I make many mistakes. But I don’t make the mistake of thinking that leaders have more impact than they do. I don’t make “the leader attribution error.” To the contrary, I repeatedly emphasize the importance of understanding leadership as a system with three equal parts: the leader, the followers, and the contexts.
But, to every rule there are exceptions. Sometimes followers are more important than leaders. Sometimes contexts are more important than either leaders or followers. And sometimes it is leaders who stand out – leaders who are so exceptional that they do explain what happens!
Such is the case with the president of the United Auto Workers union, Shawn Fain. He’s the real deal. A leader who has an outsized impact on everyone and everything around him.
By consensus, the deal that was reached this week by the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the Big Three automakers – General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis – was a “huge” win for the union. And, by consensus, it was also a “big” win for the UAW’s president, Shawn Fain.
Fain won big because of his means – his negotiating strategy was innovative and bold. And he won big because of his ends – his goals were, and are, ambitious and far-reaching.
Fain’s means included:
- Keeping the carmakers consistently off balance. For example, instead of immediately striking big, each of the carmakers in a single stroke, he struck small and sporadically. The Big Three never knew when or where their workers would walk out.
- Being pointedly pugnacious – drawing sharp distinctions between employers and employees. He took on the issue of exorbitant CEO pay as well as the system more generally. “Billionaires,” he said, “in my opinion don’t have a right to exist.”
- Bringing in experts to compensate for where he was inexpert. For instance, he hired a media-savvy assistant who enabled Fain to provide weekly livestream updates and ensure that coverage of the talks, by old media and new, was ubiquitous. Similarly, he brought in a labor lawyer who was instrumental in the UAW’s biggest strategic departure – holding talks with the big three automakers simultaneously instead of sequentially.
Fain’s ends included:
- Snagging the best contract for the UAW since at least the 1960s.
- Securing large pay gains – a 25% pay increase over the next four and a half years – and cost of living increases.
- Guaranteeing the reopening of a 1,350-worker factory in Illinois that Stellantis had shut down earlier this year.
- Reversing concessions the union made during previous downturns, such as lower wage tiers for newer workers.
- Expanding the scope and heft of the labor movement far beyond Detroit.
The last could turn out the most important. We cannot yet know Fain’s enduring impact – including his impact beyond Detroit. What we can know is that his ambitions seemingly have no bounds. Upon securing his record-breaking contract, Fain declared the UAW’s victory “stunning.” And he pointedly invited “unions around the country to align” themselves with his own. “Hey,” Fain said, “strikes work, solidarity works, we’re more unified now than before the strike. I think that’s a powerful argument that unions can take elsewhere.”
Somewhat similarly, experts dismayed by the relentless march of inequity in this country, thought it possible that Fain’s success would have a wider impact. Writing in the New York Times, Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman wrote that “maybe, just maybe, union victories in 2023” – of which the UAW’s was much the most notable – “will prove to be a milestone on the way back to a less unequal nation.”
In achieving his striking success (pun intended), Fain’s followers mattered. They willingly and even eagerly followed a leader who they believed was good. So did the context matter, the larger context within which Fain operated. The UAW benefited from an America that had a tight labor market, inflationary pressure, and a profitable recent run for the auto companies.
But make no mistake about it. Fain proved himself a remarkable leader. Arguably the most outstanding labor leader in this country in decades – and a worthy successor to his eminent predecessor, Walter Reuther. Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers in the 1950s and ‘60s, built the union into one of the most powerful and progressive in American history. While Fain has a long way to go before matching Reuter’s record, for now the incumbent can legitimately claim to be the real deal. A leader who matters.