TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — The United Auto Workers union dealswith the newest test of its enthusiastic strategy to unionize vehicle plants in the traditionally nonunion South when a vote ends Friday at 2 Mercedes-Benz factories near Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
The ballot at the 2 Mercedes factories — one an assembly plant, the other a battery-making center — comes a month after the UAW scored a development success at Volkswagen’s assembly factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In that election, VW employees voted extremely to signupwith the UAW, drawn by the possibility of considerably greater earnings and other advantages.
The UAW had little success before then recruiting at nonunion car plants in the South, where employees haveactually been much less drawn to arranged labor than in the conventional union fortress of Michigan and other commercial Midwest states.
A triumph at the Mercedes plants would represent a big plum for the union, which has long hadahardtime to gottenridof the temptations that Southern states haveactually bestowed on foreign carmanufacturers, consistingof tax breaks, lower labor expenses and a nonunion laborforce.
Some Southern guvs have cautioned that ballot for union subscription might, over time, expense employees their tasks duetothefactthat of the greater expenses that the vehicle business would have to bear.
Yet the UAW is operating from a morepowerful position than in the past. Besides its triumph in Chattanooga, it accomplished generous brand-new agreements last fall after striking versus Detroit Big 3 carmanufacturers: General Motors, Stellantis and Ford. Workers there got 33% pay raises in agreements that will end in 2028.
Top-scale production employees at GM, who now make about $36 an hour, will make almost $43 an hour by the end of their agreement, plus yearly profit-sharing checks. Mercedes hasactually increased leading production employee pay to $34 an hour, a relocation that some employees state was planned to fend off the UAW.
Shortly after employees validated the Detroit agreement, UAW P