Will Lehman at the UAW bargaining convention, March 27, 2023
On Thursday, June 19, Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate in the 2022 United Auto Workers (UAW) presidential election, filed a lawsuit in federal court against the US Department of Labor (DOL). Lehman’s suit asserts that the DOL refused to comply with a June 2024 court order, which held that the DOL had acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner when it rejected Lehman’s earlier complaint over voter suppression in the 2022-2023 UAW elections.
In his 2024 order, Federal Judge David Lawson had stated that the DOL’s rejection of the bulk of Lehman’s claims as “untimely” was “pedantry,” saying their justification was “irrational and grounded in an arbitrary and capricious construction of the Election Rules that is not supported by their plain text or the prevailing case law.” Lawson had granted in part Lehman’s motion for judgment on the pleadings and remanded the complaint to the Secretary of Labor “for further proceedings, which, at a minimum, must consist of the production of a supplemental statement of reasons.”
Nearly a year after the court order, the DOL—under both the Biden and Trump administrations—has taken no action. Lehman’s new suit, filed Thursday in the Eastern District of Michigan, states that this constitutes a “de facto refusal to act on [his] complaint.”
The delay, the suit adds, “effectively leaves a rank-and-file autoworker like Lehman with no meaningful remedy for alleged election violations,” despite well-established legal principles that time is “axiomatically of the essence” in election-related matters.
Lehman’s lawsuit comes amid an escalating crisis of the UAW apparatus and the administration of UAW President Shawn Fain. It was filed the same week as a scathing 93-page report issued by the court-appointed UAW Monitor, attorney Neil Barofsky, which concludes Fain violated the union’s own ethics guidelines by orchestrating a “cloaked” and improper campaign to strip duties from Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock. According to the report, Mock was targeted for opposing questionable spending and contracts involving Fain’s close aides.
The picture of Fain which emerges in the Monitor’s report is of a bureaucratic thug, with allegations that he threatened to “slit the f***ing throats” of anyone who challenged his inner circle. Despite this, the monitor stated that it was deferring bringing charges against Fain at this time, noting that there were other open investigations into Fain’s alleged retaliations against former top lieutenants.
The latest revelations further vindicate the warnings in 2022 by Lehman, who warned that Fain was a product of the UAW bureaucracy, who would work just as much as his corrupt predecessors to enforce the will of the corporations through anti-democratic methods.
