UAW’s Battle for the South Picks Up Steam

The vote was expected to be close, but it wasn’t. Last month, manufacturing workers at the Volkswagen Chattanooga Plant in Tennessee said “yes” to joining the United Autoworkers Union. Of the votes cast, 73% were in favor of unionizing. It was an especially satisfying victory for the UAW after two failed union elections at the plant, in 2014 and 2019.

The victory also further lifted the union’s profile and psyche. The UAW had never before succeeded in unionizing a foreign automaker’s U.S. operations in the South. It’s no accident that most of these automakers—VW, BMW, Hyundai, Nissan, Mercedes—located their U.S. headquarters in union-averse southern states. The few unionized automaker plants in the South belong to Ford and General Motors.

The Southern drumbeat began last fall. After the union’s stand-up strike at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis netted wage gains of 33%, eliminated wage tiers and restored cost of living adjustments lost during the Great Recession, UAW President Shawn Fain, a jeans-and-flannel-wearing electrician whose booming speech voice has a machine-tool rattle, declared that foreign automakers in the South were the union’s next target.

In a more complacent time, Fain might have come off as over the top, but with billionaires being made weekly while workers’ wages stagnate, cracks have widened between leadership and workers.

“Multiple governors have come out and said [unionizing] is bad for the South, it’s bad for the auto industry,” says Melissa Atkins, a labor attorney and partner at the law firm Obermayer Rebmann. In 2014, for example, then-Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam threatened to deny tax breaks to VW if workers joined the union. But this go-round, southern governors’ activism “didn’t really have an effect on those individuals who are working out at the car manufacturers.”

The UAW’s next Southern hurdle is in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where workers at the Mercedes plant are gearing up for a vote May 13-17 to decide whether to join the union.

In the past, despite a core group of about 20 Mercedes plant workers invested in union organizing, the UAW failed to generate enough interest to proceed with a union election. But this time, more than half of Mercedes’ Alabama workers at the plant signed cards pledging union support.

The stakes are even higher for the UAW in Alabama than in Tennessee, said Stephen Silvia, a professor at American University and author of “The UAW’s Southern Gamble,” an examination of the union’s efforts to organize southern workers over time.

“Volkswagen has always been the foreign automaker where the UAW has felt the most confident,” Silvia says. Past elections at the Chattanooga plant have come within a percentage point or two of victory.

With the Mercedes election looming and initiatives growing at other foreign automakers, now is a good time to take stock of what went right for the UAW at Volkswagen. Will that—or other factors—have any bearing on the Mercedes election next week? Some insights areautomaker-specific, yet there are also bigger lessons of value for leaders about treating employees with respect, communicating effectively and compensating them appropriately for their skills.

What Put the UAW Over the Top in Chattanooga

Silvia sees four reasons why the UAW succeeded in Chattanooga where it had failed before.

1. A change in leadership at VW’s joint works council in Germany, which represents workers and has four seats on Volkswagen’s supervisory board.

Different Countries, Different Worker Organizing

German Works Council (Betriebsrat): Employees on a company’s works council are elected to volunteer positions and represent the workforce on issues with management. Works councils operate on a company level, while unions in Germany represent workers at the industry level. Only unions can call strikes and negotiate compensation.

Unions in South Korea: About 14% of South Korea’s workforce is unionized. The nation’s Hyundai Motor Union has about 44,000 members. South Korean unions make the UAW look like the Mercedes works council. They’re militant and tough—old-school Walter Reuther-era UAW types.

Unions in Japan—The relationship between workers unions and company leadership in Japan, like with the workers’ councils in Europe, is more collaborative than adversarial. Although Japanese law permits workers to strike, strikes are very rare.

In 2021, Daniela Cavallo, the daughter of an Italian guest worker and an advocate for parental leave, was named chairperson of the VW works council, replacing Bernd Osterloh, who had publicly said he would not support the UAW’s efforts to organize in Chattanooga. Cavallo “was much more responsive to the UAW when they spoke to her,” says Silvia. “And that resulted in a toning down in Volkswagen’s approach to the whole thing.”

Case in point: In 2019, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee spoke against the union at a mandatory meeting for each shift in the Chattanooga plant, at the plant. This time around, the governor gave a single “Vote no” speech that was not mandatory, and not within the plant. Silvia speculated that the VW worker’s council might have pushed for the muted response.

A day before the union election, however, Lee joined other southern governors in signing a letter saying a “yes” vote compromised jobs and Southern "values."

2. Management’s unwillingness to bend on a vacation policy that workers hated.

The second factor that helped VW unionize “is something that often results in unionization: the way they dealt with paid time off,” says Silvia.

In 2018, Volkswagen Chattanooga implemented a vacation policy that forced workers to take their vacation days during the plant’s annual shutdown, rather than allow them to go with no pay for all or part of the shutdown, and then take vacation days when they wanted.

“That’s what triggered the organizing drives at Volkswagen that happened in 2019,” says Silvia. “And they hadn’t changed that policy.”

“Paid time off was the one that ticked people off the most,” Silvia reiterates. “Back in 2018, when they made the change, 40 people went off the floor in a group and complained. They went up to the personnel manager’s office and said, “Change this policy.”

“The fact that they didn’t fix this, between 2019 and now led people to think, ‘Well, we gave them a chance. They’re not going to change things on their own, so we’ll bring in the UAW.”

3. The UAW shifting from top-down leadership to a decentralized campaign.

Brian Shepherd, the UAW’s new director of organizing, came from the Service Employees International Union. “His experience was organizing in Nevada and in Texas,” says Silvia. “So he’s worked in the South and in the Southwest, and he really has taken a different approach toward organizing than the UAW had previously.”

Shepherd’s approach has been to decentralize the UAW’s organizing power. In the past, says Silvia, “the UAW was pretty top down, and the way they did their organizing drives—they had a model that they stuck to pretty closely. He’s been much more able and willing to go with local people who are the more activists in each place, going with their ideas when they say, ‘We think this would work, or we don’t think this thing that you usually do would work here.’ He’s been pretty flexible around that,” adding that while Shepherd’s plan was in motion at VW, “that’s really paid off the most at the Mercedes plant.”

4. The stand-up strike last fall showed the UAW had real leverage.

“[The strike] showed to workers that the UAW can deliver,” says Silvia. “Before that, when you looked at the UAW, the UAW reps would say our contract is better than what you’re getting paid.”

The old UAW had been focused on giving concessions and settling for lower wage increases in exchange for employment security. New leadership under Fain was different. “In this contract, they could say, we showed that we can get you significantly more than your company is offering you. We did this with the Big Three; we can do this for you. I think that made a huge difference.”

After the Big 3 contracts were set, “the UAW started getting all of these hits of people signing authorization cards, from old organizing drives,” says Silvia. “They had never taken the website down, and all of a sudden they’re getting all these hits from, you know, [Toyota workers in] Georgetown, Kentucky, different places, obviously Mercedes. When they saw that, it was clear that the thinking was, ‘We’ve got a moment here, we’ve got a momentum, so we should act while we have momentum.’”

Why Has Union Support Increased at Mercedes Alabama?

Brett Garrard, a team leader in the battery plant and inbound logistics at Mercedes, Alabama, has worked there 20 years and been involved with union organizing since 2013. “This time we’ve got a little more momentum,” he says. Frustration has been building as Mercedes added wage tiers in 2020, with new hires receiving less, and pay that has not kept up with inflation.

“From a 20-year perspective, the issues are the same,” he says. “We’ve been promised things by the company that haven’t come to fruition. We went nine years at one point with 43 cents total in raises. We weren’t keeping up with the cost of living. Our healthcare benefits have declined over the years—they’re continually getting worse.

“People have heard the same stories year after year, and we just—we’re not drinking the Kool-Aid, so to speak. We’ve seen it before, we’ve heard it before. We’ve decided it’s time to take control of our own destiny and have a voice and the new structure of the UAW is encouraging. And there’s strength in numbers. So we want to be recognized.”

Lee Adler, a labor attorney and lecturer at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR), observed that although employment in automaker plants has historically been touted as “well-paying jobs” in the Deep South, “inflation has nibbled or taken a big chunk out of the advantage of those wages.”

After the stand-up strikes last September, Mercedes announced it was eliminating the wage tiers, but Garrard says the company hasn’t followed through on that promise. Mercedes-Benz U.S. International did not reply to IndustryWeek’s questions about the pay scale, instead responding with a statement:

MBUSI fully respects our Team Members’ choice whether to unionize and we look forward to participating in the election process to ensure every Team Member has a chance to cast their own secret-ballot vote, as well as having access to the information necessary to make an informed choice.

Silvia said that some at the Tuscaloosa plant also remain unhappy that Mercedes did not rehire employees that were laid off during the Great Recession.

“And there are more recent things. It used to be Mercedes paid compensation that was pretty close to the UAW contract. But they’ve let that slide in recent years..” And the two-tier pay structure instituted in 2020 “aggravated a lot of employees.” Mercedes got rid of the tiered wages after the UAW stand-up strike at the Detroit 3 automakers last fall, “but the damage was already done.”

Garrard said the employee-driven campaign this time has made a big difference. “Organizers from the UAW are there to support us, to give us information, give us guidance. But as far as all of the legwork and the faces that our employees and our co-workers see, it’s us. It’s not the UAW. They are supporting agents in helping us to form our union.”

What Is the UAW up against in Alabama?

“The political establishment has come down harder in Alabama than in Tennessee,” says Silvia, yet union representation is actually higher in Alabama—8.6%, compared to Tennessee’s 5.6% and South Carolina’s 3%.

“There’s sort of a continuum when you look at the South,” Silvia adds. “Alabama is farther south. Alabama has a more active political establishment, but on the other hand Alabama does have some tradition of unionization, when steel was strong there in Birmingham. Those plants were unionized. Most of them are gone. But there are pockets of unionization.”

Mercedes, like Volkswagen, has a workers council in Germany, but its council is less empowered than Volkswagen’s. “At VW, the work council, they were influencing things,” Silvia says. “But at Mercedes, if anything the work council’s trying, but management has not been responsive. They’ve taken more of a traditional anti-union campaign set of measures and are coming down harder.

“We’ll see the extent to which that then influences workers,” he adds. “Some people react badly to that; some people go along with management. The one thing that I would say is even more pronounced that would suggest a union success [at Mercedes] would be the number of things that the Mercedes management has done to aggravate employees has been more than Volkwswagen.”

Garrard named a few of those aggravations. (Mercedes was given an opportunity to respond but has not).

When workers distribute union materials on their breaks, management will “come through our break area and snatch them off the tables, wad them up and throw them in the trash.”
“We have to sit and watch anti-union campaign videos every day after we clock in. ‘The lesson of the day’ is what my group leader calls it, and it’d be anything from, ‘If you join the union or if a union comes in here, your shop steward will know your health and your medical records’—false things like that. Or, ‘Here’s how much union dues will cost you. Do you really want to pay union dues?’ And at the bottom of every slide of every video, it says, ‘If you don’t want the union, Vote No.’
Morale on the shop floor “is at an all-time low. Everyone is so tired, it’s like banging your head against the wall,” Garrad says. “You want [the meetings] to stop, but you have to sit through it. They’re doing face-to-face captive audience meetings with anti-union propaganda. They’re doing private one-on-ones.”

Garrard said the five-minute pre-shift meeting covering daily activities at the plant that was once conducted by the group leader is now conducted by a higher-level manager. “Management has taken a very aggressive stance, as far as even out on the production floor going from station to station, pulling people off site and asking them, ‘How are you going to vote?’”

The harder the company pushes against the UAW, the more support Garrard senses from his co-workers. “On the 17th, when the votes are tallied, my comment would be, ‘Do you hear us now?’”