The vote marks a victory for the UAW and organized labor, which has faced years of difficulties organizing factories in southern states. The UAW has previously failed in two attempts to unionize at the VW plant, in 2014 and 2019. The plant will join a handful of other unionized auto factories in the south, where local laws and customs make it difficult for unions to advance.
victory has come After a concerted campaign by local VW workers supported by UAW staff, UAW staff pledged to support the union in their fight for better health care and retirement benefits and more paid time off. , rallied workers to their cause.
The trade union movement also It was a political victory for President Biden, who won the support of the UAW earlier this year and has supported union expansion efforts.
The National Labor Relations Board is expected to release official results later Friday.
“This is a big election,” VW worker Kelsey Smith said in a UAW statement. “People in high places told us that nothing good happens here in Chattanooga. They told us this is not the time to stand up, this is not the place. But we stood up and We have won. The time is now; this is the place. Southern workers are ready to stand up and win a better life.”
The vote will give momentum to the UAW’s ambitious campaign to organize plants for more than a dozen automakers in the South. Like VW, other targets are mainly foreign companies such as Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, and Mercedes. Tesla factories in Texas, Nevada and California have also been targeted.
The UAW has long represented workers at Detroit’s three major automakers (Ford, General Motors and Stellantis), mostly at factories in the Midwest. But union membership has declined sharply over the past few decades, leaving the UAW scrambling for new sources of growth.
The UAW led a strike against the Big Three in Detroit last fall, led by ambitious new union president Sean Fein, and helped win record raises and other perks for workers, parlaying the victory into a new union in the South. We hope to use this to attract union members.
Local “right to work” laws and political and cultural traditions in southern states make union expansion difficult. But some experts say worker attitudes are changing as younger people join the workforce.
A victory in Tennessee would add fuel to the growing momentum of the labor movement across the United States. The NLRB announced earlier this month that the number of petitions for union elections in fiscal year 2024 will increase 35% from the previous year. And after hitting an all-time low during the Great Recession, support for American labor unions has risen to 67 percent, according to a Gallup poll. Last year, workers staged a series of high-profile strikes not only in the auto industry, but also in the healthcare, hotel and entertainment industries.
This victory opens a new door for union membership growth in the United States, which has been in near-steady decline since the 1980s. Last year, just 10% of American workers were unionized, the lowest on record, due in part to explosive labor market growth. Meanwhile, previously non-union companies such as Starbucks, Trader Joe’s and REI are gaining attention, but their first union contracts with workers have yet to be achieved.
