Kim Chandler/AP Photo
Unions across the Bible Belt, including the United Auto Workers, have stacked up a series of recent wins.
Around this time last year, United Steelworkers organizer Alex Perkins went on a livestream following a resounding election win at the electric bus maker Blue Bird’s plant in Fort Valley, Georgia, and delivered a message. “The South got something to say,” he exclaimed, referencing a famous speech by the Atlanta rapper André 3000 from Outkast after winning best new rap group at the 1995 Source Awards.
That line rings even truer today as unions across the Bible Belt have stacked up a series of recent wins. Last month, the United Auto Workers pulled off a major election victory at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which has previously defeated organizing drives with aggressive tactics. Granted, they didn’t manage to capitalize on the momentum and lost an election this month at a Mercedes-Benz site in Alabama. The UAW has formally objected to the results and filed a petition to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) based on alleged intimidation of workers.
But just as important as the Volkswagen vote, there have also been several major first contracts secured this month by newly formed unions in clean-technology sectors critical for the green transition.
A year after winning the election, Blue Bird’s newly unionized Steelworkers finally ratified their first collective-bargaining agreement with an overwhelming 97 percent approval. It guarantees a new, clearly defined wage scale commensurate with job tiers and titles, which had previously been disjointed and opaque, similar to a two-tier wage system. At minimum, most workers will see a 15 percent wage increase over the contract’s three years, while lower-paid workers will get a 40 percent increase, in keeping with the logic of union solidarity. The agreement includes more flexibility for paid vacation days, and the union managed to get a 4 percent profit-sharing component coming out to a minimum of a $500 bonus for workers. In years when the company does well, that pool share of profits will be even higher.
At the electric bus maker New Flyer’s plant in Anniston, Alabama, the International Union of Electrical Workers-Communications Workers of America (IUE-CWA) earlier this month also got a significant contract with around 25 to 35 percent raises by 2026, among other benefits. There’s expanded parental leave, a major cost-of-living adjustment, and restrictions against compulsory overtime. Negotiations were finalized within just four months of the union forming, which New Flyer voluntarily recognized after a card check, forgoing an election—a rare but perhaps indicative example of a Southern company recognizing that fighting their workers isn’t worth the headache and expense.
“Workers here in the South are tired of being thought of just as cheap labor and that’s why we’re starting to see more unions rise up,” said Ryan Masters, a certified fitter/welder at New Flyer in Anniston.
Getting collective-bargaining agreements ratified within this short period of time is no small feat. These contracts come at a time when other unions around the country are facing outright obstruction from employers refusing to ever bargain in good faith, which amounts to a second front of union-busting campaigns. Some unions like at Starbucks are still without a contract over two years after their election. A major legal case brought by Starbucks is making its way through the courts challenging the legitimacy of the NLRB’s authority to police employers’ unfair labor practice tactics, like refusing to bargain or illegally firing union organizers.
The fact that these unions are succeeding in the South, a region that historically sports the lowest union density and most fanatically anti-union companies, is even more impressive. In red “right to work” states such Alabama and Georgia, the deck is still stacked against them given that unions are legally prohibited from negotiating a closed-shop contract, and hence workers can stop paying union dues whenever they see fit. That puts an even higher priority on ensuring that these first contracts clearly raise the bar for workers.
Arriving at these improved collective-bargaining agreements at electric bus makers further underscores the potential for the clean-energy transition to be a catalyst for creating good-paying union jobs.
ONE KEY TAILWIND THESE UNIONS HAVE WORKING in their favor is that heavy-industry sectors typically can’t stave off contract negotiations for as long as other employers. Service and retail companies like Starbucks and REI are banking on the fact that if they can deny a first contract for long enough, high job turnover rates will eventually replace their workforce and leave the union defunct or decertified. Retail stores also have relatively few employees at each of their hundreds or thousands of locations, making it easier to isolate or close down recalcitrant stores.
At manufacturing plants, where job tenure is typically much longer and workforces much larger, these gambits don’t really work, though employers still of course aggressively combat initial union drives. Companies usually have to invest in their employees’ job training, and it’s more common for those workers to stay there for decades.
Historically, certain heavy-industry employers like automakers would just threaten to pick up and move their Southern plants overseas if employees moved to unionize. Volkswagen, for example, did that during a previous UAW organizing drive in Chattanooga back in 2014.
But this obstacle was in large part defanged by the Biden administration’s industrial policy, accompanied by other state and local policy changes. At both the New Flyer and Blue Bird plants, unions were able to leverage their employers’ government contracts to pressure them to cease and desist from their prior anti-union campaigns.
In 2022, Blue Bird received a billion-dollar grant from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean School Bus Program, funded by the bipartisan infrastructure law. It included a union neutrality provision, though a somewhat limited one, that blocked Blue Bird from explicitly using the federal funds to union-bust by, for example, hiring an outside anti-union law firm. Though that is extremely difficult to prove on a company’s balance sheet, organizers for the Steelworkers said it got management to soften their campaign against the union, which didn’t face the same obstruction it had before.
At both the New Flyer and Blue Bird plants, unions were able to leverage their employers’ government contracts to pressure them away from their prior anti-union campaigns.
Some alleged retaliation followed the union victory, including a handful of firings that the company said were unrelated. Workers alleged that managers became stricter on disciplining measures by reinterpreting the employee handbook, and cut their lunch breaks. But union representatives say they worked through that during the contract negotiations and ensured adequate protections against any retaliation. The union would be notified beforehand so they had the opportunity to defend any fired workers moving forward.
The Anniston New Flyer plant was the last remaining site that hadn’t been unionized, and the company initially wanted to keep it that way. Management was hostile to several previous organizing drives, for example holding “captive-audience meetings” in which employees were forced to listen to anti-union propaganda—a classic modern union-busting technique—according to workers.
But in 2022, New Flyer changed their tune when they decided to sign a community benefits agreement (CBA), which is designed in part to hold companies to more equitable hiring practices for historically disadvantaged groups. Through the CBA, New Flyer also pledged to ensure promotions and bonuses would be divided out fairly, and invested in a new job training program so that a broader swath of job candidates could acquire the skills to start entry-level positions.
As part of the CBA, they also agreed to a union neutrality agreement. On the surface, this shift in their attitude toward labor seemingly came out of nowhere. But in reality, a pressure campaign had been playing out behind the scenes against the company. New Flyer ultimately reversed course in part because of a series of legal actions brought by a collection of labor groups led by the nonprofit pro-union group Jobs to Move America.
Jobs to Move America over the years has made it their mission to persuade local and state governments to use their purchasing power to push for better standards for job quality, wages, and domestic sourcing in their contracts for public-transportation orders. New standards set by the Los Angeles Metro authority is one of JMA’s crowning achievements. When employers who are awarded these contracts don’t follow through, JMA will take aggressive legal action, which is what they did against New Flyer, which provides transit buses for Los Angeles.
JMA had reason to believe that New Flyer was failing to adequately pay its workers the wages it had promised in the bidding war to win the L.A. Metro contract, so they swiftly filed a fraud complaint. JMA employed other tactics against New Flyer prior to them agreeing to a community benefits agreement, such as organizing an open letter from New Flyer employees that alleged retaliation and racial bias from the company’s management.
To avert more public relations disasters and further legal actions, among other reasons, New Flyer eventually decided to sign on to the CBA and pledged to be neutral to unions. Another factor may have been that New Flyer was awarded over $200 million in grants from the Federal Transit Administration’s 2023 Low- or No-Emission Buses program, which was bolstered by the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
The CBA paved the way for IUE-CWA to begin organizing workers, and by early 2024 they had a majority of workers on board for a card check, leading to voluntary recognition by New Flyer. When the organizing drive first started, some workers were initially skeptical about being part of a union. But many were convinced after seeing the wage increases guaranteed at neighboring unionized New Flyer plants after their first contracts.
“The money talks … and we’re just happy to have these wage gains inked in writing,” said Ryan Masters, who was originally skeptical about unions but later joined the bargaining committee that brokered the contract.
This is how organized labor has often succeeded throughout American history—with committed organizers fighting on the ground to better the lot of workers with assists from a supportive federal government.
