Seeking an equal voice at VW
We work at Volkswagen. And we have a historic opportunity this week. Along with our roughly 4,300 production and maintenance co-workers, we will vote on forming a union with United Auto Workers. The vote will take place Wednesday through Friday.
As supporters of the union who have spoken with dozens of our VW colleagues in recent months, we have great optimism about the outcome of this vote. Despite opposition from numerous powerful politicians and wealthy corporate interests, including VW, most workers want a stronger voice at Volkswagen.
All across the plant, we’ve been hearing the same thing. We build the cars, but the company has the final say over our working conditions. Fundamentally, that isn’t right. Too often, those decisions leave workers behind.
For example, VW’s paid time off policies make it harder to spend time with our families. The company has too much control over our lives. VW workers have had to miss too many of our kids’ Little League games because of mandatory overtime. Or we are required to use our PTO when the plant shuts down, instead of on vacations that we plan with our families. We do this work so that we can spend that time with our families, but work can sometimes pull us apart.
Another major issue is that the company has changed the quality and cost of our health insurance over the years. According to VW’s own website, workers at our plant pay an average of nearly $2,000 per year in health insurance premiums. At Ford, where UAW
members have negotiated their health coverage, workers pay $0. The cost of insurance especially hurts workers with families like us, and we believe VW can do better.
More generally, our two stories illustrate why so many workers want to join together as a union at VW.
Doug is a Republican who has been working at VW for four years. When he first came to VW, he was anti-union. But that has changed. During the pandemic, the company told us that if you caught COVID at work, you would be paid for your 14-day quarantine. But when Doug caught COVID on his lunch break, he got denied pay for those two weeks because the company said he wasn’t masking (while eating, during lunch). To make his mortgage that month, Doug had to take $1,000 out of his 401k. Right now, the company has so much power that it doesn’t even have to follow its own rules.
Yolanda has been working at VW for 13 years. Her father and grandfather were both UAW members at General Motors in Georgia. She was always proud of the work her father did and chose to follow in his footsteps. As the mother of a 3-year-old, Yolanda wants her daughter to feel that same sense of pride and to have VW be a place that she would be proud to join someday, too. But recent changes VW has made to health care coverage have made it harder to afford the routine medicines and vaccinations that come with raising a toddler.
We both work long hours doing physical, repetitive work that generates enormous profits for Volkswagen. Without a union, the company has nearly total control over the conditions under which we carry out this difficult work. The company controls how much of the profits they share with us, how much we spend on our family’s medical bills, and how much time we have with our families.
For the two of us, the choice is simple. If we want to have a say in how VW’s working conditions impact our lives, we need to have the voice that comes from winning our union.
Both of us took jobs at VW because we know that what we do is important. When we’re out of town and see an Atlas, we take pride in being able to say “I made that.”
We want to be treated with the respect equal to the effort we put into this job. We believe that will only happen when we form a union, and Volkswagen has to sit across the bargaining table from us as equals.
We also know that we are harnessing a power much greater than any of ourselves alone. We join with 150,000 UAW workers who won huge gains in their historic 2023 contracts. And we are at the forefront of tens of thousands of workers at nonunion auto plants seeking to make our jobs and our lives better.
We’re choosing to form a union because we believe that, in return for the work we do, we should have a say over the conditions under which we build these cars.
Together, we can make auto jobs into great careers not just in Chattanooga, but across America.
Doug Snyder and Yolanda “Yogi” Peeples are employed by Volkswagen of Chattanooga.