United Auto Workers (UAW) president Shawn Fain said that his union was “ready to work” with President-elect Donald Trump in an op-ed published on Sunday. 

“For 40 years, the American working class, especially blue-collar manufacturing workers, has been under attack,” Fain wrote in The Washington Post. “Corporate America went on the offensive in the 1980s, shutting down plants and cutting thousands of jobs.”

Since 2016, Trump has made labor policy, immigration, tariffs and working class voters a central part of his campaigning and political platform. However, labor union leaders like Fain have not always supported Trump, with Fain previously endorsing outgoing President Biden and and Vice President Kamala Harris. 

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“Donald Trump took advantage of this bipartisan betrayal in 2016, speaking to workers’ anger and disillusionment,” Fain wrote in his op-ed, headlined, “I’m president of the UAW. We’re ready to work with Trump.” 

“He promised to fix the system, but his renegotiated NAFTA, known as the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), didn’t solve the problem,” Fain continued. “Since it passed, the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico has only increased, and thousands of blue-collar jobs have continued to leave the country.”

Fain endorsed Harris in 2024 during her presidential campaign, saying that the choice for American voters was between putting a “billionaire back in office who stands against everything our union stands for, or we can elect Kamala Harris, who will stand shoulder to shoulder with us in our war on corporate greed.” 

Trump responded harshly to Fain’s comments in his speech on the closing night of the Republican National Convention (RNC).

“And the leader of the United Auto Workers should be fired immediately,” Trump said in July 2024. “And every single autoworker, union and non-union, should be voting for Donald Trump because we’re going to bring back car manufacturing, and we’re going to bring it back fast.”

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“Although we endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential election, we’ve said all along that no matter who is in the White House, our fight remains the same,” Fain wrote in his Sunday op-ed for the D.C. media outlet. “On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to use the six-year renegotiation clause of the USMCA to pursue a ‘much better deal,’ specifically targeting the auto industry. We agree with Trump that the USMCA needs to be fixed.”

Fain argued that despite policy disagreements with Trump, he hopes to “find common ground on overhauling our devastating trade policies and rebuilding U.S. manufacturing.” 

“As Trump himself has put it, ‘free trade’ has been ‘carnage’ for the American working class,” Fain wrote. “The corporate class rigged the deck and dealt American workers a losing hand. It’s time to reshuffle the deck and fix our broken trade deals for workers everywhere. The UAW stands ready to support any politician or administration that takes on corporate greed to do exactly that.”