After winning at Big Three, UAW focuses on Nonunion Plants

When United Automobile Workers President Shawn Fain announced the agreement which ended six weeks of strikes at Ford Motor in the fall, he framed it as part of a longer campaign. Next, he declared, the task would be to organize non-union factories across the country.

“One of our biggest goals coming out of this historic contract victory is to organize like we have never organized before,” he said at the time. “When we return to the negotiating table in 2028, it will not only be with the Big Three. It will be the Big Five or Big Six.”

Four months later, the first test of that strategy has emerged, and it includes a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

According to the union, more than half of the more than 4,000 eligible employees have signed cards showing their support for a union. Workers say they have done this because they want higher wages, more paid time off and more generous health benefits — and because the recent strikes at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis have convinced them that a union can help win these concessions.

“The Big Three had their big campaign, and their big strike and vote, and new contracts – we paid very close attention to that,” said Yolanda Peoples, who has worked at the Volkswagen factory for almost 13 years.

The Volkswagen factory announced an 11 percent wage increase shortly after the strikes at the Big Three. The increase brought the top hourly wage for production workers to $32.40, but the comparable wage for Detroit automakers will exceed $40 by the end of the new contracts. (Volkswagen said the wage adjustment was part of an annual evaluation.)

Unions need a simple majority vote to win, but the UAW says so will not submit for elections at the Chattanooga plant until 70 percent of the plant’s workers have signed cards and workers have built a comprehensive organizing committee, which union officials expect in the coming month.

This caution reflects the UAW’s experience in the South, where previous campaigns have fallen short.

But the stakes could be even higher this time, given the union’s investment in the organization several plants at the same time – including a Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama, where more than 50 percent of workers have signed cards, and a Hyundai plant in Alabama, where the union has cards from more than 30 percent of workers.

Last week the union said it also allocated $40 million to organizing auto and battery workers through 2026 — far more than the previous budget for such efforts, according to Jonah Furman, a union spokesman — and suggested time was of the essence.

“In the coming years, the electric vehicle battery industry will add tens of thousands of jobs across the country, and new standards will be set as the industry comes online,” the union said in its funding announcement.

If the union wins in Chattanooga, said Joshua Murray, a sociologist at Vanderbilt University has studied The auto industry’s response to unionization could quickly repeat its victories at other plants, as it did during a wave of organizing in the 1930s.

“The failure to join a union is often not the result of workers being opposed to joining a union – rather it is that they are not convinced they can win,” said Dr . Murray. “Showing that they can win is very important to get employees who weren’t excited about it excited.”

A loss in Chattanooga, said Dr. Murray, could erode employee confidence and embolden other automakers’ management to resist.

Other analysts, such as Sam Fiorani, vice president of Global Vehicle Forecasting at research firm AutoForecast Solutions, predicted Tesla would be a particular challenge. “The head of Tesla is Elon Musk, and he is going to fight against change,” Mr. Fiorani said.

The union appears to be benefiting from a resurgence in interest in organizing after a lull during Donald J. Trump’s presidency and the onset of the pandemic. Last year, unions won more than 1,225 elections – the most in 2017 at least a decade, according to the National Labor Relations Council. They lost about 500.

Polls show that younger workers are particularly supportive, and that they appear to be helping to drive the recent organization of the auto industry. “We let them know, ‘You deserve a nice salary compared to your age, but this could be better,'” said Ronald Terry, an employee involved in organizing the Hyundai plant in Alabama.

Younger workers at the Volkswagen plant also express frustration with the paid time off they accrue: 12 or 13 days during their first two years of employment, some of which they have to use during factory closures if they want to get paid.

Asked about the complaints, a Volkswagen spokesperson said the company understood furlough was a major issue and had recently announced an increase in unpaid emergency leave.

The company said last month that wages in Chattanooga have risen nearly twice the rate of inflation since 2013, and that the average manufacturing worker would earn more than $60,000 this year, not including bonuses or overtime, and pay less than $2,000 in incentives to more than $80 million. percent of healthcare costs.

The union sought a vote in Chattanooga in 2014 and was met with no opposition from the company, whose global factories are largely unionized. But the effort failed under pressure from Republican state leaders, who suggested a union would jeopardize the plant’s expansion.

With workers complaining about understaffing, high injury rates and last-minute overtime, the UAW tried again in 2019. But pleas emerged from Tennessee’s governor and the plant’s original director, who said he had returned to his former position to address workers’ concerns. to negate support. The union narrowly lost.

This time, the union appears determined to minimize the effect of such pushback.

The Union wants to recruit a volunteer leader for every line on every shift in the factory – more than 125 in all, according to union figures. In this way, the organizers say, the volunteers can quickly respond to rumors or topics of conversation that colleagues encounter.

“If you don’t have someone continuing that conversation, we’ve seen some of that pushback in a few smaller areas,” said Isaac Meadows, an employee involved with the organization.

He attributed the decline to the influence of external groups and rumors from friends and relatives of employees that a union would discourage employers from locating in Tennessee.

Gerald McCormick, a Republican who opposed the union as majority leader in the House of Representatives during the 2014 elections, said Republicans might worry that the union would support left-wing causes in Tennessee if it gained a foothold there. to get.

“They don’t want to do them any favors,” he said, referring to the state’s Republican leadership, which he said would again oppose the union campaign.

As in 2019, the employer’s response can be crucial. The Volkswagen brand seems to be roughly holding its own in the United States and is somewhat at the forefront of the transition to electric vehicles.

More than 11 percent of Volkswagen’s US sales last year came from EVs – specifically the ID.4, a compact SUV built in Chattanooga. That figure was higher than the overall 9.4 percent share for plug-in vehicles in the U.S. market, according to BloombergNEF, an energy research firm.

A Volkswagen official said during a factory tour that about a third of production this year was likely to be ID.4s, and that share could double within a decade.

If that happens, the factory may be relatively well positioned to absorb higher labor costs. Corey Cantor, electric vehicle analyst at BloombergNEF, said continued battery innovation, along with the efficiencies of large-scale battery production, could offset the cost increases associated with unionization.

But the presence of a union could complicate the ramp-up of electric vehicle production, said AutoForecast Solutions’ Mr. Fiorani, if the union opposes the drop in workers per car that could come with the shift. However, he noted that companies that make their own batteries may be able to rehire these workers instead of laying them off.

Volkswagen Group of America CEO Pablo Di Si said in a statement that the plant had already added jobs in battery assembly and battery engineering.

During a meeting with reporters last month, a Volkswagen official said the company would remain neutral during an election campaign, but that “neutral does not mean silence – it means being impartial to what employees decide.”

The official added that the company would correct misinformation, which it did accuses the union of distribution, on wages and working conditions in the factory. (Companies that enter into neutrality agreements with unions typically do not intervene in this way.)

Mr Meadows, the union supporter, said managers had communicated skepticism in sometimes subtle ways, such as removing union flyers from lunch tables.

“Someone passed out some business cards for a lawn care company, and we had some materials on the same table,” Mr. Meadows recalled. “Our materials disappeared, and the others did not.”

Volkswagen said the cleanliness of the tables was determined by “clear policies.”