A court-appointed monitor is investigating allegations that United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain retaliated against a vice president who refused to follow orders that would have benefited his partner and sister.
Monitor Neal Barofsky said they were also investigating allegations that the regional director embezzled union funds by “using a UAW corporate credit card to make personal purchases and misappropriating union assets.” Monday submission In the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.
Fain is also accused of retaliating against Treasury Secretary Margaret Mock by stripping her of certain duties for denying or delaying certain expense claims.
“While the allegations above are serious and some may violate federal criminal law, they are merely allegations and the subject of an investigation, and the Monitor has not determined or approved their veracity,” Barofsky wrote.
The Hill has reached out to the UAW for comment.
Barovsky is take on a mission Monitoring As part of a 2021 consent decree, it concluded a federal corruption investigation that examined issues of fraud, misconduct and corruption within the union and convicted 11 senior UAW officials, including two former presidents.
Fain burst onto the national stage months after the UAW elected him president in March 2023 and helped spearhead a historic six-week strike against Ford, General Motors and Stellantis last fall.
The walkout garnered national attention, with lawmakers and President Biden taking to the picket lines to show their support. Fain later endorsed Biden in the next presidential election in January, saying, “He stood up and he showed up.”
The monitor began investigating Mock’s claims in February, according to the filing.
Barofsky and the union have had multiple exchanges about specific documents the monitor requested in February related to Mock’s investigation, but the union provided Barofsky with just 18 documents by the April deadline, according to the filing.
Even after Barofsky provided a list of search terms that generated a list of 216,044 documents, the UAW “did not submit a complete set of its documents,” the complaint states.
The monitors then agreed to revised terms to turn over more than 116,646 documents, but the UAW refused to turn over the documents because it did not have “the authority to review documents protected by attorney-client privilege or related to collective bargaining strategies,” according to the filing.
Barofsky also noted that the UAW has only turned over 1,638 of 10,571 documents related to the vice president’s investigation, and that the watchdog requested documents related to the regional director’s investigation last Wednesday.
In a UAW filing last week, Claimed The consent decree gives the right to review and redact documents to protect attorney-client privilege and “trade secrets.”
The union also said the monitor was requesting documents relating to “very broad search terms,” noting it had voluntarily conducted 30 interviews and already provided more than 750,000 pages of material, calling the monitor’s position “untenable.”
