The launch of Will Lehman’s campaign for president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) is a political event of major significance for the entire working class. Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker, is running to organize a rebellion of the rank and file against a parasitic bureaucracy that has transformed the UAW into an instrument of management and the state.
Lehman’s platform centers on transferring power from the apparatus to workers on the shop floor through a network of rank-and-file committees, ending corporatist collaboration, opposing nationalist poison that pits workers against each other across borders, and mobilizing workers’ industrial power in defense of democratic rights and against war.
In a particularly revealing statement posted on X, Honda Wang, a member of the DSA’s National Labor Commission Steering Committee, wrote, responding to Lehman’s campaign video: “stop falling for these insane union busting weirdos … they send people to picket lines to tell workers to stop paying dues, decertify from their union, and form committees with their party instead … seems like pretty clear union-busting behavior to me.”
Ignoring all the issues Lehman raises—including fighting for wages that restore past losses, a zero-layoff policy, company-paid healthcare, and the 30-hour week with no loss of pay; uniting workers across borders against nationalist chauvinism; and mobilizing workers’ industrial power to defend democratic rights and oppose war—Wang fixates on the question of dues. This is telling, because it goes to what is, for the union apparatus, the heart of the matter: the income of the bureaucracy.
With the installation of Shawn Fain in 2023, in an election characterized by systematic voter suppression, the DSA and its periphery were brought directly into the top echelons of the UAW apparatus. The DSA and Labor Notes both backed Fain and denounced Will Lehman’s campaign, opposing his call for rank-and-file committees and the transfer of power to the shop floor while promoting the fraud that Fain would be a “reformer”—a lie that has been comprehensively exposed over the past three years.
They have been, and remain, well compensated for their services as advisers and functionaries of the bureaucracy. Fain’s chief of staff, Chris Brooks—a DSA member and former Labor Notes writer—took home $211,968 in 2024, while his assistant, Jonah Furman, also a Labor Notes alum, made $175,318.
Wang’s charge of “union busting” is the standard reflex of a privileged apparatus confronted with a rank-and-file challenge. For Wang and the forces he represents, the union is the apparatus. Workers are merely objects to be managed. That is why he equates the independent organization of workers to assert democratic control—over negotiations, strikes, communications and even over how their dues are collected and used—with “union busting.”