The central questions confronting the United Auto Workers (UAW) are no mystery: Can the union organize the nonunion auto industry, particularly across the South? Can it bargain contracts that reverse decades of concessions? Can it rebuild the kind of shop-floor power that once made the UAW the country’s most influential industrial union? Those were the questions that propelled Shawn Fain and the Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) reform caucus into office in 2023, and they remain the standard by which the administration will ultimately be judged.

Over the past two years, however, another conflict has increasingly intruded on that project. It is a growing fight over the role of the federal monitor installed after the UAW’s corruption scandals under previous union leadership — and whether an office created to investigate corruption has gradually assumed a much broader place in the internal political life of one of the country’s most important unions.

Until late June, much of that conflict had played out inside the union itself. Those at the center of those disputes said little publicly, as criticizing the federal monitor risked becoming part of the record assembled by the very office whose authority they increasingly questioned.