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Workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted Friday to form a union, the first victory in the United Auto Workers’ campaign to consolidate last year’s strike against the Detroit Three by organizing factories in the American South.
The workers, who voted 2,628 to 985 to join the union, said Volkswagen was underpaying them, targeting the German group as part of a $40 million campaign to organize workers in 13 mostly foreign-owned automakers with non-union plants in the United States. .
The closely watched elections highlight the resurgence of the labor movement in America. Union organizers view Southern states, including Tennessee, as hostile territory and have tried to organize there for decades with limited success.
Darrell Belcher, who worked in assembly at the Chattanooga plant for 13 years, told the Financial Times that the union’s proposal to Volkswagen workers hinged on the record 25 percent raises that Ford, Stellantis and GM had agreed to after six weeks of strike last year. . The salary increases will be spread over the contract duration of 4.5 years.
“[The union] campaigns about ‘look what Ford got,’” Belcher said. “They really pushed the $40 mark [an hour] and free health insurance.”
Belcher voted against the union, saying union representatives could not guarantee they could negotiate the same contract for Volkswagen employees.
In a statement, Volkswagen thanked its Chattanooga workers for voting and said it is waiting for federal labor officials to certify the result.
Volkswagen has previously said it doesn’t think its Chattanooga workers need a union because their pay, which ranges between $24.50 and $32.40 an hour, is already higher than the city average.
Workers had already received a raise after the UAW signed new contracts with Detroit automakers in November. Observers called it “the UAW shock.”
The union has already tried twice to organize the Volkswagen plant, most recently in 2019. It lost the election by 833 votes to 776 votes.
At the time, the UAW faced fierce opposition from elected officials, local business owners and a group of anti-UAW employees funded by anti-union interest groups, said Harry Katz, a professor of collective bargaining at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
Southern lawmakers have lured foreign automakers’ American manufacturing operations to states including Tennessee and Alabama with generous tax breaks and promises they will be inhospitable to unions that typically drive up labor costs. Regional “right to work” laws give workers the ability to opt out of paying union dues, making it more difficult for unions to support themselves financially.
But the popularity of unions has increased since the Covid crisis. According to a CNN poll, the UAW had the support of 76 percent of U.S. adults during last fall’s strike.
That means workers trying to unionize faced much less resistance during this election, according to Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
“The public is saying ‘we’re on their side,’ which I think has caught a lot of people, including a lot of Republican elected officials, by surprise,” Wheaton said.
The Republican governors of Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas issued a joint statement Tuesday against the UAW, calling the union “special interests seeking to come into our state and threaten our jobs and the values we live by.”
Republican Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, whose district includes the Volkswagen plant, told reporters he would “[stay] out of your mind this time.”
“This is something I’ll let the workers decide,” Fleischmann said as he boarded a flight to Chattanooga last week, according to the Huffington Post.
More than 70% of the plant’s 4,300 workers signed union authorization cards before the union filed an election petition last month, the UAW said.
The UAW’s landslide victory in Chattanooga raises hopes that it can repeat its success at Mercedes-Benz in Alabama, where federal labor officials have scheduled a union election next month. Winning there will be much more difficult than in Chattanooga, Wheaton said, because the union has a shorter history of organizing at that plant.
UAW President Shawn Fain said he plans to organize more than two dozen additional auto plants in the Southern United States, including a Toyota plant in Missouri and a Nissan plant in Mississippi.
“Workers in the South are ready to rise up and win a better life,” Kelcey Smith, a paint shop worker at Volkswagen Chattanooga, said in a statement.