UAW President Shawn Fain on Mexican wages and trade tariffs, Digi Mart USA News (Washington): United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain said Wednesday that low wages in Mexico and China are among the main trade problems facing the United States, while defending “strategic tariffs” to protect domestic companies.
Speaking at a press conference following the Democratic victory in Tuesday’s midterm elections, Fain defended Mexican workers and blamed large companies for exploiting wage differences. The union leader said that “Canada is not the problem,” because wages there are decent and living standards remain good.
However, he warned that wage gaps with countries like Mexico and China, “where they pay poverty wages,” are driving a race to the bottom in working conditions that harms American workers. “We don’t want to punish workers in Mexico.
We just want them to have a decent standard of living,” Fain said, adding that “the enemy is greed” of large corporations that exploit wage differences.
Fain said the UAW was one of the first unions to back Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat whom he said shares the union’s position on tariffs. He also recalled that El-Sayed, a physician, has compared the application of tariffs to chemotherapy: it must be administered gradually so as not to kill the patient.
For that reason, the union leader defended the use of “strategic and selective” tariffs, but criticized President Donald Trump’s trade policy for imposing indiscriminate duties without a coherent industrial strategy. Fain expressed hope that Democrats, who will control both chambers of Congress beginning in January, will reach agreements with Trump to “eliminate the stupid tariffs that make no sense” while keeping those that protect American production.
Fain also criticized the political influence of billionaires, citing Elon Musk, whom he said could spend more than $400 million on an election and control space technologies capable of influencing conflicts such as the war in Ukraine. In his view, this demonstrates that the American system is deeply unbalanced.
