GOP OFFICIALS PATRONIZE VW WORKERS
When politicians and businesspeople congregate at the site of a future project, they’re often photographed wearing hardhats and wielding shovels. But when Republican officeholders held a recent news conference at the Volkswagen plant, they issued patronizing statements urging VW workers not to affiliate with the United Auto Workers union at this week’s representation vote.
That echoed Gov. Bill Lee’s condescending statement to news outlets that it would be a “mistake” for workers at the VW plant “to turn their future over to someone else, namely to the [UAW].”
With that gratuitous advice, Lee insulted VW workers by suggesting they don’t know what’s best for themselves. But it’s a safe bet they knew they were being patronized. He doubled down on his advice Monday by urging VW workers not to give up “the freedom to decide for themselves” by voting for union representation. Actually, they are exercising that freedom.
Two members of the UAW organizing committee rebutted Lee’s advice, arguing that they actually do know what is best for them and, effectively, for VW.
Lee’s comments were relatively mild compared to statements by a few local Republican officials.
State Sen. Bo Watson argued that “Voting against the UAW is protecting Tennessee values.”
Watson didn’t define the “Tennessee values” allegedly at stake. But is it reasonable to infer he was warning that VW workers who vote to join the UAW aren’t good Tennesseans? Is it the workers’ “values” that are suspect?
County Mayor Weston Wamp resorted to irrelevant history, telling the workers not to vote for joining the UAW, which he called a “corrupt and hyper-political operation.”
He also argued that the UAW “has a well-earned reputation for corruption that reaches to the highest levels of the union.”
The New York Times has reported that “a federal probe about five years ago [found evidence] that a dozen UAW officials, including two former presidents, were convicted of taking more than $1 million of union funds for luxury travel and other lavish personal expenses.” The Times Free Press noted that the UAW has since had a court-appointed monitor oversee anticorruption reforms.
One of those reforms: The election of Sean Fain as the UAW’s president.
Watson echoed the UAW’s history of corruption but acknowledged that “workers have a right to organize.”
Yet then he couldn’t help himself: “[But] I hope workers from Tennessee recognize the risk that comes with the UAW.” (More corruption is inevitable?)
And this: “I hope Tennessee workers will recognize that the UAW represents the party of President Joe Biden and their values and political contributions, which are completely inconsistent with the people of Southeast Tennessee.”
The politicians’ anti-UAW news conference seems to suggest they’re trying to save VW from itself. But that ignores the fact that every VW factory in the world — but not in Tennessee — has a union presence. And Volkswagen has nary a problem with that.
Indeed, the TFP reported that Dariusz Dabrowski, the general secretary of the Volkswagen Group’s European and global Works Council, supports next week’s vote. He added, employee representation “is an instrument that strengthens and improves all of us.”
To that end, VW of Chattanooga issued a recent statement that it “respects workers’ right to determine who should represent their interests in the workplace.”
If Lee, Watson and Wamp really respect the VW workers’ integrity, they have an obvious responsibility to acknowledge that the workers are perfectly capable of looking out for their own interests.
To do otherwise is to demonize the UAW — and worse, to suggest the VW workers are incapable of seeing to their own future.
(Disclosure: As a former Chattanooga Times reporter, I was a member of The Newspaper Guild, headquartered in New York City.)