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TENNESSEE VOLKSWAGEN WORKERS VOTE UNION  
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Luis Feliz Leon
April 19, 2024
Labor Notes
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_ To head off a union drive, Volkswagen boosted wages 11 percent to
match the immediate raise UAW members received at Ford. _

The vote was a key test of whether the UAW could springboard the
Stand-Up Strike gains into new organizing. The union narrowly lost
previous drives here in 2014 and 2019. , Central Labor Council of
Tennessee

 

In a watershed victory, workers at the Volkswagen factory in
Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted tonight "UAW, yes!" The company's sole
non-union plant will finally join the rest of the world.

“If Volkswagen workers at plants in Germany and Mexico have unions,
why not us?” said equipment operator Briam Calderon in Spanish,
ahead of the vote.

"Just like Martin Luther King had a dream, we have a dream at
Volkswagen that we will be UAW one day," said Renee Berry, a logistic
worker on the organizing committee who's worked at the plant for 14
years.

The UAW is riding a wave of momentum
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after winning landmark contracts at the Big 3 automakers last year.
Production workers at Volkswagen earn $23 per hour and top out above
$32, compared to $43 for production workers at Ford’s Spring Hill
assembly plant by the contract’s end in 2028.

“We could see what other auto workers were making compared to what
we were making,” said Yolanda Peoples, a member of the organizing
committee
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on the engine assembly line.

To head off a union drive, Volkswagen boosted wages 11 percent to
match the immediate raise UAW members received at Ford. Peoples saw
her pay jump from $29 to $32 an hour.

“When they went on strike, we paid close attention just to see what
happened. Once they won their contract, it changed a lot of people
from anti-union to pro-union members,” said Peoples.

Today’s vote was a key test of whether the union could springboard
the strike gains to propel new organizing in longtime anti-union
bastions in the South
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anchors of big investments in the electric-vehicle transition.

The vote was 2,628 in favor of forming a union to 985 against. There
were seven challenged ballots, and three voided; 4,326 workers were
eligible to vote.

Previous efforts at this plant in 2014 and 2019 had gone down to
narrow defeats. Ahead of the vote, workers said their co-workers had
learned from those losses.

They brushed off threats that a union would make the plant less
competitive and lead it to close. After all, VW invested $800 million
here in 2019 to produce the I.D. Electric SUV.

“We have seen the enemy’s playbook twice, and they don’t have
any new moves,” said Zach Costello, a member of the organizing
committee and a trainer on the assembly line. “It’s the greatest
hits now.”

The organizing committee beat the predictable anti-union talking
points with conversations across the plant.

“At the end of the day, we’ve been focusing all our time and
attention on the people who matter,” said organizing committee
member Isaac Meadows, “and it’s our co-workers who cast votes.

“Now Mercedes workers [in Alabama] are right behind us. We’ve set
the stage for them to win and they will create the momentum for
Hyundai and Toyota.”

Mercedes workers will vote from May 13-16, with a ballot count on the
17.

TURNING TO FELLOW WORKERS

Angel Gomez knows the benefits that come with a union card, having
been a steward with the Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and the
Teamsters at two previous jobs.

Gomez followed his family to Tennessee after working at Smithfield
Foods and Molson Coors in Wisconsin, as well as Ford in New Jersey,
where his father put in 30 years. He was hired at VW last November. He
works on the underbodies of gleaming Atlas SUVs as they travel down
the line at a steady clip.

“At first I wasn’t involved in the union,” Gomez said, because
the moment he opened his mouth people knew he was from up North; he
didn’t want them to write him off while he was still getting
acclimated. “Down here I’m the Yankee. Perception is everything. I
didn’t want people to see a slick-talking New Yorker from the
Bronx.”

But despite his trepidations, soon people were approaching him to talk
about problems at the plant: “People started telling me—white,
Black, it didn’t matter—about all the favoritism.”

He started talking to a handful of Spanish-speaking workers from
Venezuela, Chile, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico—who saw in a
Puerto Rican worker someone from their culture, who could shed light
on the union drive because of his own union experiences.

“I took a special interest in looking out for people who do their
thing, take care of their families, and they always get f—ed with at
the job,” Gomez said. He said these people tended to be
Spanish-speaking workers who kept their heads down and did as they
were told.

He said he convinced the Latino workers in his department to vote for
the union. But he doesn’t sugarcoat the challenges. Some people
think “if you don’t believe in what uncle daddy Trump is telling
you, then you’re a bad person,” he said. “That’s been the
biggest drawback—the whole political aspect coming from the
right.”

NO PARTISAN POLITICS

Meadows said the worker-organizers had learned from past drives not to
get too drawn into partisan politics, and that conducting house visits
wasn’t worth the backlash.

Instead, this time around, workers emphasized talking to their
co-workers on the shop floor, covering 90 percent of the plant with
leaders on every line.

They also kept the focus on workers improving their jobs and bettering
the lives of their families, rather than getting drawn into a fight
with GOP actors, an astroturf campaign, or a billboard war.

“Partisan politics has nothing to do with what we’re doing
here,” said Meadows.

A recent poll conducted for the conservative Beacon Center found that
44 percent of respondents statewide in Tennessee viewed the UAW
favorably
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while just 19 percent viewed it unfavorably.

Ahead of the vote, Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee warned
workers they shouldn’t “risk their future” by voting for the UAW
and urged them not to give up “the freedom to decide it themselves
and hand that over to a negotiator on their behalf.”

“His message is wrong,” said Meadows. “Right now, the only
choice we have at this place is, do I stay or do I quit.”

Lee was reprising his role from 2019, when he also opposed the drive,
stumping alongside the plant’s chief executive officer. At the time,
Meadows said, workers booed the governor, and the union drive lost
support because of it. This time they’ve grown their committees by
focusing on each other instead of the politicians.

“People for the most part are smartening up. And they’re not
paying attention to the political crap,” said Gomez. “The
politicians know nothing about blue-collar work. They are born with a
silver spoon in their mouths.”

Take Governor Lee, heir to a wealthy construction family business
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revenues upwards of $220 million in 2019 when he became governor.

‘WE ARE DRIVING THIS SHIP’

Like last time, there was a union-busting website, _stillnouaw.com_,
this time with a social media post from former President Trump
attacking UAW President Shawn Fain and equating voting for the union
with supporting President Biden.

But the anti-union Facebook page only had 15 “likes” as of this
week. Previous opposition groups counted hundreds of open supporters.
Tennesseans for Economic Freedom, a business group, ran Facebook ads
emblazoned with the message: "UAW would spend our paychecks on
politics."

“They still have not realized that we are making the decision for
ourselves,” said Victor Vaughn, a member of the organizing
committee. “We are the ones driving this ship.”

Congressperson Chuck Fleischmann got the message. Even though he
opposed the last drive, this time Fleischmann bucked his Republican
colleagues and refused to intervene. “This is something that I’m
going to let the workers decide,” he told _HuffPost_
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Overall, the GOP campaign against the current UAW organizing wave
hasn’t been as vicious or coordinated as in previous drives. Only
after the union filed for elections in Alabama and Tennessee did the
governors of Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and
Texas issue a joint statement opposing the union.

They wrote
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that they were seeing “the fallout of the Detroit Three strike with
those automakers rethinking investments and cutting jobs. Putting
businesses in our states in that position is the last thing we want to
do.”

The threats are implied. But compare that to 2014, when Tennessee
Senator Bob Corker said the VW plant would get a new SUV production
line if workers rejected the UAW, and state politicians threatened to
withhold tax incentives should workers vote the UAW in.

TALKING PAPER

In the lead-up to this week’s election, supervisors would read
verbatim from a company newsletter called “The Talking Paper,”
written in such a way that it cast doubts about the union without
crossing over into unfair labor practice territory.

“Every time the ‘Talking Paper’ comes out,” Costello said,
“even my supervisor is like ‘It’s gonna take a while,’ because
they have to read every word as it is written. They cannot Cliff Notes
it.”

Even so, the lion’s share of the unfair labor practice charges the
UAW has filed in this organizing wave so far have been at Volkswagen.
“We’ve seen the liars that they are when they say they’re
neutral,” Costello said.

To beat past union drives, the company promised to boost wages and
address safety. But workers said these turned out to be empty
promises. In 2019, Volkswagen brought back the company president who
had originally opened the plant.

“Everybody loved Frank Fisher,” said Peoples, who was hired in
2011. “So when he came and pleaded, and pretty much said, ‘Give
Volkswagen one more chance here in Chattanooga, we aren’t finished
yet, we're going to make some changes, and I'll be right here with
you,’ that pretty much swayed a lot of people and turned their votes
into nos.”

“People understand that they’re just trying to trick us one more
time like they did the two times previously,” said Vaughn.

Costello said Volkswagen shipped Fisher back to Germany soon after the
vote. "The conditions in the plant slammed back to the brutal meat
grinder that it always was," he said. "And we have carried that with
us into this campaign."

Renee sustained multiple surgeries in her long tenure at the plant.
Going into the campaign, she said safety was her top concern. "I want
to come out of work the same way I came in," she said. But conditions
at the plant have deteriorated to the point where she says workers
agonize over whether they'll come out of work alive or maimed.

"You may lose a leg or a hand," she said. "I got synthetic in my
shoulder" from a rotator cuff tear. "I have a three-year-old
granddaughter who I can't pick up. So my life has changed, but I'm
still going to keep going because I've put too much blood, sweat and
tears into this plant."

GATEWAY TO THE SOUTH

Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein compared tonight’s win to the
Union Army’s victory in Chattanooga in 1863, during the U.S. Civil
War, when President Abraham Lincoln declared it “the gateway to the
South.”

Taking Chattanooga, Lichtenstein said, “opened the door to the
capture of Atlanta, the rest of Georgia, and the Carolinas.

“With UAW’s win at Volkswagen, another gateway to the South has
been opened. No longer will the wage-and-benefit standards of the
million-strong auto workforce in the U.S. be set by the non-union
portion of the industry. A militant and increasingly powerful UAW will
set the standard.”

Costello, too, sees new horizons opening up. “If workers can unite
in this country, I think we can move a lot,” he said. "We could even
effect change that goes beyond our workplace."

Luis Feliz Leon [[link removed]] is a
staff writer and organizer with Labor Notes.

Labor Notes is a media and organizing project that has been the voice
of union activists who want to put the MOVEMENT back in the labor
movement since 1979.

Through our magazine, website, books, conferences, and workshops, we
promote organizing, aggressive strategies to fight concessions,
alliances with worker centers, and unions that are run by their
members.

* UAW
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* Southern Labor
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* Volkswagen
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