NEWS ALERT!
In approximately one and a half hours, at 6 PM US Eastern Standard Time (11:00 UTC), Will Lehman will participate in a debate of the candidates running for president of the UAW (United Auto Workers union).
All workers and youth are invited to view what promises to be an exciting and important event which should be available to access HERE.
It will be the one opportunity to hear every candidate side by side and judge where each stands.
More info is available at Will Lehman's campaign website.
For reference:
- Shawn Fain (Incumbent International President)
- Rich Boyer (UAW Vice President and Stellantis Department Head)
- Tricia Geiger (UAW International Servicing Representative)
- Brian Keller (Stellantis worker)
- Will Lehman (Mack Trucks worker and Socialist)!
- Greg Mooney (General Dynamics Land Systems worker)
Moderator: Independent labor journalist Steven Greenhouse
WHO IS WILL LEHMAN?
Will Lehman's Road to a Socialist Campaign for UAW President
Here's how a Mack Trucks assembly line worker from Macungie, Pennsylvania went from turning wrenches on the shop floor to running for president of one of the biggest unions in the country on an openly socialist program.
Hired at Mack Trucks (Around 2017)
Will Lehman got hired at the Mack Trucks plant in Macungie, Pennsylvania, a facility that builds heavy-duty trucks. He was a regular guy on the line not a lawyer, not a politician, not a union staffer. Just a worker who showed up every day, did his job, and saw up close what was happening to his coworkers: wages getting eaten up by inflation, speedup on the line, mandatory overtime that left people with no life outside the plant, and a union that seemed to work more for the company than for the people paying dues.
The COVID Pandemic and the Mack Workers Rank-and-File Committee (2020–2021)
When COVID hit, the Mack plant didn't shut down. The company and the UAW kept the line moving while the virus spread through the workforce. Lehman and other workers started organizing not through the union bureaucracy, which was doing nothing, but by building the Mack Workers Rank-and-File Committee. They put out statements demanding real safety protections. They called out the company and the union for sacrificing workers' lives for production quotas.
In December 2021, a Mack worker named William Domitrovitsch Jr. a man with an elderly parent and a young child — died of COVID after catching it at the plant. The company and the UAW kept operations going like nothing happened. The rank-and-file committee called it what it was: the company and the union putting profits over workers' lives.
This was the kind of experience that made Lehman understand that the union apparatus wasn't just useless it was actively working against the people it claimed to represent.
Calling Out Biden at the Plant Gate (July 2021)
In July 2021, President Joe Biden came to the Mack Trucks plant for a photo op — the classic politician move of standing in front of workers while doing nothing for them. Lehman responded publicly, calling Biden's visit "both a show of force against workers at the company and an effort to stir up competition against our working class brothers and sisters in other countries." He wasn't buying the act.
This was an early sign of something that would become central to his politics: the refusal to put any faith in the Democratic Party or any capitalist politician, no matter what they claimed.
Supporting the Volvo Trucks Strike (2021)
In 2021, Volvo Trucks workers in Dublin, Virginia — also UAW members — went on strike for three months against a rotten contract. They built their own rank-and-file committee to lead the fight. The Volvo workers reached out to Mack workers for solidarity, and Lehman and the Mack committee answered. They understood that workers at different plants, even different companies, are fighting the same enemy. The Volvo strike was a lesson in what workers can do when they organize themselves, outside the control of the bureaucracy.
First Campaign for UAW President (2022)
In the summer of 2022, the UAW was holding its first direct election for top officers in over 70 years forced by a federal corruption investigation that had sent more than a dozen top UAW officials to prison for embezzlement and taking bribes from the auto companies. Lehman, then 34 years old, decided to run.
He sent a letter to tens of thousands of UAW members that pulled no punches. He called the UAW "a union in name only." He pointed out that the 15 top officers pulled in over $3 million a year combined while workers were struggling to afford gas to get to work. He called for abolishing the bureaucracy and transferring power to rank-and-file committees on the shop floor. And he said it plainly: "I am a socialist."
The WSWS endorsed his campaign as "a new point of departure for the working class."
He got on the ballot, campaigned at auto plants across the country — Ford, Stellantis, GM, Volvo, and his home plant at Mack and won nearly 5,000 votes, close to 5% of the ballots cast. That might not sound like a lot, but it happened under massive voter suppression by the union apparatus. Out of 1.1 million eligible voters, only about 104,000 even got to cast a ballot the lowest turnout for any national union election in American history. The bureaucracy made sure most workers never even knew an election was happening.
The 2023 Contract Fight and the Mack Trucks Strike
In 2023, the Big Three contract negotiations were coming up, and UAW President Shawn Fain was putting on a show — "Stand Up Strike" theatrics, Facebook Live streams, tough talk. But Lehman saw through it. In September 2023, he wrote an open letter warning that Fain's strategy of keeping most workers on the job while a few plants struck was a setup for a sellout. He called for all-out strikes, rank-and-file committees in every plant, and international unity with workers in Canada and Mexico.
Then came the Mack Trucks contract. Fain endorsed a deal that included sub-inflation raises, no cost-of-living protection, continued two-tier wages, and a longer workday. Lehman and the Mack Workers Rank-and-File Committee led the fight against it. Workers voted it down overwhelmingly and walked out on October 9, 2023 — nearly 4,000 of them.
While they were on strike, Lehman went to the picket lines at the Toledo Jeep plant to talk to Big Three workers. He told them, "What Fain tried to ram through at Mack is a warning to workers." He argued that the strike fund was workers' money and should be used to support an all-out fight, not hoarded by the bureaucracy. He raised the need for a shorter workweek with no loss of pay, and said that if the companies couldn't provide that, it raised the need for public ownership of the industry under workers' control.
Fain flew down to Pennsylvania to try to put out the fire. At a local meeting, Mack workers challenged him to his face. Fain's response? He claimed he didn't really know much about the contract he had publicly endorsed.
The Legal Fight (2024)
After the 2022 election, Lehman didn't just walk away. He filed legal challenges over the massive voter suppression that had kept turnout at rock bottom. In June 2024, a federal judge ruled in his favor, finding that the Biden administration's Department of Labor had acted "arbitrarily and capriciously" in dismissing his complaints. Bloomberg Law called it a "rare rebuke" of the Labor Department. Both the Biden and Trump administrations then sanctioned the illegitimate vote anyway showing once again that both parties protect the union bureaucracy, not the workers.
The 2026 Campaign and Convention Nomination
In February 2026, Lehman — now 38 — announced he was running again. His program had four main planks: abolish the dictatorship of the bureaucracy and build rank-and-file committees, end the UAW's collaboration with the corporations, reject nationalism and fight for international workers' unity, and mobilize the union's power to defend democratic rights and oppose war. He made clear he wasn't running to get a cushy office at Solidarity House — he'd stay on the shop floor.
In June 2026, at the UAW Constitutional Convention in Detroit, Lehman was officially nominated for president by two delegates the maximum allowed. One was a Lockheed Martin worker from Florida; the other was a Blue Cross Blue Shield worker from Michigan. In his acceptance statement, Lehman said the campaign was about "building a genuine rank-and-file movement, a movement that turns every factory into a citadel of resistance."
The Death Threat (July 2026)
On July 16, 2026, a high-ranking UAW official named Raymond L. Jensen Jr. — an organizer on the UAW staff, former assistant director of Region 9 (Lehman's own region), pulling in about $202,000 a year and a public supporter of Shawn Fain posted an AI-generated image on Lehman's campaign Facebook page. It showed Lehman bound with rope, gagged, blood running from his mouth, with a masked man aiming an automatic rifle at his back.
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees called it what it was: a death threat from the apparatus against a certified candidate for union president. Workers across the US, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and Britain have condemned the threat. Lehman's response was direct: if a threat like this can be made openly against a candidate for the union's highest office, then no worker who challenges the bureaucracy in their own local is safe.
What This Journey Means
Will Lehman's path isn't the story of a guy climbing a career ladder. He didn't go to law school, didn't work his way up through the union staff, didn't get groomed by the Democratic Party. He's a Mack Trucks worker who looked at what was happening to himself and the people around him, figured out that the union bureaucracy was the main obstacle to fighting back, and decided to do something about it.
His campaign is built on a simple idea that used to be common sense in the labor movement: the union belongs to the workers, not the officials. The power is on the shop floor, not in some headquarters in Detroit. And you can't win against multinational corporations by thinking like a nationalist you have to unite with workers in other countries who work for the same companies.
Will calls himself a socialist because he's concluded that as long as a handful of billionaires own the factories, the hospitals, and the banks, working people will always get the short end of the stick. The only way out is for the working class to take democratic control of the economy and run it for human need instead of private profit. That's what he's fighting for not just a better contract, but a different kind of society.
[Info assistance provided by Socialism AI.]
