Shawn Fain: “We Need More Than a Party — We Need a Movement”
UAW president Shawn Fain, speaking at a Center for Working-Class Politics and Jacobin event, emphasized the need for a political program that addresses workers’ most basic issues — and how a broad strike in 2028 could put them front and center.

UAW president Shawn Fain speaks with workers at the Ford Michigan Assembly Plant on July 12, 2023 in Wayne, Michigan. (Bill Pugliano / Getty Images)
United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain recently laid out four priorities he says should form the nucleus of a workers’ political program. And he said that a broad strike in May 2028 is one way to fight for those priorities.
Fain spoke on September 30 at the release of a new report by the Center for Working-Class Politics, Jacobin, and allied groups. The report, titled “Democrats’ Rust Belt Struggles and the Promise of Independent Politics,” is based on a new survey showing that workers in four states battered by decades of mass layoffs — Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin — are eager to see their basic issues addressed in the political arena.
The three thousand people surveyed supported policies that addressed “corporate greed and political corruption while correcting inequities in ways that felt immediate and tangible for working families,” the report found. Respondents included people of all political affiliations and classes, and were representative of the states’ populations.