The United Auto Workers union's late-2023 Gaza cease-fire resolution condemning both Hamas’s October 7th massacre and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza, for which the union demanded a cease-fire, initiated the ancillary but very real conflict currently imperiling the union’s leadership: that between president Shawn Fain and federal monitor Neil Barofsky.
A New York–based attorney with the firm of Jenner & Block, Barofsky served as the special inspector general overseeing the federal bailouts following the financial collapse of 2008, during which time he tangled with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner over the government’s unwillingness to assist homeowners with foreclosures even as it was tending to the needs of big banks. He was also hired by Credit Suisse to oversee its investigation into its own history of assistance to Nazi Germany.
Barofsky was in Switzerland working the Credit Suisse case when he learned of the UAW’s resolution. He almost immediately put in a call to Fain, which he began by noting that he was not calling in his capacity as the union’s monitor. To Fain’s astonishment, he said he was calling about the resolution, and that he happened right then to be with Barack Obama’s former special envoy on antisemitism, who could provide another perspective on issues that the resolution raised. (Barofsky added that he didn’t ask for any particular action to be taken, and apologized if it was perceived otherwise.)
At least, that’s how Barofsky characterized the call when he spoke to the union's international executive board (IEB) on the second day of its February 2024 meeting. Fain said he remembered the call differently: “The first thing you said to me was that you were calling me because you had concerns about my comments and they could be, you knew what I meant, but my comments could be misconstrued as being antisemitic. That’s what you said to me. And when I started explaining to you what I meant by my comment, then your comment was, well, I guess it is antisemitic.” Fain concluded, “For anybody to ever fucking say I’m antisemitic, brother, I’ll fight your ass in front of this building in a heartbeat.”
Barofsky denied calling Fain antisemitic and added that he had “no reason to think that.” But pressed by Fain to reveal more about their phone call, Barofsky told the IEB that “I shared the anecdote about the fact that my kids have been harassed since October 7th with antisemitic language. And, yes, it described that protest with people holding UAW signs chanting hateful comments.”
The whole issue was before the board because Barofsky had passed along a letter to the IEB that he’d received from the Anti-Defamation League, claiming that a resolution on Israel and Palestine from a UAW local of New York–based public defenders was antisemitic. Ben Dictor, the UAW’s attorney, had responded with a letter to Barofsky noting that the UAW had a history of resolutions and actions that many, including UAW members, had found offensive, such as calling for U.S. divestment from apartheid South Africa—and he certainly could have added such UAW efforts as providing crucial support for both the 1963 March on Washington and the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium.
Barofsky insisted he wasn’t demanding that the UAW do something about the letter; he said he had forwarded it because “we took it very seriously, in part because who it was that was making the allegation: the Anti-Defamation League … it is an important civil rights organization in this country.” He added, “Just because I described the allegation as serious, of course, doesn’t mean that I agree with it.” (In recent years, previous ADL leaders such as Abe Foxman have criticized the organization for becoming a mouthpiece for Israel’s right-wing nationalist government; a number of longtime ADL employees have quit for that reason.)
Fain’s response—the gist of which was “I couldn’t give a damn what the ADL says”—underlined his belief that Barofsky’s interventions were about union policies with which he disagreed, and coming as they did from a federal monitor with the power to investigate and recommend prosecution of UAW officials for criminal offenses, was a boundary-crossing extension of the monitor’s mission and power.
JUST ONE WEEK AFTER THE IEB MEETING, Barofsky began an investigation of Fain’s staff for its role in curtailing Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock’s responsibilities and instilling fear into some of the union’s officials and staff. In a report issued in July of 2024, he wrote that Mock’s reassignments “risk diluting the role of the Secretary-Treasurer as a potential independent check on actions that pertain to financial approvals and oversight of expenditures.” In a subsequent report, he wrote that “the Monitor’s investigation found that Mock consistently and strictly applied Union policy, guided by a commitment to accountability in the wake of the UAW’s past financial scandals. Her removal was not the result of dereliction of duty or dishonesty, but rather a consequence of her refusal to grant exceptions to the strict policy restrictions governing the expenditure of Union resources, including to those within Fain’s inner circle.”
The crucial intervention that Mock had made was to delay authorization for the production of picket signs at the outset of the Stand Up Strike, in the belief that there were usable signs in many a local’s basement, even if such signs weren’t emblazoned with the message specific to this strike. For the first week of the strike, accordingly, pickets marched without signs.
The remedy available to Fain was to have the IEB reverse these denials at the February 2024 meeting. The board duly reversed them, and members expressed incredulity that such questions even had to come before them.
Barofsky has the power to recommend that the Justice Department start an investigation of the UAW, something that Donald Trump’s administration would dearly love to do. To forestall that threat, the UAW agreed last December to give back to Mock and Vice President Rich Boyer the authority they had lost over particular departments of the union, and Chris Brooks announced he was resigning as Fain's chief of staff.
