Bible-quoting, tough-talking Shawn Fain on Wednesday scored his first big victory against the Detroit Three through a tentative labor deal with Ford. But the jury is out on whether his aggressive bargaining tactics have soured worker relations with the automakers for a long time.
Six weeks into escalating strikes and heated rhetoric, the United Auto Workers (UAW) president extracted a record 25% wage hike for some 57,000 Ford Motor workers in a tentative deal.
Fain, representing nearly 150,000 auto workers in one of the biggest labor strikes in decades, upended tradition by taking simultaneous action against all three automakers — a bolder, riskier path than his predecessors.