UAW aiming to make history at VW facility
If plant unionizes, it will be rare victory in South
DETROIT – The United Auto Workers union is on the precipice of potentially making history this week as some 4,300 autoworkers at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee vote on whether they want union representation.
The polls opened on Wednesday morning. The secret ballot voting, which takes place inside the plant and is run by the National Labor Relations Board, goes until 8 p.m. Friday, with results expected later that night, according to the NLRB and a Volkswagen spokesman.
Labor experts say if the UAW wins at VW Chattanooga, it will be a historic and hard-won victory, after repeated failures over the past decade to organize foreign automaker plants in the South. It would add thousands of members to the union. UAW membership is far below its 1979 peak of 1.5 million. The union currently counts almost 400,000 active members and 580,000 retired members.
“This is a defining moment for the UAW. A victory really sets a precedent and breaks the glass ceiling that you can’t organize auto factories in the South,” said Harley Shaiken, a labor expert and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. “A victory doesn’t automatically translate into a victory at other nonunion automakers, but it sets the standard and the momentum. So victory is a huge gain.”
Just hours before voting was to start, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee and five other Republican governors in Southern states with nonunion automakers signed a lengthy letter Tuesday saying they are “highly concerned” about the UAW’S unionization campaign, which they said is “driven by misinformation and scare tactics.”
The letter goes on to insinuate the election of union representation will mean job cuts, stating that unionization “would certainly put our states’ jobs in jeopardy.’
“We’ve seen it play out this way every single time a foreign automaker plant has been unionized; not one of those plants remains in operation,” the letter said. “And we are seeing it in the fallout of the Detroit Three strike with those automakers rethinking investments and cutting jobs.”
The UAW did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But in terms of rethinking investments, not necessarily. Days after union members ratified the GM contract, the automaker initiated a $10 billion stock buyback program to cover added labor costs. Layoffs are nuanced. GM did say in December it would lay off 1,314 employees at two factories in Michigan due to the end of production of two vehicles. GM is retooling one of the plants, Orion Assembly, to build new electric pickups in late 2025. As the Detroit Free Press reported, GM said it will offer affected employees jobs elsewhere in the company.
At Ford Motor Co., a supplier issue earlier this year forced it to pause production of the new 2024 Ford F-150 for more than five days at the factories that build the pickup, resulting in temporarily laying off about 5,200 UAW workers.
At Stellantis, the company has trimmed its workforce in recent months, but the overall picture is murky because it hasn’t clarified how many jobs are being eliminated. The company noted that a round of cuts announced in December for plants in Detroit and Toledo, Ohio, was significantly smaller than originally described, but a separate round of cuts affecting supplemental workers across company facilities rolled out last month.
None of those temporary layoffs have overshadowed the driving force behind VW workers signing cards on the UAW’S website seeking to join the union: The UAW’S big contract wins against the Detroit Three last fall followed a 46-day strike.
The union won members a cost-ofliving adjustment, the elimination of wage tiers and bonuses for retirees. Right after the UAW won wage gains of 25% across 41⁄2-year contracts with the Detroit automakers, Nissan, Honda, Hyundai, Toyota and Volkswagen all offered raises of 9% to 14% to their U.S. workforces.
The workforce at VW Chattanooga was one of the first at nonunion automakers in the country to launch its public campaign to unionize, with 30% of the workers at the plant signing the cards in December. The UAW has declined to say how many employees at the VW factory have signed the union cards, but it has previously stated it wanted 70% of a workforce to sign cards before an organizing committee, made up of plant workers, files a petition to take a plant vote.
VW broke ground on the Chattanooga plant in 2009 and has invested $4.3 billion in it over the years, a VW spokesman said. The plant assembles the ID.4 EV and houses the company’s Battery Engineering Lab. It also builds the Atlas and Atlas Cross Sport.
Its production supports about 125,000 direct and indirect jobs across the country, he said. The automaker supports employees’ right to decide the question of representation and the NLRB’S secret ballot election, the spokesman said, adding that employees already have a strong voice in the Chattanooga plant.
“Part of being invested in people and their well-being is listening. Everyone has direct access to their manager and our plant leadership is right off the factory floor,” the spokesman said.