by Samuel Messidor
Workers at the Chattanooga TN Volkswagen plant have won their unionization vote with the National Labor Relations Board on April 19, with 73% yes votes out of 3,613 total ballots cast. 4,300 workers were eligible to vote in the elections. This vote places the workers into a NLRB-recognized United Autoworkers (UAW) union local.
The VW plant in Tennessee had been the company’s only non-unionized plant in the world. The unionization effort marks the first time a foreign auto plant has been unionized in the US.
The UAW lost union election votes by narrow margins twice before at the plant, in 2014 and 2019. But the third time’s the charm, with rank-and-file workers attributing the different outcome to the speed of the unionizing campaign, increased morale from the Big 3 strike last year, and the sense of being part of a larger movement with the UAW launching its unionization drives at multiple plants across the country at once rather than focusing on one isolated plant at a time.
Workers quoted by the union and the monopoly media have cited demands for reduced working hours, higher wages, and workers’ say in safety standards as driving factors in the unionization campaign. Across the auto manufacturers being organized by the UAW, workers cite injury rates from increased work tempos, stagnating pay as profits soar, and consecutive 12-hour days, sometimes for 7 days straight.
This is the first automotive factory organized by the UAW in the South since the 1940s. Southern state governments have attracted automakers to the region in the last decades with promises of lower labor costs, low levels of unionization, and generous corporate tax breaks. The stratification of the working class has its effect here—auto workers make less in the South than in the rest of the country, but the wages are still relatively high compared to other jobs in the South, a differential cited by monopoly media commentators to explain the past failures of UAW to unionize individual auto plants.
The UAW has announced that its unionizing drive, coming in the wake of the “Stand Up” strike against the Big Three auto manufacturers, will seek to bring over 150,000 non-union autoworkers across the country into the union. Mercedes workers in Alabama will be the next workers to vote on whether to become organized under the UAW in mid-May of this year.
UAW membership is down from 1.5 million in 1979 to 383,000 in 2023, with a series of sell-out contracts forced by the union bureaucrats down the throats of workers and also auto manufacturer restructuring production over the decades. Sean Fain has been trumpeted by the monopoly media and bourgeois labor outlets like Jacobin as a reformer sweeping aside the conciliation and corruption of the old UAW leadership he has replaced. Fain’s “Stand Up” strike in 2023 only hit a few plants and warehouses across the Big Three at a time, keeping the majority of workers off the picket lines and the profits flowing for the corporations while bragging of worker militancy.
photo: VW workers celebrate at an election watch party organized by the union in Chattanooga on April 19
