On January 29, the United Auto Workers (UAW) announced that more than 10,000 workers across 13 non-union automakers have signed union cards since last November, when the union announced an ambitious goal to organize 150,000 autoworkers.
A majority of those who have signed up are located in the South. At Hyundai and Mercedes in Alabama, workers recently crossed the threshold of having 30 percent of their co-workers sign union authorization cards, joining workers at Volkswagen’s assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who reached that milestone last December.
Successfully organizing those plants would be one of the biggest breakthroughs for worker power in nearly a century. In response, the region’s business class—an unholy trinity of company bosses, state politicians, and Washington front groups backed by billionaires—has initiated its counteroffensive, smearing the UAW as an out-of-state special-interest group and fearmongering about job losses.
Until last Friday, auto company managers were employing the predicable yet effective tactics highly paid union avoidance consultants recommend—intimidating workers for distributing union literature at plant gates, trashing their flyers in break rooms, and preventing them from wearing union T-shirts at work. The UAW has filed unfair labor practice charges for these tactics against Rivian, Toyota, Honda, and Volkswagen, which leads the pack with five charges over surveillance, threats, and coercive work rules.
Republicans have consolidated power across all three branches of government in Tennessee, and the political class sees the VW fight as existential.
Compared to the scorched-earth campaigns against organizing drives at Volkswagen in 2014 and 2019, this was relatively timid. But then last week, the National Right to Work Foundation publicly announced an anti-union push, including thousands of messages to workers, after the UAW announced that they’d received union cards from 50 percent of the workforce at the Chattanooga plant, less than 60 days after the union drive had begun.
“Volkswagen workers know who the National Right to Work Foundation is, and who they are run by,” said Zach Costello, a leading organizer at the VW plant, via text message last weekend. “They want to pretend that they have the best interest of the workers at heart, but the truth is that they are just a corporate front group, who wants to tell us what to do, and it’s not going to work.”
The news only stiffened Costello’s resolve to build a union. But Republicans have consolidated power across all three branches of government in Tennessee, and the political class sees the VW fight as existential.
“The left wants Tennessee so bad, because if they get us, the Southeast falls, and it’s game over for the republic,” said state Rep. Scott Cepicky last year in leaked audio from a closed-door meeting of the Tennessee House Republican Caucus. “And the world is staring at us—are we gonna stand our ground?”
YOLANDA PEOPLES, A THIRD-GENERATION AUTOWORKER on Volkswagen’s engine assembly line, still remembers when Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee came to the plant in 2019. “They took us to an all-team meeting,” said Peoples. “Everybody stopped working. He gave this big spiel about why we should not be unionized.”
In 2008, after General Motors shuttered its assembly plant in Doraville, Georgia, Peoples was one of thousands of workers left without a job—a sliver of the 8.8 million jobs that were lost nationwide during the Great Recession. She hired in at Volkswagen in 2011 at starting pay of $14.50 an hour. The company attracted 85,000 applications for 2,000 jobs. UAW membership was a family tradition, so Peoples followed in the footsteps of her African American father and grandfather before her.
Olivia Ross/Chattanooga Times Free Press via AP
Volkswagen made $184 billion in profits over the last decade, according to the UAW.
When a union drive at Volkswagen started in early 2013, Peoples leaped at the opportunity. She saw in a union card a decent paycheck in blue-collar work and the chance to retire with dignity on a pension.
But inside the plant, workers didn’t have much familiarity with the union, and fear saturated the factory, especially once opposition forces gathered and unleashed an onslaught of anti-union attacks. “If you join the UAW, it’ll take money out of your pockets,” Peoples remembered others saying.
Union organizers adopted a top-down approach, leaving workers on the sidelines as mere spectators. The union “was something that was unheard of especially being here in Chattanooga, where it’s a right-to-hire, right-to-fire state,” she said. The UAW had no real organizing happening inside the plant to counter the fear and grow the courage of the workers supporting the union push.
“The people that were pushing for the UAW, it was like we were part of a secret society,” she remembered. “We had to be real hush-hush about it because we didn’t want to get in any trouble with HR because we said the word union. So it was real hard for us to get the word around to our co-workers because of the pressure from management to not have any type of discussions whatsoever about the UAW in the plant.”
At the time, 9 out of 10 workers at the plant were white, and the majority of them men. According to the latest U.S. census estimates, the city of Chattanooga’s population is 184,000, with 59 percent of residents white and 29 percent Black. Racist dog whistles were effective at dividing the workforce. The conservative front group Americans for Tax Reform rented billboards around Chattanooga emblazoned with the message: “UNITED AUTO OBAMA WORKERS.”
Anti-union managers leaned into the closing of the company’s first Volkswagen plant in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, in 1988, blaming the UAW for the closure. Even Volkswagen’s own public-relations manager dismissed “the perception among so many people that organized labor somehow has played a part in our plant’s forthcoming closing. Nothing could be further from the truth.” The plant closed because Volkswagen’s Rabbit wasn’t selling, among other factors.
But Peoples remembered plant managers showing historical footage and sharing articles about the plant shuttering. “When you have an employer telling you, this is the reason why the doors are closed, you tend to believe that until you do your own research.”
State politicians followed the playbook. The UAW’s regional director Gary Casteel played footsie with Republicans, hoping that then-Sen. Bob Corker, Chattanooga’s former mayor, would remain neutral. But Corker didn’t go along with Casteel’s plan. “I’ve had conversations today and based on those am assured that should workers vote against the UAW, Volkswagen will announce in the coming weeks that it will manufacture its new midsize SUV here in Chattanooga,” Corker told the workers. The UAW would lose the election.
The following year, the UAW did win an election to represent 164 skilled trades workers at Chattanooga. Volkswagen never bargained with the workers, and a war of attrition ensued through court filings and a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruling banning micro units in 2017.
In 2019, the UAW again filed for an election, and lost narrowly by 57 votes, outmaneuvered by political and company opposition. At the time, a Justice Department investigation revealed long-standing corruption in the union, including embezzlement, kickbacks, and collusion with employers. More than a dozen union officials went to jail, including two former presidents, after pleading guilty to embezzlement and racketeering charges.
The scandal didn’t win over workers to the side of a fighting union, and became a potent weapon in the hands of opponents.
“When you don’t see something good coming from unions, you assume that they have no purpose,” said Costello. “There was no big worker victory to point to, to get people energized. They only hear about how human rights basically just didn’t exist at the start of the Industrial Revolution, and that unions had to be necessary and are no longer necessary.”
VETERAN LABOR ORGANIZER GENE BRUSKIN, who led a successful union campaign at a Smithfield pork processing plant in North Carolina in 2008, said community support, not top-down tactics, is critical to winning in the South. One of the key aspects of the union victory at Smithfield, he explained, was organizers associating the company’s brand with its treatment of workers inside the plant.
Olivia Ross/Chattanooga Times Free Press via AP
Picketing Chattanooga's Volkswagen plant, December 2023.
“To the degree that the broad community support for workers is public and the company’s brand is identified with oppressing workers, that is essential for getting the company’s attention,” Bruskin said. “That combined with a strong inside campaign, done properly, is almost undefeatable.”
Past losses in Chattanooga came while the union was under the control of the Administration Caucus, which members finally voted out of office last March. The new leaders from the reform caucus, Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), promised a completely different organizing philosophy and practice, based on workers’ own activity at work. Led by union president Shawn Fain, they have embraced creative tactics, militancy, and public battles with auto company CEOs, at a time when automakers are flush with record profits. Volkswagen made $184 billion in profits over the last decade, according to the UAW.
Unlike 2014 and 2019, when the UAW kept workers in the dark about organizing strategy, the union publicly announced its intention to support worker-led organizing drives and laid out the strategy to get there. Once workers reach the threshold of 30 percent on signed union authorization cards, they take their organizing public. At the 50 percent mark, they hold a rally with community and union supporters.
At the 70 percent mark, after workers have grown their organizing committee to include workers from every shift and job classification, they will demand voluntary recognition. If the company refuses, the workers file for an election with the National Labor Relations Board.
This time around, the UAW is working closely with other unions, community-based organizations, churches, and racial justice organizations that have been building organizing infrastructure in Tennessee for years. In December, Fain accompanied a delegation of community and faith leaders as they delivered a letter calling on Volkswagen management to end its union busting.
“These workers at your plant are our neighbors, congregants, family, and friends. We applaud them for having the courage to demand better for themselves and our community,” reads the letter from CALEB (Chattanoogans in Action for Love, Equality and Benevolence), a community and faith coalition advocating for economic justice.
Peoples is ready for the anti-union poison, and is inoculating her co-workers against it. “I just try to prepare them,” she said. “So they’ll be able to notice that ‘Hey, that is one of the tactics that Yolanda had told me about … now I see what Volkswagen is trying to do.’”
One of these tactics she has warned about is the company saying that the factory will close if workers vote for a union. “The biggest fear that most people have is that they don’t have any security,” Peoples said. “And once they start rocking the boat, they’ll just destroy their livelihood.”
In response, she points to investments the company has made and its product commitments and performance. Volkswagen sold 329,029 vehicles in 2023, a 9 percent increase from the previous year, according to industry mouthpiece Automotive News. Next year, it aims to hit 400,000. Workers say the company told them last week it will increase production from 45 to 60 vehicles per hour for the first shift. Workers crank out about 300 vehicles on the first shift even while short-staffed.
“They are getting ready to bring out new models,” Peoples said. “They will not do all this preparation just to pick up and leave. That is enough to tell me that Volkswagen is not going anywhere, union or not.”
WHEN THE UAW SIGNED ITS HISTORIC CONTRACTS with Big Three legacy automakers Ford, GM, and Stellantis, non-union auto companies responded with preemptive wage hikes. Volkswagen offered an 11 percent wage bump. Everyone knew the momentary reprieve wouldn’t last, and the companies would soon try to wallop new organizing drives.
In December, the European and Global Works Council wrote a letter to Tennessee workers, affirming that Volkswagen “is always obliged to maintain absolute neutrality.” The letter went on to say that if the company violated its social charters—which include core standards like the International Labor Organization’s right to organize—it would face the “risk of severe consequences.”
As part of Germany’s postwar co-determination laws, employers have set up works councils, where workers and corporate management sit on supervisory boards. The European and Global Works Councils were created in the 1990s and are part of that network.
VW claimed it remained neutral in the 2014 and 2019 union drives, despite anti-union tactics. To date, the consequences these councils have threatened have yet to materialize. Asked about the letter, Volkswagen’s spokespeople ignored the question, denying any union busting and offering a statement that has been circulated in other media outlets: “We respect our workers’ right to decide the question of union representation. And we remain committed to providing accurate information that helps inform them of their rights and choices.”
“The problem is that employer coercion in the U.S. is an intractable issue: Almost any company that doesn’t have a union and bargaining will do almost anything, lawful or unlawful, to make sure it stays that way,” said John Logan, a professor of labor studies at San Francisco State University.
Even when unions successfully prove that employers engaged in flagrant violations of labor law, the companies face only minor penalties. But the monetary penalties aren’t ineffective only because they are paltry. They are ineffective because the employer’s goal is to drag out cases to blunt the momentum that powers an organizing drive.
Victor Vaughn, an assembly-line worker on the logistics line, said the voluntary organizing committee (VOC) is pursuing a twofold approach. They have workers who are highly visible and confrontational when necessary. “We have VOCs that are really out front passing out handbills,” said Vaughn. “We’re right in the face of everybody—not afraid of anything that’s gonna come down the pike.”
One of the pitfalls of the momentum organizing approach we’ve seen in recent years is that the election becomes the goal.
Another group Vaughn calls the “quiet group” acts as the eyes and ears of the union drive. “Those are the ones that have really helped us get those e-cards signed and helped ease the comfort of those people that don’t really want to be out there in front line, but know that in order for us to make changes that are going to help everyone, we’ve got to stick together.”
One of the pitfalls of the momentum organizing approach we’ve seen in recent years is that the election becomes the goal. But negotiating a first contract has been an uphill battle, with independent union efforts at Starbucks and Amazon locked into bargaining fights that may take years.
That dynamic appears less likely in the auto sector, where there is already union density and an established union. “There’s still a significant number of people within the industry that are unionized, and they can bounce from one company to the other, so that if they’re unable to organize or get decent wage rates at Toyota, they may be able to go to another auto plant,” said Art Wheaton, an automotive industry specialist at Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations School. In Tennessee, Volkswagen workers have to look no further than GM’s Spring Hill union plant, where workers got $12,250 profit-sharing checks.
But inside the plant, a successful union drive also depends on workers acting like a union before they’ve even negotiated a contract. Vaughn describes a committee made up of a core of 70 people in the first shift, and 12 roamers who are the eyes and ears on the shop floor. They are all invested in winning as it’s their campaign, but organizers are working with people who are on the fence, building support through every conversation by moving people closer to the core of the organizing.
IN DECEMBER, VOLKSWAGEN CIRCULATED A NEWS RELEASE called “UAW Myths vs. VW Facts,” challenging statements the union has made, including that company-offered wage bump, after a Big Three strike raised wages at union plants by at least 25 percent.
Lawmakers are contributing to the anti-union cause. Tennessee enshrined right-to-work laws in the state’s constitution in 2022, after voters approved the change by a 2-to-1 margin. Last May, Gov. Lee signed into law a bill that prohibited companies receiving state incentives from recognizing unions by card check (after a majority of workers sign up to affiliate with a union), and instead requiring a secret-ballot election. Workers at Ford’s BlueOval $5.6 billion mega-campus in Stanton are attempting to use card check to organize.
Alabama and South Carolina have related laws on the books. And just last week, Georgia’s Senate voted in favor of a similar bill in the wake of the state’s largest union victory last year at the bus factory Blue Bird. These conservative legislative maneuvers are a response to the NLRB’s Cemex decision, which requires automatic union recognition via majority card check if an employer commits an unfair labor practice so egregious that it would invalidate a union election.
In January, Terry Bowman, a GOP operative who chairs the Koch-backed Institute for the American Worker and trades on his autoworker background at Ford to bust unions, wrote an op-ed in a local Chattanooga newspaper larded with distortions. Bowman claimed that workers at Volkswagen earn an average of more than $84,000 per employee, including bonuses and benefits. He included all of the plant’s 5,500 employees, when the company says only 4,100 hourly workers are eligible to vote for a union. Volkswagen’s own website puts average earnings at $60,000.
Workers at Volkswagen are eyeing a different number: the $28 million the company reportedly spent on a two-minute Super Bowl ad to celebrate its 75th anniversary in the U.S. Asked about how much it spent on the ad, the company refused to confirm the figure, saying “it is important to highlight their hard work and contributions to the company, which is why a Chattanooga employee, putting the finishing touches on the innovative ID.4 [electric vehicle], and our plant are featured in the spot.”
Vaughn’s job involves picking parts from a parts rack, depending on the model of the vehicle it’s going to be put in. The train cart runs on a 1/8-mile track and weighs a couple of hundred pounds. “But as you add parts on to it, the weight increases,” said Vaughn. “There’s a push handlebar where normally you could hold it with two hands. A lot of the carts are missing the push handle, so you have to literally use your left hand to reach over to scan parts on the right because of how the track is laid.”
These twisting motions result in aches and pains. “Every day I go home at night, I wrap my elbow in ice packs and elevate it to try to get the swelling down,” he said.
Vaughn got a $3,000 estimate, about 0.01 percent of that Super Bowl ad, to put absorbent flooring in his work area to lessen the toll of walking on hard concrete and pushing the cart. “That’s fallen on deaf ears,” he said.
Disclosure: Luis Feliz Leon is an associate editor at Labor Notes; former colleagues now work for the UAW.
