{"id":33075,"date":"2024-04-20T13:19:56","date_gmt":"2024-04-20T20:19:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=33075"},"modified":"2024-04-20T13:19:57","modified_gmt":"2024-04-20T20:19:57","slug":"a-great-labor-explosion-will-auto-workers-unionize-in-trump-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2024\/04\/20\/a-great-labor-explosion-will-auto-workers-unionize-in-trump-country\/","title":{"rendered":"A Great Labor Explosion: Will Auto Workers Unionize in Trump Country?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Workers at a Volkwagon factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, are now voting on whether to join the United Auto Workers (UAW). Is this the restart of a unionized nation?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
MATT STOLLER<\/a> APR 19, 2024 (mattstoller@substack.com)<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you\u2019d like to sign up to receive issues over email, you can do so here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today I\u2019m featuring a piece by a labor journalist named Mike Elk on a union organizing movement happening right now at a Volkswagen auto plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. There\u2019s a vote happening this week, and it\u2019s a big deal. If workers approve a union in Chattanooga, it would be an \u201cearthquake\u201d in industrial relations, the first auto factory unionized in the South, and potentially lead to a restructuring of the industry nationwide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The political stakes are high, with an emphasis on culture from the anti-union side. Six state governors are attacking<\/a> the union organizing campaign as a threat to \u201cliberty and freedoms<\/a>,\u201d and the company itself is telling<\/a> the workers in a very conservative Republican area that the \u201cUAW = Biden,\u201d and that the union will \u201cturn Chattanooga into Detroit.\u201d There have been two failed attempts to unionize this factory, one in 2014 and one in 2019, but this one is more likely to succeed, because it comes on the heels of a recent successful strike by the United Auto Workers (UAW) against the big three domestic automakers late last year which raised their wages dramatically and forced the reopening of certain plants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The backstory here is all about market structure. The three big domestic auto producers in the U.S., Ford, GM, and Stellantis, are unionized, but have been slowly shedding union workers over the decades through a variety of tactics. The rest of the industry, which includes foreign makers Mercedes, BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Mazda, Nissan, Subaru, Toyota, and Volvo, as well the three US-based electric vehicle makers, Tesla, Rivian and Lucid, are not. So the question now is whether the UAW can extend its reach to them. The auto industry is a pace-setter for industrial and labor relations, so whether it will be a low wage\/low productivity or high wage\/high productivity model matters. And all of these fights are happening in the context of a world-class, extremely efficient and highly subsidized Chinese EV industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what about the workers themselves? Elk covered the organizing campaigns in Chattanooga in both 2014 and in 2019, and while he\u2019s vehemently pro-union, he\u2019s also honest about what workers think about labor organizing. In this piece, Elk discusses the change in the environment since the last campaign to unionize the factory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why am I featuring something on unions? There are two reasons. The first is that antitrust and labor are intrinsically linked. Both come from the same source, the 19th century notion that Americans should be able to enjoy the \u2018fruits of their labor,\u2019 unencumbered by monopoly or financial power. Antitrust is about allowing or breaking the unionization of capital, labor law is about allowing or breaking the unionization of workers. Market structure is the combination of the two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second is that the same change in political economic thinking has hit both areas, a shift from fear to possibility. In 2019, I wrote a piece on this link titled the \u2018Wave of Terror in American Commerce<\/a>,\u2019 in which I described how fear of retaliation is the pervasive dynamic among business people and workers. Venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, travel sites, and chicken farmers all understood that the government doesn\u2019t have their back. The biggest example of this dynamic was when workers in this Tennessee Volkswagen plant voted down the chance to join a union, because they were told that the auto firm would simply shutter the plant if they voted yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This environment of fear had traditionally been addressed through antitrust law. As Congressman Emanuel Celler wrote in the 1950s, \u201cUnder our ancient common law your neighbor must not point a gun at you, even though he has never shot anyone. Similarly, our antitrust laws were intended to protect businessmen not only from violence but from fear of violence.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s exciting about this moment is that there is increasing public action to take on dominant power. Since that 2019 article, the government has initiated monopolization cases against four separate trillion dollar firms, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta. It is likely to go at Ticketmaster soon. There\u2019s industrial policy to reconstruct domestic industry, halting though it is. Subsidies for producing in the U.S. make it harder to shut down factories like those in Chattanooga. And while Joe Biden is the first President to walk a picket line, Donald Trump is also arguing for a different model to protect auto workers. No one is saying that offshoring these jobs is inevitable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that\u2019s making waves in Tennessee. With that, here\u2019s Elk\u2019s reporting on the union organizing campaign and the vote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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After Ten-Year Battle, a Younger Generation Leads the Way at Volkswagen<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

By Mike Elk, cross-posted from the Payday Report<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE \u2013 Ten years ago, Angelo Hernandez\u2019s father was involved in the union drive at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga. That effort narrowly failed, but a decade later, the son may be able to achieve his father\u2019s dream.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe was the one who, like, told me about the union before I was even in this job,\u201d says the 20-year-old Hernandez.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the current union drive got started late last year, his dad started pushing him to get involved. \u201cI\u2019m here and I\u2019m gonna go for it right now,\u201d Angelo says he told his dad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more than a decade, workers have fought, argued, and tried to persuade their colleagues to join a union. After the first loss at this Volkswagen plant in 2014, the United Auto Workers even established a minority union<\/a>, Local 42.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in two prior union elections in Chattanooga, the UAW was unable to move the needle enough to win, losing the first time, 626-712<\/a>, and on a second try in 2019, 776-833<\/a>. The U.S. remains the only country in the world where Volkswagen workers are non-union.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Failures of 2014 and 2019<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In 2014, when the UAW first tried for an election, anti-union forces put up recent concessions by the UAW as evidence that Volkswagen had little reason to unionize. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As part of the auto bailout in 2009, new hires under UAW contracts at GM made $16.50 an hour. During the 2014 UAW election, new non-union assembly line workers at Volkswagen started at $14.50 an hour<\/a>, which, with cost-of-living differences between Tennessee and the Midwest factored in, is arguably slightly higher. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat the UAW is offering, we can already do without them,\u201d anti-union Volkswagen worker Mike Burton, who created<\/a> the website for the \u201cNo 2 UAW\u201d campaign, told me in 2014. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The union ultimately lost that vote in 2014 by a narrow margin. As I wrote for the New York Times at the time<\/a>, \u201cMany Chattanooga workers had trouble seeing the upside of joining the U.A.W.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2019, when the UAW tried for a union election again, the organization felt much more optimistic. However, at the time, the UAW was accused in the press of corruption charges as several senior officials had already pled guilty to accepting bribes from their employers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hammered with captive audience anti-union meetings and hundreds of thousands of dollars in TV ads highlighting corruption, the union once again narrowly lost. \u201cThere was actually a corruption scandal with UAW,\u201c says 34-year-old Volkswagen worker Zach Costello. \u201cAll you would hear about is corruption, corruption, corruption.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few months after the election, several of its top leaders, including UAW President Gary Jones, were arrested for accepting bribes from employers, validating the distrust many Volkswagen workers had of the UAW. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The federal government would eventually intervene and force the UAW to accept a consent decree that opened space for union reformers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As part of the consent decree, the UAW was forced to hold a referendum on whether rank-and-file members should be allowed to vote directly for the UAW\u2019s president or elect a president through a complex and opaque system of delegates, which the UAW had used for 80 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

UAW members voted overwhelmingly to have their president directly elected by referendum. In 2023, reformer Shawn Fain was elected president, defeating incumbent Ray Curry, the first time an incumbent president had been defeated in the history of the UAW. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fain immediately moved to take the union on a more militant footing. In September of 2023, Fain led his union in a series of escalating strikes against factories owned by all of the Big Three, the first time in the history of the UAW that the union had struck at all three automakers simultaneously. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The union won impressive wage gains of at least 25% at all three big employers. The union then decided to use that momentum to launch an ambitious $40 million organizing effort at non-union auto manufacturers in the U.S. South. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Non-union employers responded frantically, with Volkswagen offering workers an 11% wage increase this year in the hopes of fighting off a union drive there. It wasn\u2019t enough to dissuade workers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A New Hope<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Things really began to change at the factory in 2022, when Volkswagen expanded the plant to produce the all-electric ID.4. In the process, the company hired over 2,000 new workers. With labor shortages throughout the manufacturing sector, many of the workers hired by Volkswagen were much younger and more diverse. Some had even moved from more pro-union parts of the country to work there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While in the past, Volkswagen workers, who had less experience with unions, were skeptical of the bureaucracies of the scandal-tainted UAW, younger Southern workers seemed more receptive to trying something new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI just hope it goes through,\u201d says 25-year-old Manny Perez. \u201cAnd I\u2019m not well informed about it. I just know. Being able to have a voice of your own is more important than just letting other people decide for you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the last decade, there has been a sea change among workers at Volkswagen\u2019s Chattanooga plant, in large part due to this newer, younger workforce. It could lead to a historic victory in the union election, which concludes today, and the signature victory for organized labor in the South that has eluded them for years. Votes will be tallied this evening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA lot of the people who\u2019ve been staunchly anti-union are from an older generation,\u201d says 32-year-old Caleb Michalski, a safety lead, who has worked on various assembly teams at the Volkswagen plant. \u201cA lot of the younger generation, through a combination of social media and education and stuff like that, they realize, like, hey, it doesn\u2019t make sense.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition, threats to shut down the plant if it unionized have been nullified in part because of new industrial policy choices. Dave Dayen at The American Prospect<\/em> has argued<\/a> that Biden\u2019s new EPA emission rules force employers to produce more electric cars, limiting threats that Volkswagen would close the plant. \u201cWe are growing, and a lot more people can smell the BS now when they say that,\u201d says Volkswagen worker Zach Costello. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no way they can shut that factory down,\u201d Corey Cantor, Senior Associate for electric vehicles at BloombergNEF, told Dayen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fake Neutrality<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Volkswagen has claimed to be neutral in each campaign at the Tennessee plant. But under the radar, they have fought the union, while linking arms with leading politicians<\/a>, who repeatedly warned that the plant would close or lose shifts. Southern governors are trying the same tactics this time around, signing a joint statement<\/a> expressing alarm at the UAW campaign here and elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2019, Volkswagen fired or transferred several unpopular shop floor managers, and brought back a popular plant manager, Frank Fisher, who promised to make things better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen I first started it was January 2020, immediately after the last election, and it was when, you know, the plant manager said, \u2018Hey, let\u2019s fix this in-house,\u2019\u201d says Michalski. \u201cAnd they made a lot of changes. And so when I first started, right at the beginning of that first wave of changes, I was impressed by it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said that the receptiveness of management made him believe that it was possible to get problems at work addressed without a union.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBefore, I was always like, \u2018Well maybe the right people just don\u2019t know,\u2019\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, as a safety lead, Michalski found himself frustrated in his efforts to get issues addressed within the plant. Volkswagen regularly requires him and his co-workers to lift vehicles, which can weigh over 700 or 800 pounds, and sometimes as much as 1,400 pounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For nearly a year, he begged Volkswagen to get a hoist. They took little action, while many members of his team got hurt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI hurt my back in November, I\u2019ve been having chronic pain for the last month, I can barely turn my head and neck,\u201d says Michalski. \u201cEvery single one of us have gotten injured. We\u2019ve had two guys that had to have shoulder surgeries, a third one that\u2019s going to have to have shoulder surgery, and one guy shattered his kneecap.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Michalski finally had to talk to the CEO of Volkswagen America to get a hoist approved. But weeks later, the hoist still hasn\u2019t been installed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI shouldn\u2019t have to talk to the CEO of a multibillion-dollar corporation just to get a hoist,\u201d says Michalski. \u201cI think that we need the ability to say, \u2018Hey, this process is unsafe.\u2019 And that\u2019s it, not having to argue for weeks and weeks, and weeks of meetings to say like, \u2018Hey, we need a hoist.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to the decade-long battle to win hearts and minds at the plant, Volkswagen workers also say that the success of the \u201cStand Up Strike\u201d at the Big Three U.S. automakers helped spur interest in the union.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou have strike after strike happening around the country. You had the writers, the actors, and then UAW followed up,\u201d says Volkswagen worker Zach Costello, speaking of the \u201cSummer of Strikes\u201d last year. \u201cAnd then you had the big contract [UAW] got. That, like, sparked an insane amount of discussion around unions all around the plant.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the closing days of the campaign, workers say that Volkswagen\u2019s anti-union tactics are having little effect on dissuading them. Due to the influence of German labor law, the company has not yet engaged in anti-union \u201ccaptive audience\u201d meetings or one-on-one discussions, which can be lethal in killing union support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, anti-union forces at Volkswagen have largely focused on TV and online ads attempting to tie the UAW election to President Biden, who is unpopular in this red state, though perhaps not entirely at the plant. Near the entrance to the plant sits a banner that reads: \u201cBack Biden, Vote UAW.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In recent days, local TV ads and billboards have been blasting the UAW with messages like \u201cUAW = Biden.\u201d The union has endorsed Biden, who walked the picket line during the Big Three Stand Up Strike. In an official statement<\/a> that the union has sent to its members, Biden congratulated workers in Chattanooga for the union drive. \u201cAs one of the world\u2019s largest automakers, many Volkswagen plants internationally are unionized,\u201d Biden said in the statement. \u201cAs the most pro-union president in American history, I believe American workers, too, should have a voice at work. The decision whether to join a union belongs to the workers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ads are warning members repeatedly that their dues money will be spent on helping Biden\u2019s re-election campaign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cUAW membership nationwide is at its lowest point since 2009. Maybe the UAW should care more about its members than politics?\u201d said<\/a> anti-union groups in online ads blanketing Chattanooga.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the Volkswagen plant located in \u201cTrump country\u201d in eastern Tennessee, UAW activists have responded by distancing themselves from the political function of their union. \u201cThis vote is not about politics,\u201d Volkswagen worker Isaac Meadows told the Prospect<\/em> in an interview. \u201cThis vote is about the workers \u2026 standing up for themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Bandwagon?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Electing the UAW could inspire workers at other plants in the South to unionize. The UAW has announced that a majority of workers at Mercedes in Alabama have signed up to join the union. Public union campaigns have also been launched at Hyundai in Montgomery, Alabama, and Toyota in Troy, Missouri. Unlike previous union campaigns, where Volkswagen union organizers felt isolated, now they feel like they are part of a nationwide campaign. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s helpful that this Volkswagen unionization effort is happening after the pandemic. According to Gallup<\/a>, in 2014, only 53% of Americans said they had positive views of unions.  During the pandemic, the popularity of unions skyrocketed, as workers went on more than 3,000 strikes<\/a> since the beginning of the pandemic, according to Payday Report\u2019s Strike Tracker. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following the pandemic, union popularity is at a near-record high<\/a>, with 67% of Americans approving of unions, according to Gallup. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vanderbilt University sociology professor Josh Murray, who has spent years studying unionizing efforts in the South, thinks that a win at Volkswagen could create a domino effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn social movement theory there is the idea of the \u2018politics of the possible,\u2019 which says movement success breeds future movement success because it mobilizes people by giving them evidence that winning is possible,\u201d says Murray. \u201cApplied to the UAW, the huge victory in the strikes against GM, Ford, and Stellantis makes victory at Volkswagen more likely, and a victory at Volkswagen would make further victories at currently non-unionized plants more likely.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the closing days of the third UAW election at Volkswagen in a decade, that hope is evident among workers and organizers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs far as workers reclaiming our power, it starts with us,\u201d says Michalski. \u201cAnd if we can be the first to start bringing organized labor to good-paying jobs with workers who have rights here in the South, I\u2019m all for it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Thanks for reading! Your tips make this newsletter what it is, so please send me tips on weird monopolies, stories I\u2019ve missed, or other thoughts. And if you liked this issue of BIG, you can sign up here<\/a> for more issues, a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation, and democracy. Consider becoming a paying subscriber<\/a> to support this work, or if you are a paying subscriber, giving a gift subscription<\/a> to a friend, colleague, or family member. If you really liked it, read my book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

cheers,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Matt Stoller<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Upgrade to paid Workers at a Volkwagon factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, are now voting on whether to join the United Auto Workers (UAW). Is this the restart of a unionized nation? MATT STOLLER APR 19, 2024 (mattstoller@substack.com) Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you\u2019d… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33075"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33075"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33076,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33075\/revisions\/33076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}