‘Victories would be nothing less than an earthquake’: can UAW win in the south?
The United Auto Workers (UAW) has launched an ambitious campaign to unionize 13 non-union automakers across the US, and the first big test begins this Wednesday when 4,300 Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, start voting on whether to unionize. Many VW workers are predicting victory.
“We’re going to win,” said Lisa Elliott, a quality control worker at VW. “We have the momentum. I know this will be a historic event.”
Elliott has worked at VW since 2019 when the UAW narrowly lost a unionization vote in Chattanooga, but she says the mood today is far different. She said most workers are jazzed about unionizing because of the UAW’s big victory in last fall’s strike and contract fight with General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, which owns Jeep and Chrysler.
“I support a union because we don’t have a voice now, and there are some serious issues that need to be addressed,” Elliott said. “If the union wins here, it will definitely encourage workers in the other factories.” The vote in Chattanooga runs from Wednesday through Friday.
The UAW’s campaign has targeted 13 companies, including Toyota, Tesla and Hyundai, that have roughly 150,000 workers at 36 non-union plants. After VW, the next vote will be at the Mercedes plant in Vance, Alabama, where a supermajority of the 5,000 workers have signed cards requesting a unionization vote.
“I have great confidence that the union drive will be successful,” said Jeremy Kimbrell, a worker at Mercedes’ Vance plant since 1999. “A majority of workers have already voiced that they’re with the union, and very few are openly against.” The National Labor Relations Board has not yet set a date for the vote.
“A victory at Volkswagen would make a victory at Mercedes much more likely,” said Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown and co-author of Labor in America: A History. “Victories at both Volkswagen and Mercedes would be nothing less than an earthquake. This would be the biggest breakthrough in private-sector organizing in decades. It would mean that the anti-union citadel [in the south] that has repulsed effort after organizing effort has been breached.”
Stephen Silvia, a political science professor at American University who has written a book about the failed unionization drives at VW, Mercedes and Nissan plants in the south, says several important developments make victories much more likely this time around. “The UAW’s strikes last year show that the UAW can deliver,” he said. “It really was a turning point for the UAW.”
For 30 years, Silvia said, the UAW was focused on fighting austerity and often agreed to concessions, but “when Shawn Fain came in as UAW president [in March 2023], he turned things around and focused on making gains for the workers”.
The UAW’s deal with Detroit’s automakers includes raises of 25% over four and a half years – more than the total raises won in the previous 22 years. The contracts also call for improved pensions, restoring the cost-of-living allowance, increasing the top wage to $40 an hour and raising starting pay by 68%.
“If they’re doing a union drive, they can now point to last fall’s contract settlement and say, ‘This is what the union can do for you.’” Silvia said. “They couldn’t say that before.”
Another change is that anti-union politicians in the south haven’t, at least so far, campaigned as fiercely against the union as in the past – perhaps because the GOP is trying harder to woo blue-collar voters. Moreover, GOP governors are no longer in as powerful a position to scare workers by threatening to deny their plants big subsidies and thereby jeopardize a plant’s survival. A major reason VW workers voted against unionizing in 2014 – 712 against to 626 for – was that Tennessee’s then governor, Bill Haslam, and state lawmakers had threatened to withhold $300m in subsidies to build a second production line at the Chattanooga plant if the workers voted to unionize. VW workers feared that if their plant had just one production line, it might not survive. Now there is little fear of the plant closing because VW added an expensive production line in 2022 to make its all-electric ID.4 compact SUV.
To be sure, southern politicians have spoken out against the UAW. Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, said, “It would be a big mistake for [the VW] workers to risk their future” by unionizing. Alabama’s governor, Kate Ivey, wrote, “Alabama has become a national leader in automotive manufacturing, and all this was achieved without a unionized workforce … Unfortunately, the Alabama model for economic success is under attack.”
Fain fired back, saying that Ivey “dared to say that the economic model of the south is under attack. She’s damn right it is! It’s under attack because workers are fed up with getting screwed.”
Under Fain, the UAW has abandoned its top-down style of organizing, and that has increased the union’s chances of winning. The UAW has let rank-and-file VW and Mercedes workers take far more control of their campaigns They fanned out quickly to collect pro-union cards, and the VW plant has 300 volunteer organizer captains.
“The UAW has clearly taken a very creative, grassroots, militant approach to organizing and collective bargaining,” said Daniel Cornfield, a sociology professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. “That’s a huge change.”
Another big change is that the UAW has gone far to shed its reputation for corruption. A corruption scandal in which UAW officials embezzled more than $3m and two former UAW presidents were sentenced to prison helped cause the UAW’s loss at VW in 2019. As a result of the scandal, the UAW agreed to have a federal monitor, and for the first time it established direct election of its president. Fain, an insurgent, won on an anti-concessions, anti-corruption platform.
“I think Fain is a great guy,” said Kelcey Smith, a paint shop worker at the VW plant. “I believe in his vision for the union. He supports the workers.”
Smith is very impressed by what Fain and the UAW achieved in their showdown with Detroit’s automakers. When the UAW lost at Volkswagen in 2014 and 2019, Smith said, “the union didn’t have anything on its plate for workers to look forward to. With what they accomplished with the big three, we feel they can accomplish that in the south.”
Daiquiri Steele, an employment law professor at the University of Alabama, sees some important changes in the south. “People in Alabama are starting to see that the union can win,” she said. “At one point, it would have been unheard of, an exercise in futility. I don’t think it’s being perceived that way any more. With social media, people now have more access than ever to people who live outside the south. They can see that people in unionized settings have so much more than they have. That can influence people to say, ‘How can I go about getting this, too?’”
At Volkswagen, a big issue is that many workers receive between 96 and 144 hours of paid time off a year (about 12 to 18 full-time days), but when VW closes the plant for a week or two during the year for maintenance, workers must use their paid time off if they want to be paid for those days the plant is closed. VW workers also complain that they don’t receive paid sick days.
At Mercedes, workers complain that the Vance plant adopted a detested two-tier wage system in January 2020 and offered little in the way of raises for several years. After the union drive started, Mercedes ended two-tier and announced long-awaited raises. Nonetheless, VW and Mercedes workers remain upset that they earn several dollars less an hour than UAW members.
“One thing we say is, ‘End the Alabama discount,’” said Kimbrell, the Mercedes worker. “We have shown we can build cars as good as anybody in the world. The time is over when companies can just go to the south and pay people less money and treat them worse. We’re sending the message, ‘Come on down. Take advantage of the skills our workers offer, and we’ll help you make profits. But if you come down, don’t take advantage of the workers down here. End the discount.’”
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Pro-Israel groups – which include Aipac Pac, United Democracy Project and Democratic Majority for Israel – notched some notable wins during the last election cycle, ousting the progressive congressman Andy Levin of Michigan in his incumbent-versusincumbent primary and blocking candidates such as Donna Edwards of Maryland and Nina Turner of Ohio from advancing to general elections.
This time around, there have already been some surprises in the primary campaigns. Aipac poured more than $4.5m into the March primary in California’s 45th congressional district to prop up their preferred candidate, Joanna Weiss, but she ultimately lost to a progressive, Dave Min.
And although Summer Lee squeaked by in her 2022 primary against the moderate Democratic challenger Steve Irwin, her current primary opponent Bhavini Patel has struggled to come up with cash, raising a paltry $600,000 compared with Lee’s approximately $2.3m. Meanwhile, Lee has also faced opposition spending by the Moderate Pac, a Super Pac funded primarily by the GOP mega-donor and Pennsylvania resident Jeffrey Yass.
Omar and Tlaib, meanwhile, so far face little opposition spending. Omar’s primary opponent Don Samuels, who she beat narrowly in her 2022 primary, has raised a little more than $750,000, while Omar’s campaign has already generated nearly $5m in cash with four months to go before her August primary.
Only Tlaib – whose criticism of Israel provoked the Republican-controlled
legislature to censure her last year – has raised more, with $6.5m on hand according to her latest reporting. Tlaib easily fought back a 2022 primary challenge and faces no opposition in her 2024 race so far, and she has already formed joint fundraising committees with both Bowman and Bush to help boost their financial standing.
Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for Justice Democrats, said the impressive fundraising haul from lawmakers like Lee and Tlaib underscored how progressives’ criticism of the Israeli government over the war in Gaza is resonating with Democratic voters.
“These are likely going to be some of the most expensive Democratic congressional primaries we have ever seen. And it is only that way because these candidates – be it George Latimer or Wesley Bell or Bhavini Patel – cannot stand on their own,” Andrabi said.
“They have to stand on $5m of money from Republican Maga [‘Make America Great Again’] donors that Aipac is funneling to them. That is the only way that they get a leg up against deeply popular progressives who are speaking of core values.”
alone!”
The ADA’s chief scientific and medical officer, Dr Robert A Gabbay, said that the ADA’s dietary guidelines were the result of a rigorous scientific process undertaken annually by a team of medical experts who scrutinize the latest studies about how best to treat type 2 diabetes. “There is no ‘one size fits all’,” he told me. “There is more than one way for people to successfully manage their diabetes.”
He added that corporate funders have no say in the organization’s guidelines: “The standards of care process receives no funding from the industry, [and] our guidelines and recommendations are based on science.”
The ADA has a major say in how diabetes is managed globally. Its medical practice committees issue Standards of Care medical guidelines to American physicians and doctors around the world. The organization boasts a $100m annual budget, 600,000 volunteers and has 20,000 members from the healthcare community. It holds bikea-thons and walk-a-thons, and publishes dietary guidelines and recipes that are downloaded by the millions every year. It publishes academic journals and holds medical conferences in which the latest research is presented. It funds medical research. It hosts summer camps for children with diabetes.
“Their professional practice committee writes all of the guidelines that we follow,” Kasia Lipska, an endocrinologist at the Yale School of Medicine, told me. “Clinicians have a lot of respect for that body. Their guidelines are the bible for diabetes medical practice.”
The ADA is far from the only obstacle to widespread adoption of a lowcarb diet. Absent a national health education initiative that links carbohydrates to the diabetes epidemic, lowcarb clinicians will be a voice in the wilderness. It can be challenging for many people with diabetes to forgo the breads, sweets, pastas and starches that form the basis of many diets. And given the dearth of healthy eating options on the shelves of many American supermarkets, some clinicians I spoke with, each of whom was dedicated to their patients’ wellbeing, said it was more effective to simply prescribe their patients pharmaceuticals.
“The low-carb diet can resonate,” a retired endocrinologist told me. “But of all the patients I had who adopted lowcarb diets, very few were from lower socio-economic classes.”
Diabetes was hijacked as a business opportunity almost from the moment that insulin – the hormone that people with type 1 diabetes cannot produce – was first discovered by a team of researchers at the University of Toronto. In 1923, the University of Toronto board of governors sold the patent for insulin to Eli Lilly and Company for $1, because Lilly was better able to manufacture and distribute the synthetic hormone. “Insulin does not belong to me,” the insulin medication’s co-inventor, Sir Frederick G Banting, said. “It belongs to the world.”
Eventually two international drug companies – now known as Novo Nordisk and Novartis – wrangled patents as well.
“The reason the insulin story is so outrageous is that the inventors of insulin wanted insulin to belong to everybody,” David Mitchell, the founder of the non-profit organization Patients For Affordable Drugs, told me. “Somehow these three drug companies got together to create a global oligopoly. It’s a remarkable thing when you consider the birth of insulin.”
The ADA’s corporate contributions are not precisely traceable. Based on financial filings, this is what we know: between 2017 and 2024, more than 50 pharmaceutical and device manufacturers contributed over $134m to the organization, or roughly 20% of its total funding. Food industry contributions were not broken out.
It isn’t difficult to see how contributors to the ADA get bang for their buck. The ADA’s social media feed is a virtual supermarket of products purveyed by its funders.
Need a diabetes test? Go to CVS! ($10m 3 year partnership in 2021.) Want to learn more about kidney care? Do it with DaVita! ($1.5m in 2024.) Want to donate to the ADA? Just head over to your local GNC store and put your money in the tin can. ($100k in 2024.)
Needless to say, a low-carbohydrate product that lowers blood sugar also reduces need for the drugs and ancillary products that make diabetes such a boon for the healthcare industry.
In 2021, Patients for Affordable Drugs published a landmark report exploring connections between 15 patient advocacy groups and the pharmaceutical industry. The ADA scored lowest because it: “Accepts funding from pharma industry” and also because it “Has board members with financial ties to pharma industry; Shares lobbyist and/or lobby firm with pharma,” the report said.
Reading the ADA’s publications, one would get the impression it is a grassroots organization supported by moms and pops. A banner on their website blares: “Your Support Goes Twice as Far!” Every few seconds, a pop-up announces a new small donation: “Patrick F donated $100.” “L Robert H. donated $12.” “Al S donated $20.” These small donors may not know that, in 2021, the Patients for Affordable Drugs report, found that a third “of the members of the ADA board of directors have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry”.
Diabetes is a national scandal hiding in plain sight. Despite infinite medical innovations, including glucose-lowering drugs, fast- and slowacting insulin, A1C tests, continuous glucose monitors and insulin pumps, more than 100,000 Americans die from the condition annually. In 1980, before many of these medical breakthroughs were available, that number was 35,000.
The big winners of the ADA’s cozy arrangements with industry, of course, are the pharmaceutical companies that enjoyed an estimated $58bn in annual sales in 2017, and the medical device and food companies who donate to the ADA in exchange for recipe endorsements.
The losers are the millions of people with diabetes who suffer amputations, blindness, neuropathy, often daily shoot themselves with insulin and eat carbohydrate-rich foods because they simply are not informed about their healthier options. It is not too late for the ADA to, loudly and in no uncertain terms, tell people with diabetes the truth. It might lose funders, but it would also save lives.
Neil Barsky, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and investment manager, is the founder of The Marshall Project
The ADA still sees diabetes as a progressive disease that gets worse over time