‘Keeps the momentum’: What the UAW’s Volkswagen win means for its organizing campaign
The United Auto Workers’ organizing victory at Volkswagen AG’s plant in Tennessee is a critical early momentum-builder as the union turns to more auto and battery plants across the South, experts say, but further successes aren’t a foregone conclusion.
The Volkswagen landslide in Chattanooga, where 73% of voting workers backed UAW representation for 4,300 employees there, is a long-sought triumph for the Detroit-based union. Its power and influence had diminished as the Detroit Three’s market share shrunk in the face of increasing foreign competition, it largely failed to add workers of those companies to its ranks and it found itself emerging from a years-long corruption scandal.
The result of that was the rank-and-file voting to institute the direct election of international leaders, ushering in a new administration led by President Shawn Fain that promised greater transparency and vigilance. It came alongside a perfect storm of the COVID-19 pandemic, labor shortages and inflation woes that brought about national sympathies for workers under a Biden White House that vocally expressed its support for unions, even at the picket line. Record contracts at the Detroit Three followed, the enthusiasm from which the UAW sought to bottle and take elsewhere. The VW win, experts said, validated that strategy.
“It was pretty obvious early on we had done really well,” Isaac Meadows, a 14-month employee at VW who helped organize the plant, said about watching the ballot counts come in late Friday night. Early nerves, he said, gave way to excitement as the first few batches showed the UAW was getting about 3-to-1 support.
Still, in some ways, Volkswagen was low-hanging fruit: The UAW knew well the landscape of the Chattanooga plant, having tried to organize workers there twice before and losing by slim margins. It was the only VW plant without some form of employee representation, and the company had pledged not to oppose the campaign. Plus, the UAW already represents autoworkers in Tennessee at General Motors Co.
“It keeps the momentum going,” said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “It helps some of the negative feelings saying, ‘You can’t do that. You can’t do it in the South.’ It’s, ‘No, we can do it in the South. We can do it to a foreign-owned company.’
“But I don’t know that it’s going to be the snowball or domino effect people are talking about,” he added. “It’s still going to be very difficult.”
The union previously had tried organizing Chattanooga. In 2019, VW workers at the plant voted 51.8% against union representation. There also was a narrow defeat in 2014.
The plant was a natural place to try again, especially after the contract gains at the Detroit Three, said Dan Gilmore, a labor attorney who also teaches classes on labor law at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
“It’s obvious with the momentum and credibility they established in negotiations in the fall,” he said, “they were able to parlay that into some great talking points.”
Next on the organizing docket are two Mercedes-Benz Group plants outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Roughly 5,000 workers there will be able to vote May 13-17 on whether to unionize in a National Labor Relations Board-run election. The Vance assembly plant produces SUVs for the current GLE, GLE coupé and GLS model series as well as the all-electric EQS SUV and EQE. The Woodstock battery plant a few miles away provides batteries for the plant’s EQ models.
Meanwhile, organizing its first foreign auto plant in the South will send the union to the bargaining table with VW management. The German automaker issued a statement Friday thanking its workers for voting and didn’t signal it would challenge the results.
“We just shouted,” said Yolanda Peoples, a 13-year VW worker who was a member of the organizing council. “We just leaped in praise. It was exciting. It was unbelievable. I’ve been in this fight for 10 years. We knew we had the numbers, but you never know until you get the results. We’re going to have a little extra pep in our walk in there Monday.”
‘Big win,’ now negotiate
The negotiations likely will bring about conversations over compensation, benefits, tiers and other matters. Fain wasn’t made available by the UAW in time to comment for this story.
“You know and we all know the real fight begins now,” he said in a video after the votes were tallied Friday. “The real fight is getting your fair share, the real fight is to get more time with your families, the real fight is the fight for our union contract.”
Meadows, the autoworker, said his top priorities were better pay, health care, paid time off and addressing certain safety and quality-of-life issues inside the plant.
Darrell Belcher, who’s worked at the plant for 13 years, voted against union representation. He said on Saturday he was disappointed with the results, worrying the automaker could relocate some of its operations out of Tennessee and reduce jobs following the vote. Other auto companies might not want to move to the region, he added, if they know the union has a foothold there.
Following last year’s negotiations with the UAW, Ford Motor Co. CEO Jim Farley suggested the automaker was evaluating its U.S. manufacturing footprint after its most profitable facility, the Kentucky Truck Plant, was the first truck factory to go on strike, despite Ford employing the most UAW members and building all of its full-size trucks in the country.
There’s a lot that has to happen between a union being recognized and a contract. Some workers at companies like Amazon.com Inc. and Starbucks Corp. after years still haven’t seen a first contract. But it wouldn’t be surprising if there’s an agreement at Volkswagen by the end of the year, said Marc Robinson, principal of consultancy MSR Strategy and a former GM internal consultant who was involved in labor negotiations.
“It won’t be an easy negotiation,” he said. “The contracts with the Detroit Three are very thick and have many, many dimensions to them. They have the last contract to start with, and they’re for the most part trying to do tweaks to the last contract rather than completely starting from scratch.”
Workers at the VW plant that makes the Volkswagen ID.4, Atlas and Atlas Cross Sport in early December were the first to launch a public campaign to join the UAW following the union’s strikes last fall against GM, Ford and Stellantis NV. The walkouts ended with four-and-a-half-year agreements promising top production wages to be over $40 per hour by the end of 2027, up from more than $35 today after workers received an immediate 11% hike upon ratification. The deals also included the return of cost-of-living adjustments, a reduced three-year timeline to the top pay and improved retirement contributions.
Following the tentative agreements, several competitors announced changes to pay scales – moves that the UAW said show the importance of employee representation in the industry. As a part of an annual compensation review, top-paid Volkswagen production workers saw an 11% pay increase to $32.40 per hour and the timeline to the top decreased to four years from seven. VW also this year added two unplanned paid time-off days for a total of five.
How far economic matters and other key subjects fall in comparison to the agreements with the Detroit Three could be relevant for future talks, especially regarding when the Volkswagen contract will expire. That will be important to VW, Robinson said.
“I would not have my contract expire anywhere near May 1 or April 30, 2028,” he said. “They certainly don’t want to be a part of the Detroit Three’s (negotiations). First of all, they’ll likely end up out on strike. Secondly, they’ll likely be forced to have the same contracts that the Detroit Three chose. They’re going to want to have their own customized contract. If they get linked up, that will be the major loss for VW.”
Next up: Mercedes and more
For now, it’s hard to overestimate the importance of the UAW’s win in Chattanooga, said Sharon Block, a labor attorney and former member of the National Labor Relations Board during the Obama administration.
“The UAW went into this vote from a position of strength, and they demonstrated strength throughout this campaign,” she said. “And I think that strength is going to radiate out from Chattanooga to the Mercedes plant where we’ll have an election next month.”
Other experts said the UAW shouldn’t assume it will be such a straightforward path to victory at other plants – although they said the Mercedes facilities in Alabama do offer a relatively high chance for success.
Michael Innis-Jiménez, a University of Alabama labor historian and professor of American studies, said workers there have long been seeking to organize their colleagues, efforts that ramped up last fall.
A previous push to unionize the Mercedes workers was scrapped before a vote could be taken in 2014. A UAW presence in the Tuscaloosa area never really left after that, with a union local taking root in the city back then, Innis-Jiménez said.
The organizing itself looks different this time around, he said. Before, UAW officials who came into town from the outside led the effort; now, it’s more grassroots with many Black workers at the facility taking the lead.
“The big difference between this one and the last one is that this has been very rank-and-file,” the professor said. Still, he expects a strong anti-union campaign that will ramp up in the coming weeks, including mailers, billboards – some are already on the highway near the plant – and opposition from conservative politicians.
Robinson noted that VW workers overwhelmingly voted to organize even after Republican governors from six states issued a joint statement last week against the union: “It was completely ineffective. It gave Biden and the Democrats a win.”
The UAW has committed $40 million to organize auto and electric vehicle battery plants through 2026. Still, it’ll be an investment and slog to get a foothold at each plant and each manufacturer – each with different views about unions, and approaches to fending off their encroachment. At some automakers, like Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co., the UAW might be a tough sell because both carmakers have a reputation for compensating workers well.
“It’s going to depend on the multinational corporations,” Wheaton said, “and if they try to block it, and what the tactics or strategies are.”
There may be signs of potential opportunities for the UAW at plants perceived to be a greater challenge, though, Robinson said. As Tesla Inc. mechanics in Sweden strike for a contract, the Texas-based electric vehicle maker is laying off more than 10% of its workforce and has seen its stock drop as EV adoption rates have failed to keep up with industry expectations.
“There may be more interest than before at Tesla,” Robinson said.
Taking advantage of conversations with coworkers during the workday about unionizing played a big part in the successful vote at Volkswagen, Peoples said: “It’s hard when you’re worrying about getting the job done, making a great product and have other concerns.
“We wanted a voice to be able to improve our work conditions and improve our safety that aren’t being addressed. Talk to people you never thought you would to inside the plant. This is our future we’re talking about.”