The United Auto Staff’ overwhelming election victory at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee is giving the union hope that it could actually make broader inroads within the South, the least unionized a part of the nation.
The UAW gained a stunning 73% of the vote at VW after dropping elections in 2014 and 2019. It was the union’s first win in a Southern meeting plant owned by a overseas automaker.
Union President Shawn Fain stated the pundits all instructed him that the UAW couldn’t win within the South.
“But you all said, ‘Watch this,’ ” he instructed a cheering group of VW organizers at a union corridor in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Friday evening, when the UAW victory was clear. “You guys are leading the way. We’re going to carry this fight on to Mercedes and everywhere else.”
Nevertheless, the UAW is prone to face a harder take a look at because it tries to symbolize employees at two Mercedes-Benz plants in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. A five-day election is scheduled to begin Could 13, the place the union’s marketing campaign has already develop into heated.
The UAW has accused the German carmaker of violating U.S. and German labor legal guidelines with aggressive anti-union techniques, which the corporate denies.
“They are going to have a much harder road in work sites where they are going to face aggressive management resistance and even community resistance than they faced in Chattanooga,” stated Harry Katz, a labor-relations professor at Cornell College. “VW management did not aggressively seek to avoid unionization. Mercedes is going to be a good test. It’s the deeper South.”
Late final yr, the UAW introduced a drive to symbolize nearly 150,000 workers at non-union factories largely within the South. The union is focusing on U.S. crops run by Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, Subaru, Mazda, Volkswagen, Mercedes, BMW and Volvo, together with factories operated by electric-vehicle makers Tesla, Rivian and Lucid.
The union’s last defeat at VW in Chattanooga got here at a low-water mark — in the course of a federal investigation into bribery and embezzlement beneath a earlier president.
Marick Masters, a enterprise professor at Wayne State College in Detroit who research the UAW, stated the union flipped the script by putting in new management, touting the wealthy contracts it gained final yr from Detroit automakers after strikes at focused factories, and exploiting a local weather that’s now extra favorable to unions. He stated the union was additionally adept at translating signed pro-union authorization playing cards into votes — partly by pushing for a fast election.
“Now the public and media eyes are going to be on Chattanooga and how quickly the UAW can translate this into a contract,” he stated. If the union can’t shortly get a superb contract, it dangers dropping a number of the momentum it gained with Friday’s election win, he stated.
Unions in different industries are already shifting forward with organizing campaigns within the South and making an attempt to study from the UAW’s playbook.
The Affiliation of Flight Attendants, which has tried and didn’t win over cabin crews at Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines, hopes to gather sufficient signatures to power one other election at Delta by yr finish. The union’s president, Sara Nelson, stated she was not stunned on the UAW win after strikes that led to document contracts final yr.
“I’ve been talking about this for a long time — that strikes and taking on the boss is going to spur organizing, and that’s exactly what we saw here,” Nelson stated.
Nelson is making an attempt to safe an industry-leading contract at United Airlines that she will be able to use to court docket Delta crews. Within the meantime, crews at startup Breeze Airways, lots of whom dwell within the South, will vote subsequent month whether or not to affix her union.
The White Home issued a press release from President Joe Biden congratulating the UAW. Biden — who joined a UAW picket line in Michigan throughout the union’s strike towards Ford, GM and Stellantis crops final yr — praised the success of unions representing autoworkers, Hollywood actors and writers, well being care employees and others in gaining higher contracts.
“Together, these union wins have helped raise wages and demonstrate once again that the middle-class built America and that unions are still building and expanding the middle class for all workers,” Biden stated.
Biden criticized six Southern Republican governors, together with Invoice Lee of Tennessee, who instructed autoworkers this week that voting for union illustration would jeopardize jobs.
Sharon Block, a regulation professor at Harvard College who labored for the Biden administration on labor and different points, stated the governors’ warning rang hole after nonunion Tesla revealed that it plans to put off 10% of its employees after disappointing gross sales outcomes. She stated VW employees noticed the governors’ open letter as “an empty threat and a cynical ploy,” and so they ignored it.
“Workers for a long time have been told that you can’t organize in the South. And many workers, even not in the South, may work in industries where they’ve been told for a long time you can’t organize,” Block stated. “What the UAW showed last night is that we need to go and rethink all those negative statements.”
