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THE UAW’S CHATTANOOGA VICTORY: SCORE ONE FOR THE NORTH IN OUR
ENDLESS CIVIL WAR  
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Harold Meyerson
April 22, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ We still have two labor systems, and need mass unionization to end
our immense inequality, which has its roots in the South. _

UAW members celebrate the announcement of unionization victory at
VW's Chattanooga auto plant, screen grab

 

History—good history, if conditional history—was made last Friday
in Chattanooga, as workers at Volkswagen’s factory there voted to
join the United Auto Workers by an overwhelming margin of 2,628 to
985, a 73 percent to 27 percent landslide.

The vote was historic on any number of counts. It marks the UAW’s
first successful unionization of a foreign-owned auto factory after a
number of failed attempts; it marks the first unionization in many
decades of a major group of workers in the non-union South; it may
even mark the rebirth of a powerful union movement, something the
nation has lacked over the past 40 years.

It also marks, alongside the provisional victory of the Starbucks
baristas, a breakthrough in the type of occupation that’s been able
to unionize. In recent years, there’s been a wave of unionizations
among university teaching assistants, interns and residents, museum
docents, and other workers who can’t readily be replaced should
management fire them for their pro-union proclivities. But it’s been
standard practice for management to fire assembly-line workers, retail
clerks, drywall installers, and the myriad of other workers for whom
replacements can indeed be found if and when they threaten to
unionize. It’s illegal for employers to do that, but the penalties
are so negligible (restoring those workers to their jobs after months
or years of litigation, giving them their back pay, and posting a
notice of this settlement somewhere in the workplace) that it’s long
been standard practice in American business. The VW and Starbucks
workers had that sword hanging over their heads, yet managed to
prevail nonetheless. Should their example inspire the millions of
workers who’d like to unionize but fear employers’ retaliation,
that would mark a sea change in America’s political economy.

The historic status of the victory at Volkswagen, however, is still as
yet conditional. To really mark a historic break with nearly 60 years
of union decline—a decline that is at the root of the erosion of the
New Deal’s egalitarian economics and, correspondingly, the rise of
record levels of economic inequality—it can’t be a one-off. The
UAW has to roll this on to other Southern foreign-transplant
factories; the first test of its ability to do that will come the week
of May 13, when workers at the Mercedes factory in Vance, Alabama,
will also vote on whether to join the UAW.

But this victory—if it does become a harbinger of more—should be
situated in an even larger historical context. It may well mean that
the North now has a better chance to win the Civil War that began in
1861 but never really ended. That war, of course, counterposed two
labor systems that were inextricably intertwined with two racial and
social systems as well.

Everyone knows at least some of the racial narrative—how
Reconstruction’s burst of racial egalitarianism was snuffed out in
the mid-1870s, leaving the South with an economy of largely Black
sharecropping, a society of segregation, and a system of Black
suppression centered on lynching. Many of these systems were
overthrown by decades of often heroic activism by Blacks and their
allies. But not all of them.

The deep antipathy of the Confederacy to any form of worker
power—which in the antebellum South meant Black power—has
persisted to the current day. As soon as the Civil War ended, and
before Reconstruction began, Southern state governments enacted their
“Black Codes,” which bound former slaves to keep working, albeit
this time for an actual pittance of a wage, on their former
plantations, with no real option to leave. Sharecropping then kept
them in place until they could pay off their debts, which, by the
system’s design, seldom occurred.

The deep antipathy of the Confederacy to any form of worker
power—which in the antebellum South meant Black power—has
persisted to the current day.

By the late 19th century, some of the corporations centered in the
industrial North had found their way south, chiefly in textiles,
rails, mining, and steel. By the 1920s, Northern-based unions and
indigenous Southern radicals were attempting to unionize the textile
workers and meeting opposition (armed when “necessary”) that they
couldn’t overcome. Then, with the great surge in industrial
unionization that the UAW kicked off in Michigan with its successful
1937 strike at General Motors, the industrial unions’
organization—the CIO—made a major effort to unionize Southern
factories in 1938. This coincided with President Roosevelt’s efforts
to support liberal challengers to conservative Southern senators and
representatives in that year’s Democratic primaries; but both FDR
and the CIO’s attempts fell flat.

As World War II ended and workers sought raises to make up for what
they hadn’t been paid during the wartime wage freeze, the nation saw
the greatest strike wave in its history. Unions sought to ride that
momentum by initiating a massive campaign—Operation Dixie, it was
called—to unionize the industrial South. But Dixie’s political and
economic power structure united to defeat nearly every unionization
campaign. The fact that CIO unions like the UAW supported civil rights
and often proposed to establish desegregated locals in the heart of
Dixie made that power structure even more determined to wipe out every
trace of unionism by every possible means. They not only told white
workers that they’d have to work alongside Blacks, but that the
unions were Northern intruders bent on undermining Southern
“values.”

The following year, 1947, Southern House and Senate Democrats joined
with Northern Republicans to enact, over Harry Truman’s veto, the
Taft-Hartley Act, which made it far more difficult for unions to grow,
in part by enabling states to pass laws making them “right to
work,” which enabled workers represented by unions to avoid paying
dues to them. This, in turn, made the economics of unionization very
daunting for unions. Every Southern state quickly passed laws giving
themselves this status, though over the years, as those states turned
Republican and Northern Republicans became more “Southern”—that
is, right-wing—some Northern states under Republican control went
“right to work” as well. Even today, the five states with no
minimum-wage law of their own are all Southern—Alabama, Louisiana,
Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee—while Georgia’s minimum
wage ($5.15) is actually lower than the federal minimum of $7.25 (to
which all states are required to adhere, and may legally exceed, as
many other states do).

Today, the South’s political and economic elite still mobilize to
defend their labor system—much as they did in 1861, the 1920s, 1938,
and 1946-1947. Now as then, that system is based on low-wage labor,
sustained by denying workers the power to change that. The expansion
of industrial America to the South has continued straight through our
current era of financial capitalism’s promotion of offshoring.
It’s been abetted by European and Asian corporations seeking
low-wage labor whose products don’t have to travel far to reach
American consumers. Southern states are now home not just to VW and
Mercedes factories, but also factories of Nissan, Hyundai, Honda, and
other Asian automakers—all of them non-union. For decades, Southern
governors and mayors have been traveling across the Atlantic and
Pacific, trying to lure such companies with the siren song of cheap
and powerless labor.

The commanding heights of the American economy—Wall Street—was
long aligned with the South in seeking to suppress worker wages and
worker power. (During the actual Civil War, many New York
financiers—early Wall Street—were heavily invested in the
plantation economy, so much so that New York Mayor Fernando Wood
suggested the city secede to support the Confederacy.) In 2011, I
wrote about an as-yet-unreleased study
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the Boston Consulting Group that noted how quickly factory workers’
wages were rising in China’s industrial belt and exulted that this
increase would soon make some factory workers’ wages in the U.S.
competitive again, provided our own labor system could sufficiently
“flex” in the matter of worker pay. To demonstrate this pending
renaissance of American manufacturing, it compared those Chinese wages
with those in Mississippi. When I called the author of the study and
suggested that most Americans wouldn’t consider sinking to the
living standards of Mississippi to be a renaissance, he conceded the
point. When the study was eventually released, its reference to
Mississippi had been eliminated. Instead, it cited the industrial wage
standards in South Carolina.

Workers at the VW plant are a younger and more racially diverse group
than those who voted down previous attempts to go union.

Not surprisingly, South Carolina wage standards were good enough for
some foreign corporations. Since Airbus is partly owned by the German
government and thus has to partly follow the German law that requires
workers’ representatives on corporate boards, I was told, during a
discussion about a decade ago with the chief of staff of a German
union official on Airbus’s board, that the company was then
carefully weighing the respective pluses and minuses of locating its
next factory in either the Chinese South or the American South.

By trying to match the labor standards of China, of course, the
Southern power structure was doing no favor to its own workers, and
bringing down the wage and benefit levels of workers in the North. As
I noted in a _Prospect article
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years ago, “Between 1980 and 2013, _The Wall Street Journal_ has
reported, the number of auto industry jobs in the Midwest fell by 33
percent, while those in the South increased by 52 percent.” Not
surprisingly, when manufacturing went south, so did the wages of
manufacturing workers. In 2021, the _Journal _reported that a
factory job that paid 83 percent more than a hotel or restaurant job
in 2010 paid just 56 percent more in 2020. It added that the pay
advantage of manufacturing over retail had slumped from 40 percent to
27 percent. This was not because wages in hotels, restaurants, and
stores were rising.

In the battle over Chattanooga’s VW factory, the Southern power
structure not only united to oppose the horror of worker power but
went to the same playbook of alarmist misinformation that has
underpinned its messaging for well over a hundred years. As Jamelle
Bouie has noted
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New York Times_, the governors (all Republican) of Alabama, Georgia,
Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas jointly published a
letter decrying what they termed the “special interests looking to
come into our state and threaten our jobs and the values we live
by.” Like their predecessor governors of 1946 and 1938—hell, like
Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun—they portrayed this battle as
originating with Northern outsiders seeking to undermine their
“values.” In particular, their last-ditch defense of those values
were ads that said by voting to unionize, workers were affiliating
themselves with an organization that had endorsed the hated Joe Biden.

This time, though, it didn’t work. As Mike Elk noted in a report
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Chattanooga that we ran on Friday, the workers at the VW plant are a
younger and more racially diverse group than those who voted down
previous attempts to go union. The teaching assistants, baristas, and
now autoworkers who’ve voted to go union in the past couple of years
come disproportionately from, by the evidence of multiple polls, the
most pro-union generation that this country may have ever seen. Their
awareness of this nation’s stratospheric levels of inequality and
the strapped financial conditions that they themselves live under have
primed them to seek better conditions. And if the union option
didn’t appear all that attractive to them before, or if unions were
so far off their radar screens that they didn’t even consider it,
the campaigns that the new-model UAW has waged under President Shawn
Fain have not only brought unions to their attention, but made the
union option palpably attractive. The UAW’s recent strike against
General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis ended in record contracts for its
members, and though all the Southern non-union plants immediately gave
raises to their own workers to stave off a sudden (and utterly
rational) burst of pro-union sentiment, the UAW’s contracts were
still far superior to what the Southern factories were offering, and
so well publicized that the Southern workers knew it.

Significant increases in union membership don’t happen
incrementally; they come in waves. It was the UAW’s successful
sit-down strike of 1937 in key GM factories that spawned the greatest
such wave, growing the unionized share of the national workforce from
about 10 percent in the mid-1930s to about 34 percent in the
mid-1940s. Can the UAW do it again? Can the North finally win our
near-eternal civil war?

We shall see.

_Harold Meyerson [[link removed]] is
editor at large of The American Prospect._

_Read the original article at Prospect.org.
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with the permission. © The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2024. All
rights reserved. _

* UAW
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* organizing the south
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* Chattanooga
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