A Great Labor Explosion: Will Auto Workers Unionize in Trump Country?

Workers at a Volkwagon factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, are now voting on whether to join the United Auto Workers (UAW). Is this the restart of a unionized nation?

---

Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’d like to sign up to receive issues over email, you can do so here.

Today I’m featuring a piece by a labor journalist named Mike Elk on a union organizing movement happening right now at a Volkswagen auto plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. There’s a vote happening this week, and it’s a big deal. If workers approve a union in Chattanooga, it would be an “earthquake” in industrial relations, the first auto factory unionized in the South, and potentially lead to a restructuring of the industry nationwide.

The political stakes are high, with an emphasis on culture from the anti-union side. Six state governors are attacking the union organizing campaign as a threat to “liberty and freedoms,” and the company itself is telling the workers in a very conservative Republican area that the “UAW = Biden,” and that the union will “turn Chattanooga into Detroit.” There have been two failed attempts to unionize this factory, one in 2014 and one in 2019, but this one is more likely to succeed, because it comes on the heels of a recent successful strike by the United Auto Workers (UAW) against the big three domestic automakers late last year which raised their wages dramatically and forced the reopening of certain plants.

The backstory here is all about market structure. The three big domestic auto producers in the U.S., Ford, GM, and Stellantis, are unionized, but have been slowly shedding union workers over the decades through a variety of tactics. The rest of the industry, which includes foreign makers Mercedes, BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Mazda, Nissan, Subaru, Toyota, and Volvo, as well the three US-based electric vehicle makers, Tesla, Rivian and Lucid, are not. So the question now is whether the UAW can extend its reach to them. The auto industry is a pace-setter for industrial and labor relations, so whether it will be a low wage/low productivity or high wage/high productivity model matters. And all of these fights are happening in the context of a world-class, extremely efficient and highly subsidized Chinese EV industry.

But what about the workers themselves? Elk covered the organizing campaigns in Chattanooga in both 2014 and in 2019, and while he’s vehemently pro-union, he’s also honest about what workers think about labor organizing. In this piece, Elk discusses the change in the environment since the last campaign to unionize the factory.

Why am I featuring something on unions? There are two reasons. The first is that antitrust and labor are intrinsically linked. Both come from the same source, the 19th century notion that Americans should be able to enjoy the ‘fruits of their labor,’ unencumbered by monopoly or financial power. Antitrust is about allowing or breaking the unionization of capital, labor law is about allowing or breaking the unionization of workers. Market structure is the combination of the two.

The second is that the same change in political economic thinking has hit both areas, a shift from fear to possibility. In 2019, I wrote a piece on this link titled the ‘Wave of Terror in American Commerce,’ in which I described how fear of retaliation is the pervasive dynamic among business people and workers. Venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, travel sites, and chicken farmers all understood that the government doesn’t have their back. The biggest example of this dynamic was when workers in this Tennessee Volkswagen plant voted down the chance to join a union, because they were told that the auto firm would simply shutter the plant if they voted yes.

This environment of fear had traditionally been addressed through antitrust law. As Congressman Emanuel Celler wrote in the 1950s, “Under our ancient common law your neighbor must not point a gun at you, even though he has never shot anyone. Similarly, our antitrust laws were intended to protect businessmen not only from violence but from fear of violence.”

What’s exciting about this moment is that there is increasing public action to take on dominant power. Since that 2019 article, the government has initiated monopolization cases against four separate trillion dollar firms, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta. It is likely to go at Ticketmaster soon. There’s industrial policy to reconstruct domestic industry, halting though it is. Subsidies for producing in the U.S. make it harder to shut down factories like those in Chattanooga. And while Joe Biden is the first President to walk a picket line, Donald Trump is also arguing for a different model to protect auto workers. No one is saying that offshoring these jobs is inevitable.

And that’s making waves in Tennessee. With that, here’s Elk’s reporting on the union organizing campaign and the vote.

After Ten-Year Battle, a Younger Generation Leads the Way at Volkswagen

By Mike Elk, cross-posted from the Payday Report

CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE – Ten years ago, Angelo Hernandez’s father was involved in the union drive at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga. That effort narrowly failed, but a decade later, the son may be able to achieve his father’s dream.

“He was the one who, like, told me about the union before I was even in this job,” says the 20-year-old Hernandez.

When the current union drive got started late last year, his dad started pushing him to get involved. “I’m here and I’m gonna go for it right now,” Angelo says he told his dad.

For more than a decade, workers have fought, argued, and tried to persuade their colleagues to join a union. After the first loss at this Volkswagen plant in 2014, the United Auto Workers even established a minority union, Local 42.

But in two prior union elections in Chattanooga, the UAW was unable to move the needle enough to win, losing the first time, 626-712, and on a second try in 2019, 776-833. The U.S. remains the only country in the world where Volkswagen workers are non-union.

The Failures of 2014 and 2019

In 2014, when the UAW first tried for an election, anti-union forces put up recent concessions by the UAW as evidence that Volkswagen had little reason to unionize. 

As part of the auto bailout in 2009, new hires under UAW contracts at GM made $16.50 an hour. During the 2014 UAW election, new non-union assembly line workers at Volkswagen started at $14.50 an hour, which, with cost-of-living differences between Tennessee and the Midwest factored in, is arguably slightly higher. 

“What the UAW is offering, we can already do without them,” anti-union Volkswagen worker Mike Burton, who created the website for the “No 2 UAW” campaign, told me in 2014. 

The union ultimately lost that vote in 2014 by a narrow margin. As I wrote for the New York Times at the time, “Many Chattanooga workers had trouble seeing the upside of joining the U.A.W.” 

In 2019, when the UAW tried for a union election again, the organization felt much more optimistic. However, at the time, the UAW was accused in the press of corruption charges as several senior officials had already pled guilty to accepting bribes from their employers. 

Hammered with captive audience anti-union meetings and hundreds of thousands of dollars in TV ads highlighting corruption, the union once again narrowly lost. “There was actually a corruption scandal with UAW,“ says 34-year-old Volkswagen worker Zach Costello. “All you would hear about is corruption, corruption, corruption.” 

A few months after the election, several of its top leaders, including UAW President Gary Jones, were arrested for accepting bribes from employers, validating the distrust many Volkswagen workers had of the UAW. 

The federal government would eventually intervene and force the UAW to accept a consent decree that opened space for union reformers.

As part of the consent decree, the UAW was forced to hold a referendum on whether rank-and-file members should be allowed to vote directly for the UAW’s president or elect a president through a complex and opaque system of delegates, which the UAW had used for 80 years.

UAW members voted overwhelmingly to have their president directly elected by referendum. In 2023, reformer Shawn Fain was elected president, defeating incumbent Ray Curry, the first time an incumbent president had been defeated in the history of the UAW. 

Fain immediately moved to take the union on a more militant footing. In September of 2023, Fain led his union in a series of escalating strikes against factories owned by all of the Big Three, the first time in the history of the UAW that the union had struck at all three automakers simultaneously. 

The union won impressive wage gains of at least 25% at all three big employers. The union then decided to use that momentum to launch an ambitious $40 million organizing effort at non-union auto manufacturers in the U.S. South. 

Non-union employers responded frantically, with Volkswagen offering workers an 11% wage increase this year in the hopes of fighting off a union drive there. It wasn’t enough to dissuade workers. 

A New Hope

Things really began to change at the factory in 2022, when Volkswagen expanded the plant to produce the all-electric ID.4. In the process, the company hired over 2,000 new workers. With labor shortages throughout the manufacturing sector, many of the workers hired by Volkswagen were much younger and more diverse. Some had even moved from more pro-union parts of the country to work there.

While in the past, Volkswagen workers, who had less experience with unions, were skeptical of the bureaucracies of the scandal-tainted UAW, younger Southern workers seemed more receptive to trying something new.

“I just hope it goes through,” says 25-year-old Manny Perez. “And I’m not well informed about it. I just know. Being able to have a voice of your own is more important than just letting other people decide for you.”

Over the last decade, there has been a sea change among workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant, in large part due to this newer, younger workforce. It could lead to a historic victory in the union election, which concludes today, and the signature victory for organized labor in the South that has eluded them for years. Votes will be tallied this evening.

“A lot of the people who’ve been staunchly anti-union are from an older generation,” says 32-year-old Caleb Michalski, a safety lead, who has worked on various assembly teams at the Volkswagen plant. “A lot of the younger generation, through a combination of social media and education and stuff like that, they realize, like, hey, it doesn’t make sense.”

In addition, threats to shut down the plant if it unionized have been nullified in part because of new industrial policy choices. Dave Dayen at The American Prospect has argued that Biden’s new EPA emission rules force employers to produce more electric cars, limiting threats that Volkswagen would close the plant. “We are growing, and a lot more people can smell the BS now when they say that,” says Volkswagen worker Zach Costello. 

“There’s no way they can shut that factory down,” Corey Cantor, Senior Associate for electric vehicles at BloombergNEF, told Dayen. 

Fake Neutrality

Volkswagen has claimed to be neutral in each campaign at the Tennessee plant. But under the radar, they have fought the union, while linking arms with leading politicians, who repeatedly warned that the plant would close or lose shifts. Southern governors are trying the same tactics this time around, signing a joint statement expressing alarm at the UAW campaign here and elsewhere.

In 2019, Volkswagen fired or transferred several unpopular shop floor managers, and brought back a popular plant manager, Frank Fisher, who promised to make things better.

“When I first started it was January 2020, immediately after the last election, and it was when, you know, the plant manager said, ‘Hey, let’s fix this in-house,’” says Michalski. “And they made a lot of changes. And so when I first started, right at the beginning of that first wave of changes, I was impressed by it.”

He said that the receptiveness of management made him believe that it was possible to get problems at work addressed without a union.

“Before, I was always like, ‘Well maybe the right people just don’t know,’” he says.

However, as a safety lead, Michalski found himself frustrated in his efforts to get issues addressed within the plant. Volkswagen regularly requires him and his co-workers to lift vehicles, which can weigh over 700 or 800 pounds, and sometimes as much as 1,400 pounds.

For nearly a year, he begged Volkswagen to get a hoist. They took little action, while many members of his team got hurt.

“I hurt my back in November, I’ve been having chronic pain for the last month, I can barely turn my head and neck,” says Michalski. “Every single one of us have gotten injured. We’ve had two guys that had to have shoulder surgeries, a third one that’s going to have to have shoulder surgery, and one guy shattered his kneecap.”

Michalski finally had to talk to the CEO of Volkswagen America to get a hoist approved. But weeks later, the hoist still hasn’t been installed.

“I shouldn’t have to talk to the CEO of a multibillion-dollar corporation just to get a hoist,” says Michalski. “I think that we need the ability to say, ‘Hey, this process is unsafe.’ And that’s it, not having to argue for weeks and weeks, and weeks of meetings to say like, ‘Hey, we need a hoist.’”

In addition to the decade-long battle to win hearts and minds at the plant, Volkswagen workers also say that the success of the “Stand Up Strike” at the Big Three U.S. automakers helped spur interest in the union.

“You have strike after strike happening around the country. You had the writers, the actors, and then UAW followed up,” says Volkswagen worker Zach Costello, speaking of the “Summer of Strikes” last year. “And then you had the big contract [UAW] got. That, like, sparked an insane amount of discussion around unions all around the plant.”

In the closing days of the campaign, workers say that Volkswagen’s anti-union tactics are having little effect on dissuading them. Due to the influence of German labor law, the company has not yet engaged in anti-union “captive audience” meetings or one-on-one discussions, which can be lethal in killing union support.

Instead, anti-union forces at Volkswagen have largely focused on TV and online ads attempting to tie the UAW election to President Biden, who is unpopular in this red state, though perhaps not entirely at the plant. Near the entrance to the plant sits a banner that reads: “Back Biden, Vote UAW.”

In recent days, local TV ads and billboards have been blasting the UAW with messages like “UAW = Biden.” The union has endorsed Biden, who walked the picket line during the Big Three Stand Up Strike. In an official statement that the union has sent to its members, Biden congratulated workers in Chattanooga for the union drive. “As one of the world’s largest automakers, many Volkswagen plants internationally are unionized,” Biden said in the statement. “As the most pro-union president in American history, I believe American workers, too, should have a voice at work. The decision whether to join a union belongs to the workers.”

The ads are warning members repeatedly that their dues money will be spent on helping Biden’s re-election campaign.

“UAW membership nationwide is at its lowest point since 2009. Maybe the UAW should care more about its members than politics?” said anti-union groups in online ads blanketing Chattanooga.

With the Volkswagen plant located in “Trump country” in eastern Tennessee, UAW activists have responded by distancing themselves from the political function of their union. “This vote is not about politics,” Volkswagen worker Isaac Meadows told the Prospect in an interview. “This vote is about the workers … standing up for themselves.”

A Bandwagon?

Electing the UAW could inspire workers at other plants in the South to unionize. The UAW has announced that a majority of workers at Mercedes in Alabama have signed up to join the union. Public union campaigns have also been launched at Hyundai in Montgomery, Alabama, and Toyota in Troy, Missouri. Unlike previous union campaigns, where Volkswagen union organizers felt isolated, now they feel like they are part of a nationwide campaign. 

It’s helpful that this Volkswagen unionization effort is happening after the pandemic. According to Gallup, in 2014, only 53% of Americans said they had positive views of unions.  During the pandemic, the popularity of unions skyrocketed, as workers went on more than 3,000 strikes since the beginning of the pandemic, according to Payday Report’s Strike Tracker. 

Following the pandemic, union popularity is at a near-record high, with 67% of Americans approving of unions, according to Gallup. 

Vanderbilt University sociology professor Josh Murray, who has spent years studying unionizing efforts in the South, thinks that a win at Volkswagen could create a domino effect.

“In social movement theory there is the idea of the ‘politics of the possible,’ which says movement success breeds future movement success because it mobilizes people by giving them evidence that winning is possible,” says Murray. “Applied to the UAW, the huge victory in the strikes against GM, Ford, and Stellantis makes victory at Volkswagen more likely, and a victory at Volkswagen would make further victories at currently non-unionized plants more likely.”

In the closing days of the third UAW election at Volkswagen in a decade, that hope is evident among workers and organizers.

“As far as workers reclaiming our power, it starts with us,” says Michalski. “And if we can be the first to start bringing organized labor to good-paying jobs with workers who have rights here in the South, I’m all for it.”

---

Thanks for reading! Your tips make this newsletter what it is, so please send me tips on weird monopolies, stories I’ve missed, or other thoughts. And if you liked this issue of BIG, you can sign up here for more issues, a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation, and democracy. Consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this work, or if you are a paying subscriber, giving a gift subscription to a friend, colleague, or family member. If you really liked it, read my book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.

cheers,

Matt Stoller