DALLAS — The United Auto Workers’ frustrating election success at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee is offering the union hope that it can make morecomprehensive inroads in the South, the least unionized part of the nation.
The UAW won a spectacular 73% of the vote at VW after losing elections in 2014 and2019 It was the union’s initially win in a Southern assembly plant owned by a foreign carmanufacturer.
Union President Shawn Fain stated the experts all informed him that the UAW couldn’t win in the South.
“But you all stated, ‘Watch this,’ ” he informed a cheering group of VW organizers at a union hall in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Friday night, when the UAW success was clear. “You guys are leading the method. We’re going to bring this battle on to Mercedes and allover else.”
However, the UAW is mostlikely to face a harder test as it attempts to represent employees at 2 Mercedes-Benz plants in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. A five-day election is setup to start May 13, where the union’s project has currently endedupbeing heatedup.
The UAW hasactually implicated the German carmaker of breaching U.S. and German labor laws with aggressive anti-union methods, which the business rejects.
“They are going to have a much harder roadway in work websites where they are going to face aggressive management resistance and even neighborhood resistance than they dealtwith in Chattanooga,” stated Harry Katz, a labor-relations teacher at Cornell University. “VW management did not strongly lookfor to prevent unionization. Mercedes is going to be a excellent test. It’s the muchdeeper South.”
Late last year, the UAW revealed a drive to represent almost 150,000 employees at non-union factories mainly in the South. The union is targeting U.S. plants run by Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, Subaru, Mazda, Volkswagen, Mercedes, BMW and Volvo, along with factories run by electric-vehicle makers Tesla, Rivian and Lucid.
The union’s last defeat at VW in Chattanooga came at a low-water mark — in the middle of a federal examination into bribery and embezzlement under a previous p