{"id":68271,"date":"2026-08-22T02:20:40","date_gmt":"2026-08-22T02:20:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/68271\/"},"modified":"2026-08-22T02:20:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-22T02:20:40","slug":"family-and-coworkers-to-hold-memorial-service-for-james-brasher-third-stellantis-worker-killed-under-uaw-2023-sellout-contract","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/68271\/","title":{"rendered":"Family and coworkers to hold memorial service for James Brasher, third Stellantis worker killed under UAW 2023 sellout contract"},"content":{"rendered":"

James and Karyn Brasher [Photo: Gofundme.org ]<\/p>\n

Family, friends and coworkers will gather Saturday at the Kaul Funeral Home in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, to memorialize James Brasher, the 57-year-old Stellantis worker killed on the job August 1 at the company\u2019s Mopar Parts Distribution Center in Center Line.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Brasher, a member of United Auto Workers Local 1248 with more than 30 years seniority, was discarding decommissioned office furniture and equipment through a roll-up door on the second floor of the building when he fell 25 feet into a trash dumpster below. Center Line Public Safety Director Paul Myszenski said it appeared Brasher was killed instantly from head injuries.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Neither the company, the UAW nor the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration (MIOSHA) have released any further information of the workplace fatality.<\/p>\n

James leaves behind a wife, Karyn, a daughter, Sabrina, his mother, Tina-Marie and his brother, Erik, according to an obituary on the funeral home\u2019s website. It also noted that \u201cJim devoted 33 years of his life to his job at Stellantis, formerly Chrysler\/FCA, where he worked until the day of his passing. He was a member of UAW Local 1248 and was an incredibly hard worker who was well-respected by the coworkers and friends he came to know over more than three decades. Many of those relationships grew far beyond the workplace into lasting friendships.\u201d<\/p>\n

A GoFundMe page organized by a family friend describes Brasher as \u201cthe kind of person who made this world better simply by being in it. If someone needed help, he was there. He would give you the shirt off his back without a second thought.\u201d The fundraiser was established to support Brasher\u2019s wife Karyn, who the site notes is facing \u201can incredibly serious medical battle\u201d and \u201ca long and difficult road ahead that will require extensive treatment, recovery, and ongoing care.\u201d Donations are being raised for funeral expenses, lost income, medical bills, gaps in insurance coverage: the realities that confront the families of the more than 5,000 workers killed on the job in the United States every year.<\/p>\n

Brasher was the third Stellantis worker and fourth Detroit Three autoworker killed since the UAW bureaucracy, headed by President Shawn Fain and Vice President Richard Boyer, rammed through the sellout 2023 contract that they hailed as \u201chistoric.\u201d<\/p>\n

The tragedy is the direct outcome of the deal, which sanctioned the closure of 19 US facilities, including half of all Stellantis parts distribution centers. The Center Line building\u2014once the national headquarters of Mopar\u2014was sold in January 2025 and is being leased back until the opening of a $388 million automated Detroit Mega Hub in 2027. The new Amazon-style facility near the Detroit Metropolitan Airport will eliminate hundreds of jobs through automation. Brasher was dumping discarded furniture and equipment from one of the 10 PDC facilities already condemned to close. In other words, he was cleaning out the remains of a parts depot the UAW had signed away.<\/p>\n

Mopar world headquarters was closed as result of the 2023 UAW-Stellantis contract<\/p>\n

The agreement also sanctioned the slashing of thousands of jobs, long hours of forced overtime and speed up, which have created deadly conditions in the plants. <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

On August 21, 2024\u2014two years ago to the day before Saturday\u2019s memorial service\u2014Antonio Gaston, a 53-year-old father of four, was crushed to death at the Stellantis Toledo Assembly Complex when he was caught under a vehicle moving on the assembly line. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined Stellantis $16,000 for \u201cserious violations,\u201d including the failure to ensure that pinch points on the chassis delivery conveyor were properly guarded. Stellantis challenged the fine and it was reduced to $11,000.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Backside of abandoned Mopar headquarters in Center Line, Michigan<\/p>\n

On April 7, 2025, Ronald Adams Sr., a 63-year-old machine repairman known to his coworkers as \u201cthe protector of the plant,\u201d was crushed to death at the Stellantis Dundee Engine Complex when an overhead gantry crane suddenly activated during maintenance. Sixteen months later, neither the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration (MIOSHA), nor Stellantis, nor the UAW has released a single finding. In more than a year months since her husband\u2019s death, Adams\u2019s widow, Shamenia Stewart-Adams, has received not one letter, not one call, not one explanation. <\/p>\n

The only real investigation<\/a> into Adams\u2019s death was conducted by the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). Drawing on dozens of worker interviews, the IWA-RFC found that management, with UAW collaboration, had distributed \u201ccheater keys\u201d that bypassed lockout\/tagout protections that would have prevented the gantry from operating. The retooling of the factory was already more than a year behind schedule and the company was rushing to launch a new line of engines. <\/p>\n

According to a lawsuit filed by Stewart-Adams, equipment safety guards were also removed or never properly installed including: hard-wired electronic sensor interlocks on machine doors, covers and hatches; physical safe zone limit switches; safety relays designed to fail safe and light curtains or area scanners to detect personnel in hazardous areas. <\/p>\n

Ford and GM workers have also been victims.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On March 16, 2026, Gregory Knopf, a 64-year-old pipefitter and father of three at Ford\u2019s Sharonville Transmission Plant in Ohio, was killed when a press machine activated during routine maintenance \u2014 a virtual replay of Adams\u2019s death.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, on August 13, a worker at the GM Flint Assembly Plant who had just signed her retirement papers was severely injured<\/a> when a forklift backed over her, reportedly severing one leg and badly mangling the other. Workers were told to keep the line moving as she lay bleeding on the floor.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo Common Denominator\u201d<\/p>\n

Faced with this mounting death toll, Fain and Boyer issued a joint statement expressing condolences and saying, the \u201cUAW will investigate and demand details from the company of exactly how this tragedy occurred to ensure this kind of accident never happens again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Questions about this article? Ask Socialism AI<\/p>\n

But such an investigation, if it happens at all, will only be another whitewash of corporate management and the UAW apparatus. <\/p>\n

In recent comments to the\u00a0Detroit News, UAW Stellantis Department Director Richard Boyer said the union previously promised to look into the Gaston and Adams cases, \u201cthough it has not released findings in those cases, and Boyer said he wasn\u2019t sure what their status was.\u201d Boyer then said there did not appear to be a \u201ccommon denominator\u201d tying the three Stellantis deaths together.<\/p>\n

This is a blatant cover-up. The common denominator is immediately apparent to any worker on the shop floor: speed-up, job cuts, cost-cutting, the subordination of safety to production targets, and the collusion of a UAW bureaucracy that functions as an arm of corporate management.<\/p>\n

It is the \u201cemergency status\u201d provision in the 2023 contract that forces workers onto nine-to-ten-hour shifts, six to seven days a week. It is the systematic bypassing of lockout\/tagout protections documented by the IWA-RFC. It is the closure of facilities and the concentration of work onto fewer and fewer workers. <\/p>\n

Safety sign at employee entrance of now shuttered Mopar headquarters<\/p>\n

At the July 30 UAW presidential candidate debate, Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist running against Fain, alone raised the toll of dead workers. \u201cEvery year in this country, more than 5,000 workers die on the job because safety is subordinated to profit,\u201d Lehman said. \u201cIn our plants, Antonio Gaston, Ronald Adams Sr., Gregory Knopf were crushed to death under the 2023 contract that this leadership called \u2018historic.\u2019\u201d Two days later, James Brasher was dead.<\/p>\n

In a statement<\/a> following Brasher\u2019s death, Lehman declared that workers must \u201ctake health and safety into our own hands\u201d by forming rank-and-file committees with the power to shut down production until conditions are safe. <\/p>\n

Brasher\u2019s family and co-workers deserve the truth. That will not come from Stellantis, from MIOSHA, or from a UAW bureaucracy that has made itself the personnel department of the auto companies. It will come only when rank-and-file workers, organized in committees under their own democratic control, take the fight for safety into their own hands\u2014and wage a political struggle against the capitalist system that sacrifices human life to corporate profit every single day.<\/p>\n

I want to discuss joining or building an autoworkers rank-and-file committee:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"James and Karyn Brasher [Photo: Gofundme.org ] Family, friends and coworkers will gather Saturday at the Kaul Funeral…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":68272,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13129],"tags":[12112],"class_list":["post-68271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-stellantis","tag-stellantis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}