In late 2023, in a meeting with over 300 UAW staffers present, UAW President Shawn Fain asked his half-dozen top staffers, including UAW Chief of Staff Chris Brooks and UAW Communications Director Jonah Furman, to go to the front of the room. He then pointed to them and declared, “If anyone ever messes with them, I will slit their fucking throats.”
The shocking revelation came out as part of a 94-page status report provided by the federal monitor of the UAW, Neil Barofsky. In 2021, Barfosky was appointed to monitor the union as part of a federal consent decree after a dozen top UAW staffers were convicted of embezzling money from the union.
The federal monitor’s report, released yesterday, raises troubling questions about UAW’s approval of no-bid contracts to DC political consulting firms in violation of the federal consent decree, which requires UAW to seek three bids for each contract.
In sworn testimony given to the federal monitor, dozens of UAW staffers, including Fain’s allies, verified the disturbing incident.
“It was in the moment,” Kevin Gotinsky, one of Fain’s top aides, told the federal monitor. “Fain knew after the fact that he maybe shouldn’t have said it.”
However, the incident was just one of many that have left many UAW staffers in fear.
In one incident, described in the report when the UAW’s print shop was going to print a flyer describing the details of a tentative agreement between Stellantis and the union, Fain burst into the print shop to yell at staffers. He berated a staffer because they included a photo of the UAW’s elected Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock alongside Fain’s photo on the flyer.
“Who told you to put [Mock’s] motherfucking photo on there? This is my motherfucking membership,” Fain yelled.
Fain later admitted that he did it, telling monitors that he felt bad about “getting shitty” with the staffer.
The 94-page federal monitor’s report paints a troubling picture of how Fain and his top staffers have created a culture of fear within the UAW and orchestrated “show trials” to purge UAW officers who have questioned Fain.
Show Trials and Purges of UAW Dissidents
Last month, Payday broke the news that the UAW’s assistant communications director had resigned over the culture of intimidation.
“I cannot lose my integrity by continuing to work in a place where dissent is a termination worthy event,” wrote Gumpert in a Facebook post published in late April.
Gumpert went on to denounce UAW Chief of Staff Chris Brooks and UAW Communications Director Jonah Furman. Prior to their appointment to UAW top positions, neither of them had held any top labor leadership positions within any union. Their role in the union had been quite controversial among UAW leaders, who had come up through the rank-and-file of the union.
“There are 2 primary sycophants - outsiders there for 2 years, who never were members and never held leadership roles at any union in their lives prior - who have taken the keys to the car from the elected President and hijacked this amazing union for personal gain, attention and ego,” wrote Gumpert about Brooks and Furman. “Now, they’ve driven it straight off a cliff.”
The federal monitor’s report describes in depth how both Brooks and Furman in 2024 arranged a “show trial” without due process of Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock. The “show trial” resulted in Mock being demoted from her positions overseeing 11 departments within the union. It also led to her being removed as one of the few Black women on the AFL-CIO’s 57-member executive board.
Just two years earlier, Fain, a white Bible-quoting autoworker from rural Indiana, had tapped Mock, a Black autoworker from Detroit, to be his running mate. During the campaign, incumbent UAW President Ray Curry, a Black man from North Carolina, made an issue of Fain being white.
Mock’s inclusion as a Black woman undoubtedly helped Fain’s ticket win narrowly, by only 483 out of a total of 136,485 votes from the UAW’s rank-and-file.
Less than a year after serving as Fain’s running mate, her demotion shocked many, particularly Black union members, who constitute approximately 25% of the UAW’s membership.
In February of 2024, at an International Executive Board (IEB) meeting of the UAW, board members accused Mock of “weaponizing” the expenditure process and not approving expenditures for political reasons.
As part of the UAW’s federal consent decree, the union was required to solicit bids from at least three vendors before approving an expenditure. Fain had repeatedly pressured Mock to approve no-bid contracts to politically connected DC consulting firms in violation of the federal consent decree, which Mock resisted.
At the IEB meeting, a Special Compliance Report was presented that laid out charges against Mock. The Special Compliance Report was presented by UAW Region 1A Director Laura Dickerson, who Fain has tapped to be his running mate as Secretary-Treasurer when he runs for re-election in 2026.
Under threat of federal perjury charges, Dickerson admitted to the federal monitor that she played no role in preparing the Special Compliance Report. According to the federal monitor's investigation, the report was primarily prepared by Furman and Brooks, but since Dickerson is a Black woman, UAW President Shawn Fain felt it was best if she presented the charges against Mock, who is also Black.
“I thought it would be better coming from her than me, a white guy,” Fain told the federal monitor.
The report completely blindsided her, “who had received no advance notice that these allegations were to be levied against her at the IEB meeting and was not given an opportunity to participate in the investigation into her that resulted in the Report,” wrote UAW federal monitor Neil Barofsky.
The report presents a detailed, in-depth report on decision-making on expenditure approvals, citing many UAW members and staffers, that completely discredits the Special Compliance Report used to remove Mock. The full 94-page report even gets into details about instances where union staffers complained about taxi rides not being reimbursed because they did not present a receipt.
“Although the Special Compliance Report described this accusation as a ‘pattern of Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock trying to influence current or future Board decisions’ and that the Compliance Department had ‘received reports from many’ members of the IEB, the Monitor’s investigation identified only two specific incidents,” wrote Barofsky. “In both, the Regional Directors in question explicitly denied that Mock had offered them a quid pro quo or expressly conditioned the granting of their expense requests in return for favorable votes.”
An analysis by the federal monitor found that Mock had approved more than 2/3rds of all expenditure requests presented to her.
However, in December of 2023, she angered UAW Communications Director Jonah Furman when she refused to grant a $500,000 no-bid contract to a politically connected DC consulting firm for billboards and media buys to support union organizing at Volkswagen in Chattanooga.
Given that the no-bid contract was for $500,000, a large expenditure for any union, Mock denied the request until more dialogue within the union could be had about whether the expenditure should be approved.
Union organizers debated whether spending $500,000 was an effective use of organizing resources, especially given that the no-bid contract was going to a media firm named Conexión, which had little experience with union organizing. The firm was founded by Adrian Saenz, who led the White House’s Director of Public Engagement under President Biden and was staffed primarily by the DC-based Democratic Party.
Furman also grew frustrated with Mock after she refused to approve a no-bid contract for Feldman Strategies, a communication firm founded by DC political operative Andrew Feldman. The federal consent decree had been very clear that the union should solicit at least three bids before approving any contract unless the union found there was a reason to grant a special exception.
Eventually, after a six-week debate within the union, both no-bid contracts were approved in February. In late April, the UAW would overwhelmingly win the union election at Volkswagen by 73%- 27%.
It’s unclear whether the delay in approving the expenditure by a few weeks had any effect on union organizing. Mock insisted that she was merely following her legal duty to comply with the federal consent decree requirements and doing her duty as the union's elected Secretary-Treasurer.
However, her delays angered Furman and UAW Chief of Staff Chris Brooks, a native of Chattanooga, who had taken a lead role on the Volkswagen Campaign.
Brooks, who makes $187,000-a-year as the UAW’s Chief of Staff according to federal records, had been angered that Mock refused to reimburse him for purchasing pizzas for Volkswagen workers since Brooks could not present a receipt.
Brooks was also upset that he was not approved by Mock for an enhanced corporate credit card that would have allowed him to charge up to $12,000 a month without union pre-approval. However, Brook’s position was not listed in federal guidelines as one of the positions eligible for the enhanced corporate credit card.
Both Brooks and Furman had garnered a reputation as “hatchet men” in the labor movement, willing to smear union dissidents. Court documents filed in Pittsburgh revealed that Brooks had been involved in an attempt to smear sexual assault whistleblowers while employed by the NewsGuild in 2020.
Emails, text messages, and sworn statements obtained by the federal monitor show that Furman and Brooks took a lead role in drafting the Special Compliance Report to oust Mock. However, given the controversial nature of both Brooks and Furman, who are white, Fain got Region 1A Director Laura Dickerson, a Black woman, to present the report at the International Executive Board meeting as an investigation that she personally undertook.
Fain Attempted to Hide Role in Mock’s Ouster from UAW Members
The UAW’s federal monitor, Neil Barofsky, found that the UAW President, Shawn Fain, intentionally tried to mislead the UAW’s rank-and-file about who authored the report.
“As further evidence of retaliatory intent, Fain made statements to the Monitor that confirmed his intent to deliberately conceal his commanding role in the effort to remove Mock’s departmental responsibilities,” wrote UAW’s federal monitor Neil Barofsky in court documents filed in federal court in Michigan yesterday.
Further attempting to conceal what occurred, the UAW refused to release the minutes of the executive board meeting to the rank-and-file as required by the UAW’s constitution.
In addition, for more than a year, the UAW refused to release documents to the federal monitor relating to Mock’s dismissal. Instead, Brooks and Furman went on the attack against UAW federal Monitor Neil Barofsky, who had won praise from progressives for taking on the Obama Administration from the left in his role as the Special Inspector General of the bailout program TARP.
However, Ryan Grim of Drop Site News, a publication run by UAW Communications Director Jonah Furman’s wife, Nausicca Renner, ran a piece claiming that Barofsky was a “secret Zionist and that his investigation of the UAW was retaliatory for their union’s support of a ceasefire in Gaza.”
The story relied on one anonymous source, who claimed that Barofsky had berated Fain over the UAW’s support for a ceasefire in Gaza. Barofsky, who was honored by the World Jewish Congress for winning back money for Holocaust survivors stolen by Credit Suisse, has publicly denied that he is a Zionist.
However, as evidence of Barofsky’s Zionist connection, Drop Site News pointed to a legal threat against the UAW from the ZIonist group ADL (Anti-Defamation League) that was initially sent to Barofsky, which Barofsky merely forwarded to the UAW. Labor law experts, including one anti-Zionist, said that Barofsky had fulfilled his legal duty as federal monitor by simply forwarding on the threat.
“I think forwarding a letter from the ADL out of concern that the union risked violating the anti-BDS law (leaving questions of constitutionality to one side) arguably fell within the monitor’s legal-ethical duty,” University of St. Louis labor law professor Mike Duff, an anti-Zionist, told Payday Report in August of 2024.
Nowhere in his story did Ryan Grim mention that his site’s editor was married to the UAW’s Communications Director Jonah Furman. Nor did Grim explain the nature of the charges brought by Mock against Fain, claiming that the Barofsky’s investigation was merely a Zionist witch hunt without merit.
When pressed on his wife’s publication role in smearing the UAW federal monitor, Furman refused to comment.
While the smears against Barofsky stuck, the monitor’s report validates the questions raised by Barofsky about whether or not Mock was demoted due to her refusal to approve no-bid contracts to DC political consultants in violation of the federal consent decree.
"The report released today by the court-appointed independent monitor confirms what I have said all along: There was no justification for action taken last year to remove me from positions I held on behalf of UAW members," Mock said in a statement. "I was elected on a reform slate because our members want a fresh start from the previous scandals and bad practices, which took money out of our members’ pockets. We need to operate with full transparency, to restore the UAW’s reputation as a strong union that fights every day for our members."
Barofsky has asked the UAW to reinstate Mock to her previous roles including as one of the only Black women on the AFL-CIO’s Executive Board.
“The Monitor’s investigation found that Secretary-Treasurer Mock was falsely accused of misconduct, and that therefore there was no basis for removing departments from her oversight or reassigning her board positions. The Monitor’s investigation further found that President Fain acted with illegitimate and retaliatory intent when he removed Mock’s departments and board assignments,” wrote Barofsky. “For these reasons, Fain’s actions should be immediately reversed, with each of Mock’s departments and assignments reinstated.”
Barofsky also stated that he would not yet bring charges against Fain, but may in the future.
“Due to delays in that investigation caused by the Union, the Monitor is still in the process of investigating those allegations, including but not limited to claims made by Vice President Boyer that Fain also retaliated against him by removing the Stellantis Department from his oversight,” wrote Barofsky.
