When Shawn Fain, the president of the United Automobile Workers, revealed the deal which ended six weeks of strikes at Ford Motor in the fall, framed it as part of a larger campaign. Next, he declared, would be the task of organizing non-union factories throughout the country.
“One of our biggest goals coming out of this historic contract win is to organize like we’ve never organized before,” he said at the time. “When we return to the negotiating table in 2028, it will not be just with the Big Three. It will be the Big Five or the Big Six.”
Four months later, the first test of this strategy came into focus and involved a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn.
More than half of the 4,000 eligible workers have signed cards indicating support for a union, according to the union. Workers say they did it because they want higher wages, more benefits and more generous health benefits — and because recent strikes at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis have convinced them that a union can help win those concessions.
“The Big Three, they had their big campaign, their big strike and their vote, and the new contracts — we watched it very carefully,” said Yolanda Peoples, who has worked at the Volkswagen plant for nearly 13 years.
The Volkswagen plant announced an 11 percent wage increase shortly after 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 review.)
Unions need a simple majority vote to win, but the UAW says it won’t file for an election at the Chattanooga plant until 70 percent of the plant’s workers sign cards and workers have formed an extensive organizing committee, which they expect union officials. next month.
The caution reflects the UAW’s experience in the South, where previous campaigns have fallen short.
But the stakes may be even higher this time, given the union’s investment in organizing several plants at once — including a Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama, where more than 50 percent of workers have signed cards, and a plant in Hyundai in Alabama, where the union has cards from more than 30 percent of workers.
Last week, the union said it would also allocate $40 million to organize auto and battery workers through 2026 — far exceeding its previous budget for such efforts, according to Jonah Furman, a union spokesman — and suggested that the time was of the essence.
“In the coming years, the electric vehicle battery industry is slated to add tens of thousands of jobs across the country, and new standards are being set as the industry comes online,” the association said in its funding announcement.
If the union wins in Chattanooga, said Joshua Murray, a sociologist at Vanderbilt University who has studied the auto industry’s response to unionization, it can quickly repeat the victory at other plants, as it did during a wave of organizing in the 1930s.
“A lot of times the failure of unionization isn’t that workers are opposed to being in a union — it’s that they’re not convinced they can win,” said Dr. Murray. “Showing that they can win is a big deal to get non-gung-ho workers.”
A loss at Chattanooga, Dr. Murray said, could undermine worker confidence and encourage management at other automakers to fight back.
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 of interest in organizing after a lull during the presidency of Donald J. Trump and the onset of the pandemic. Last year, unions won more than 1,225 elections — the most in at least a decade, according to the National Labor Relations Board. They lost about 500.
Polls show younger workers are particularly supportive and appear to be helping to fuel the auto industry’s recent reorganization. “We’re telling them, ‘You’re making good pay for your age, but this could be better,'” said Ronald Terry, a worker who joined the union at 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 on the job, several of which they must use during plant shutdowns if they want to be paid.
Asked about the complaints, a Volkswagen spokesman said the company understood the time off was a significant issue and had recently announced an increase in unpaid leave time for emergencies.
The company said last month that its wages in Chattanooga had risen at nearly twice the rate of inflation since 2013, and that the average production worker would earn more than $60,000 this year before bonuses or overtime and pay less than $2,000 in premiums for to cover more than 80 percent of health care costs.
The union sought a vote in Chattanooga in 2014 and faced no opposition from the company, whose factories worldwide are mostly unionized. But the effort failed amid pressure from state Republican leaders, who suggested a union would jeopardize the plant’s expansion.
With workers complaining of understaffing, high injury rates and last-minute overtime, the UAW tried again in 2019. But there were calls from Tennessee’s governor and the plant’s original CEO, who said he was returned to his previous position. to address employee concerns to galvanize support. The union narrowly lost.
This time, the union seems determined to minimize the effect of such pushback.
The union wants to hire a volunteer leader for every line on every shift at the plant — more than 125 in all, according to the union’s tally. That way, organizers say, volunteers can quickly respond to rumors or company talking points encountered by colleagues.
“If you don’t have someone to carry on that conversation, we’ve seen some of it retreat to some smaller areas,” said Isaac Meadows, a worker involved in the organization.
He attributed the setback to the influence of outside groups and chatter from friends and family of workers that a union would discourage employers from locating in Tennessee.
Gerald McCormick, a Republican who as the state’s House majority leader opposed the union during the 2014 vote, said Republicans might worry that the union would support left-wing causes in Tennessee if it took hold there.
“They don’t want to do them any favors,” he said, referring to the state’s Republican leadership, which he predicted would again oppose the union campaign.
As in 2019, the employer’s response can be decisive. The Volkswagen brand seems to be holding its own in the United States and somewhat ahead of the transition to electric vehicles.
More than 11 percent of Volkswagen’s U.S. sales last year came from EVs — specifically the ID.4, a compact sport utility vehicle 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 its production this year will likely be the ID.4, and that the share could double within a decade.
If this happens, the plant may be relatively well positioned to absorb higher labor costs. Corey Cantor, an electric vehicle analyst at BloombergNEF, said continued battery innovation, along with efficiencies from larger-scale battery production, could offset cost increases associated with unionization.
But a union presence could complicate the increase in electric vehicle production, said Mr. Fiorani of AutoForecast Solutions, if the union resists the reduction in workers per car that might accompany the shift. He noted that companies that built their own batteries might be able to redeploy those workers rather than lay them off, however.
Pablo Di Si, chief executive of Volkswagen Group of America, said in a statement that the plant has already added jobs in battery pack assembly and battery engineering.
In 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 silent – it means impartial in what the workers decide.”
The official added that the company would correct misinformation, which the union accuses of spreading, about pay and working conditions at the plant. (Companies that enter into neutrality agreements with unions usually do not intervene in this way.)
Mr Meadows, the union supporter, said managers had expressed skepticism in sometimes subtle ways, such as removing union leaflets from lunch tables.
“Someone pulled out some business cards for a lawn service company and we had some material on the same table,” Mr. Meadows recalled. “Our materials disappeared and the others did not.”
Volkswagen said the cleanliness of the tables is governed by “clear policies”.
