the moon?”
(Fine with that, actually, so long as they never come back.)
Honestly, it’s just incredibly refreshing to see someone in some kind of position of authority not freaking cowering and going “Oh no! But if we upset the people in power, there will be backlash and they will punish us for it and we will all surely die!” The more people like Shawn Fain do it, the more everyone else will realize they can do it too. And that is pretty sexy if you ask us!
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