A federal judge is ordering the United Auto Workers’ court-appointed monitor to divulge more details on objections to the Detroit-based union’s first direct election of international leaders.
New UAW President Shawn Fain in March beat incumbent Ray Curry with 50.2% of the vote. More than 400 votes separated them once the nearly 140,000 ballots were tallied after weeks of delays in determining an official winner because the results were too close to call in the runoff race. The monitor, New York attorney Neil Barofsky, officially certified the results in his seventh report filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.
In it, he noted he had resolved all of the protests he had received about the results, but that some of the protesters have appealed or still have time to appeal to the U.S. Labor Department under Title IV of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act.
In response, Judge David Lawson has ordered Barofsky to provide a breakdown of each of the complaints the monitor received objecting to the election, the monitor’s response and whether they were appealed to the Labor Department.
The Curry Solidarity Team campaign previously stated it had filed a protest with the monitor in the election over accusations around campaign finance, candidate eligibility and other objections. Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks Inc. worker in Pennsylvania who had run for president last fall, in March had filed a protest with the Labor Department because of the election’s low turnout and allegations of conflicts of interest.
bnoble@detroitnews.com
Twitter: @BreanaCNoble