A blue-collar worker from the Ford Motor Co.’s Chicago Assembly plant and a UAW activist has won a seat in the Indiana State Senate, easily beating his Republican opponent in the district which includes the industrialized belt along the southern edge of Lake Michigan next to the far south side of Chicago.
Union activist Scott Houldieson checks out his seat on the floor of the Indiana state senate.
Scott Houldieson, 65, of Highland, Indiana, an electrician and an electrician employed at Ford’s Chicago assembly plant, defeated Republican Trevor G. DeVries, taking 57% of the vote in the contest for the open seat In the Indiana state legislature.
Lake County has long-been considered a Democratic stronghold even as the GOP has tried in recent elections to win over blue-collar voters in an area scarred by deindustrialization. During his campaign, Houldieson leaned on his union roots to win the seat, gaining endorsements from the Indiana AFL-CIO, the United Steel Workers and teachers union as well.
Back to work at Ford
In a telephone interview after the election, Houldieson said he is planning to return this week to his job as an electrician at the Ford’s Chicago Assembly on the far South Side near the Illinois-Indiana border.
“I am planning to go back to work,” said Houldieson, and planning to use a provision in the UAW-Ford labor contract, allowing workers to take time off for public service. “I will be sworn in on Nov. 17,” noting Democrats picked up five seats in the Nov. 3 election.
UAW President Shawn Fain got out the union vote for Democrats in the midterm election.
He added he plans to focuson labor issues once he reaches Indianapolis such as helping the 800 locked out workers at the BP Refinery
“Scott is a Ford worker, who was instrumental in reforming the UAW, winning direct elections in the union, and electing Shawn Fain,” Jonah Furman, a top aide to Fain and former member of Senator Bernie Sanders, said on Facebook. “It is the best working-class story of the night,” he added after the “Blue Wave” election.
After attending Purdue Calumet, Houldieson was hired at the Ford Assembly on the far-south side of Chicago near the border with Indiana in 1989 and joined UAW Local 551 in 1989. After working on the assembly line, Houldieson began an electrician apprenticeship in 1994. He also emerged as a union activist, serving as the editor of the local union newspaper for over a decade and taking on other roles including Financial Secretary, Vice President, and Chairperson of the Trustees, a position he was recently elected to in 2025.
Houldieson played big role in UAW reform
The UAW flexed its muscle on the national stage during the midterm elections.
As an elected delegate to the UAW’s quadrennial bargaining and constitution conventions, Houldieson emerged as leaders of the reform movement inside the union, which grew after a wide-ranging scandal over the misuse of union funds and influence in which a dozen UAW officers and officials, including two past Presidents, were sentenced to prison.
He was a co-founder and chaired Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), which campaigned successfully for a one-member-one vote election system, allowing UAW members to vote for their top officers for the first time since the union was organized in the 1930s.
The change led to the 2023 election of a leadership slate led by UAW President Shawn, who easily won re-election in a union-wide election in October. “He really didn’t really need my help,” said Houldieson, who originally played a pivotal role in knitting together an alliance of blue-collar workers and graduate students that narrowly won the election, installing Fain as UAW President in spring 2023.
A slew of UAW-endorsed candidates, like Sherrod Brown in Ohio, won last week.
Houldieson, who has six children and 13 grandchildren, also helped found the Progressive Democrats of the American Calumet Region Chapter in 2017.
Election in Indiana fit with UAW’s new political agenda
Fain, an Indiana native familiar with the politics of the Indiana legislature, was a booster of Houldieson’s campaign. “Working class people deserve better,” according to Fain, who has said one way to make elected officials more sensitive to working-class issues is to elect more working -class representatives. “We expect the Democratic Party to get back to their roots. Some of those Democrats forgot about that over the years. … Working class people are sending a message tonight that they are fed up with struggling to afford to live”
At least two other Democrats swept into office by blue tsunami on Election Day have deep ties to organized labor — Brian Poindexter, a union ironworker, who won a Congressional seat outside Cleveland in Ohio and Troy Jackson, a union longer who defeated Susan Collins in a contest for one of Maine’s two seats in the U.S Senate.
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