Volkswagen Chattanooga vote could set UAW’s future
Workers at the Chattanooga plant will make their decision April 17-19
With United Auto Workers membership sliding to its lowest point in nearly 15 years in 2023, Volkswagen Chattanooga may hold the keys to helping drive the union’s future, observers said.
“It has become a mustdo for them,” said Sean Higgins, a research fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Competitive Research Institute. “They want a redemption story — ‘This time we finally broke through.’”
Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University, said the momentum for the union is “way stronger” now given the UAW’s recent contract negotiations with the Big Three Detroit automakers.
“I hope it gives other automakers in the South an opportunity to choose yes or no,” he said.
UAW membership fell 3.3% in 2023 to 370,000, its lowest point since 2009, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
In 1970, the union had 1.5 million members.
On April 17-19, about 4,300 Volkswagen workers are to decide in a secret ballot vote overseen by the National Labor Relations Board whether they will choose the UAW as their bargaining representative.
The UAW lost close votes trying to organize production and skilled trades workers at the VW Chattanooga plant in 2014 and 2019.
VOLKSWAGEN HISTORY
Germany-based Volkswagen globally has a long history of unions. All of its assembly plants have employee representation, although experts said that often looks differently in counties around the world.
While the UAW and its negotiating stance and rhetoric are often adversarial in dealing with U.S. automakers, German laws call for workers at large companies to elect up to half the members to boards that make key corporate decisions.
Wheaton said that after World War II, the U.S. and other countries helped change the laws in Germany to encourage co-determination and more democratic worker participation at companies.
“We helped change the rules and laws to make them cooperate with workers,” he said by phone.
Wheaton said at Volkswagen’s headquarters in Germany, worker representatives from plants have a direct vote on which factories get new product and investment.
“They go to meetings and argue for a project,” he said.
But, under U.S. labor law, Volkswagen Chattanooga can’t send such worker representatives, Wheaton said.
“They’re at a distinct disadvantage because they don’t have worker representation,” he said.
However, Higgins by phone cited UAW corruption scandals over the past half decade, including the jailing of two past presidents, and he urged Volkswagen Chattanooga employees to carefully weigh what the union says.
“People have a right to be skeptical,” said the research fellow for the public interest group aimed at free enterprise and limited government.
A federal probe about five years ago found broad corruption, with a dozen UAW officials convicted of taking more than $1 million of union funds for luxury travel and other lavish personal expenses, according to The New York Times.
The union has since had a court-appointed monitor oversee anti-corruption reforms. UAW President Shawn Fain was the first elected under one of those reforms, which was direct election of a president instead of a delegate system. He took the oath of office in March 2023.
FIRST VW FACTORY
Volkswagen Chattanooga isn’t the automaker’s first factory in the U.S.
In the 1970s, the company opened an assembly plant in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania.
However, the plant, which was organized by the UAW, suffered through bad product, mismanagement and labor disputes, including several strikes, according to news archives. It shut down a decade later, and the company retreated from the U.S. for decades before coming to Chattanooga.
Meanwhile, other U.S. plants involving foreign automakers, including Mitsubishi in Illinois, Toyota in California and Mazda in Michigan, ceased production over the years at UAW organized facilities, news archives show.
LABOR COSTS
Higgins said unions exist to raise labor costs.
“Unions exist to get more wages, benefits, demand management to do more for safety,” he said. “To say a union doesn’t raise labor costs is ignoring what a union is supposed to do.”
Wheaton, however, said labor costs are less than 6% to 7% of building a vehicle for an automaker. During the pandemic, auto companies marked up vehicle prices, and that had nothing to do with wages, he said.
“They dramatically increased because of supply and demand and greed,” Wheaton said. “They made more profit.”
He said the automakers are “hugely profitable.”
“They’re not going to go broke if they give a little bit better pay and benefits,” Wheaton said.
The Industriall Global Union, a federation representing 50 million workers in 140 countries, is supporting the UAW effort in Chattanooga.
Petra Brannmark, a federation spokesperson, said workers who are trade union members earn more than nonunionized workers.
“Trade unions use their collective muscle to bargain for better salaries, pensions, holidays, health insurance, sick pay, overtime and more,” she said in an email. “Unions fight discrimination against race, gender, sexual orientation and disability. Trade unions promote maternity rights, flexible working and paternity pay.”
Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp said recently the UAW is different from some unions locally such as those in building trades.
“I’m not an anti-union Republican,” he said in a recent phone interview. “I’m grateful for the role trade unions play in our community.”
But Wamp said the UAW is tightly affiliated with the Democratic Party, and he, too, raised the corruption issue that “amounts to selling out their membership.”
Wheaton said he’s hopeful there’s less “thirdparty intervention” in the days leading up to the election than there had been in the first two votes at Volkswagen Chattanooga.
“It’s up to the individual,” he said. “We all have opinions. Let people vote to express their own.”
Wheaton said he believes there’s a higher level of support for the UAW under its new president.
He said Fain has done “a lot of cleaning house with the help of the Justice Department.”
Higgins said the UAW’s two previous losses at Volkswagen Chattanooga have become “something of a thorn in their side. It’s embarrassing for them.”
He said a win later this month in Chattanooga would be symbolically important for the UAW, though he didn’t believe it would signal a growing wave of success for the union.
“It gives them a lot of positive press,” Higgins said. “The UAW’s current leaders are astute in packaging something that’s a media narrative.”
Contact Mike Pare at mpare@timesfreepress. com or 423-757-6318.