Autoworkers union celebrates breakthrough win in Tennessee and takes aim at more plants in the South

DALLAS– The United Auto Workers’ landslide election victory at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee gives the union hope it can make broader inroads in the South, the least unionized part of the country.

The UAW won a whopping 73% of the vote at VW after losing the 2014 and 2019 elections. It was the union’s first victory at a southern assembly plant owned by a foreign automaker.

Union President Shawn Fain said the experts all told him the UAW couldn’t win in the South.

“But you all said, ‘Look at this,’” he told a cheering group of VW organizers at a union building in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Friday evening, as the UAW’s victory was clear. “You are leading the way. We are going to continue this fight at Mercedes and everywhere else.”

However, the UAW will likely face a tougher test as it tries to represent workers at two Mercedes-Benz plants in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Five-day elections are scheduled for May 13, with the union’s campaign already heated.

The UAW has accused the German automaker of violating U.S. and German labor laws with aggressive anti-union tactics, charges the company denies.

“They will face a much tougher road in workplaces where they will face aggressive resistance from management and even resistance from the community than in Chattanooga,” said Harry Katz, a professor of labor relations at Cornell University. “VW management did. not aggressively trying to avoid unionization. Mercedes is going to be a good test. It is the deeper south.”

Late last year, the UAW announced an initiative to represent nearly 150,000 workers in non-union factories, largely in the South. The union is targeting U.S. factories of Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, Subaru, Mazda, Volkswagen, Mercedes, BMW and Volvo, along with factories of electric vehicle makers Tesla, Rivian and Lucid.

The union’s latest defeat at VW in Chattanooga came at a low point — in the middle of a federal investigation into bribery and embezzlement under a previous president.

Marick Masters, a business professor at Wayne State University in Detroit who studies the UAW, said the union flipped the script by installing new leadership, touting the rich contracts it won from Detroit automakers last year after strikes in targeted factories, and by operating an environment that is now more favorable to unions. He said the union was also adept at turning signed pro-union authorization cards into votes — in part by pushing for snap elections.

“Now the public and media eyes will be on Chattanooga and how quickly the UAW can translate this into a contract,” he said. If the union cannot get a good contract quickly, it risks losing some of the momentum it gained from Friday’s election victory, he said.

Unions in other sectors are already organizing campaigns in the South and trying to learn from the UAW’s playbook.

The Association of Flight Attendants, which has tried and failed to win over the cabin crew of Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines, hopes to collect enough signatures to force new elections at Delta by the end of the year . The union’s president, Sara Nelson, said she was not surprised by the UAW’s victory after strikes that led to recording contracts last year.

“I’ve been talking about this for a long time: that strikes and standing up to the boss will boost organizing, and that’s exactly what we saw here,” Nelson said.

Nelson tries to land a top contract with United Airlines, which she can use to woo Delta crews. In the meantime, crews at startup Breeze Airways, many of whom live in the South, will vote next month on whether to join its union.

The White House released a statement from President Joe Biden congratulating the UAW. Biden — who joined a UAW picket line in Michigan last year during the union’s strike against Ford, GM and Stellantis plants — praised the success of unions representing auto workers, Hollywood actors and writers, health care workers and others in obtaining better contracts.

“Together, these union victories have helped raise wages and demonstrated once again that the middle class built America and that unions continue to build and expand the middle class for all workers,” Biden said.

Biden criticized six southern Republican governors, including Bill Lee of Tennessee, who told autoworkers this week that voting for union representation would jeopardize jobs.

Sharon Block, a Harvard University law professor who worked in the Biden Labor Department, said the governors’ warning rang hollow after non-union Tesla revealed it plans to lay off 10% of its workers after disappointing sales. She said VW employees saw the governors’ open letter as “an empty threat and a cynical ploy” and ignored it.

“Workers have been told for a long time that you cannot organize in the South. And many workers, even in the South, may work in industries where they have been told for a long time that you can’t organize,” Block said. “What the UAW showed last night is that we need to reconsider all those negative statements.”

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Associated Press writer Gary Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed to this report.