A court-appointed monitor disclosed on Monday that he was investigating accusations that the president of the United Automobile Workers union retaliated against a vice president for resisting actions that would have benefited the president’s domestic partner and her sister.
The monitor made the disclosure in a court filing seeking access to internal union documents as part of an investigation that began in February into potential financial misconduct.
Since then, the monitor and the union have clashed over how much access the monitor should have to union documents, and the pace at which the union has produced them. In Monday’s filing, the monitor, Neil Barofsky, sought an order granting him extensive access.
The union declined to comment.
The monitor was appointed as part of a 2021 consent decree that ended a federal corruption case against the union. It concerned 11 top officials who were convicted of felonies, including two former U.A.W. presidents.
The U.A.W.’s current president, Shawn Fain, was an obscure union official before winning the top job in March 2023 on a platform of reforming the union, getting tough with large U.S. automakers and organizing nonunion companies.
Under Mr. Fain, the union waged a set of six-week-long strikes last year that won members substantial wage and benefit increases. The union then capitalized on the momentum of the strike by unionizing a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., this April — the first foreign-owned plant in the South to be unionized — before losing another high-profile election in May at two Mercedes plants in Alabama.
Mr. Barofsky’s investigation initially looked into accusations involving Mr. Fain and the union’s second-ranking official, its secretary-treasurer Margaret Mock.
A union official accused Ms. Mock of denying legitimate requests for money by members of the union’s board. After the board voted to rein in her authority, Ms. Mock accused Mr. Fain of retaliating for her refusal to authorize inappropriate spending.
Mr. Barofsky’s investigation has since expanded to include accusations that a regional director embezzled union funds, and the accusation involving Mr. Fain and his partner.
According to Monday’s filing, Mr. Fain stripped a vice president of his authority to oversee the union’s Stellantis department in late May, citing “dereliction of duty.” After that, the monitor received complaints from other union officials that Mr. Fain had taken the action in retaliation for the vice president’s refusal to go along with actions that would have benefited Mr. Fain’s partner and her sister.
Much of the back and forth between the union and the monitor has focused on access to internal documents. Mr. Barofsky says the union has produced only a tiny fraction of the documents he requested by early April, more than a month into the investigation.
Thereafter, Mr. Barofsky proposed that the union expedite the process by searching its records for key terms and handing over any document that contained them. The union argued that the terms would require it to hand over more than 200,000 documents. The monitor then revised the terms in such a way that they would produce about 116,00 documents, of which he said the union has produced only about 70,000.
In a filing of its own last week, the union argued that Mr. Barofksy had made “a massively broad electronic search request that necessarily encompasses a significant amount of documents that are irrelevant to the investigation.”
The union added that the search terms pulled in “the most highly sensitive privileged and collective bargaining strategy documents that the union holds” even when they had no bearing on the accusations.
The back and forth over the documents is not the first point of contention between the union and the monitor. Late last year, after the U.A.W. released a statement calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, Mr. Barofsky called Mr. Fain to discuss the union’s statement in a personal capacity, according to a letter subsequently sent to Mr. Barofsky by a lawyer for the union.
In the letter, Benjamin Dictor, the union lawyer, said that Mr. Barofsky’s call to Mr. Fain “on an issue so blatantly outside of the monitor’s jurisdiction was inappropriate as your office holds disproportionate power over the U.A.W.”
A spokesperson for Mr. Barofsky said: “This false account is offensive and an obvious attempt to distract attention from the most recent report. We have adhered to standard norms of a monitorship in referring complaints to union leadership.”