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**FEBRUARY 1, 2024**
On the Prospect website
Can Progressive New York Revive?
That depends on whether organizing and unity are a match for two
incumbents in the pocket of business and one embittered ex-governor. BY
ROBERT KUTTNER
Mississippi's Direct-Democracy Con in Progress
The ballot measure process died three years ago, but some Republicans
working on a new, more restrictive framework hope that voters won't
notice. BY GABRIELLE GURLEY
The Return of the Koch Brothers
Koch Industries is buying an Iowa fertilizer plant built with taxpayer
dollars. Will federal authorities block the deal? BY LUKE GOLDSTEIN
Meyerson on TAP
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**** The Momentum From the UAW's Victorious
Strike Continues
In Alabama and Tennessee, workers are signing up with the union at VW,
Hyundai, and Mercedes.
It was the UAW that more or less invented momentum organizing. In the
winter and spring of 1937, the success of the union's 44-day sit-down
occupation of General Motors' factories in Flint, Michigan-which
compelled GM to recognize the union and sign a contract with
it-prompted a wave of sit-downs at other business establishments.
Workers were plopping themselves down and locking the doors from the
inside not just in factories but in department stores and drugstores.
The wave only lasted for several months, but fear that the wave could
wash over their own factories made Chrysler, U.S. Steel, and other major
corporations agree to unionization within weeks of the victory at Flint.
Today, in the wake of the stunning success of the UAW's strikes at GM,
Ford, and Stellantis, it's still too early to predict that any such
wave will engulf the nation's non-union auto plants. It's not too
early, however, to note that a wave is clearly forming. Today, the UAW
announced that 30 percent of the workers at Hyundai's factory in
Montgomery, Alabama, have signed union affiliation cards, joining the 30
percent who've recently signed cards at the Mercedes plant in
Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and the Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga,
Tennessee. Just as the UAW broke with the past by staging its "Stand Up"
strikes with all of the Big Three at once, rather than with each
separately, it is now attempting to organize the non-union companies'
factories in one massive effort, building on the momentum of their very
well-publicized success in winning landmark contracts at the Big Three.
The plan, UAW President Shawn Fain has said, is to announce worker
affiliations at the factories when they reach 30 percent of the
workforce, to hold public rallies and begin intense organizing when they
reach 50 percent, and to file for NLRB recognition elections when they
reach 70 percent.
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Almost all the non-union factories are in the South, historically a
graveyard for union organizing campaigns. Fain's legendary predecessor
Walter Reuther repeatedly urged the AFL-CIO to invest heavily in
organizing the South, though after the 1947 passage of the Taft-Hartley
Act, which enabled Southern states to pass laws allowing workers
represented by unions to cease paying dues, Reuther's pleas fell on
deaf ears. Fain and his fellow UAW leaders believe that their success at
GM, Ford, and Stellantis may now have created the kind of momentum that
spurred their union to its initial successes in the late 1930s.
With the exception of Tesla, the companies that own all the major
non-union auto factories in the U.S. are unionized in their home
countries. In Germany, the workers of Volkswagen and Mercedes enjoy the
considerable wages and benefits won for them by the nation's most
powerful union, IG Metall, and under the provisions of German law, their
representatives fill roughly half the seats on those companies'
governing boards. At the UAW's national legislative conference in D.C.
last month, Fain told me the union is in frequent touch with IG Metall,
which itself is engaged in a major organizing campaign at the one
non-union auto factory in Germany-which, not surprisingly, is
Tesla's.
If the UAW wave in the States is powerful enough to reach Tesla, and
Elon Musk remains opposed, as he has said, to the very "idea of unions,"
there remains the tantalizing, if, I suppose, remote possibility of a
strike of Tesla workers that reaches from California, Nevada, and Texas
all the way to Brandenburg. We're way overdue, after all, for the
workers of the world to unite, even if it takes Elon Musk and a union
with momentum behind it to get them there.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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