VW’s Chattanooga Assembly Plant has voted to join UAW, in a historic move on the back of several recent union wins in the US.
The UAW have had quite a 12 months, launching an unprecedented strike against all three major US automakers at the identical time last September. The tactic worked, and 6 weeks later the UAW had made a cope with all three automakers, winning big pay increases and other assurances from each of them.
The win didn’t just help UAW staff, though, as soon after the strikes closed, several other corporations announced big pay increases. Workers at VW, Hyundai, Toyota, Honda and Tesla all earned pay increases of about 10% or more as corporations recognized the necessity to compete for expert staff with higher packages.
UAW President Shawn Fain called this “the UAW bump,” and said UAW stands for “U Are Welcome,” highlighting to non-union staff that strong unions help staff across the economy, not only at their very own respective shops.
After these wins, the UAW announced their intention to unionize all other US automakers at the identical time – an idea which President Biden lent his support to. UAW encouraged employees from other plants to signal their intent to meet up by signing a union card through the web site uaw.org/join/.
Fain even said that when the newly-negotiated contracts with the “Big Three” come up for renegotiation (on May 1, 2028 – International Workers’ Day), that this time the negotiations “won’t just be with a Big Three, but with a Big Five or Big Six” – meaning that the UAW plan to have unionized other automakers by that timeframe.
And today, they’ve got their first big win.
Today’s VW vote was the primary test of UAW’s strategy, and the vote succeeded by a large margin. VW confirmed that the ultimate tally was 3,613 ballots, with 83.5% of eligible employees casting a ballot. 2,628 votes were in favor (73%), with 985 votes against (27%).
Chattanooga’s vote makes history in multiple ways. It’s the primary newly unionized auto plant in the US South in 80 years, and is now the one union plant owned by a foreign automaker in the US.
Prior to the vote, Chattanooga was actually VW’s only non-union plant worldwide. In fact, in VW’s home country of Germany, every company over a certain size should have employee representation, generally in the shape of union representatives, on the corporate board.
The plant had conducted other union votes in the past, in each 2014 and 2019, but each failed by slim margins. But the plant has greater than doubled in employment since 2019, together with more union momentum now than there was then.
Past votes lost at the very least partially due to opposition from republican state government officials who oppose employee representation. Today’s vote was opposed by Tennessee’s republican governor, Bill Lee, and republican governors from other nearby states. President Biden released a press release supporting the vote, and chiding said governors for attempting to undermine the vote.
Past votes were also affected by corruption scandals that left UAW’s former appointed presidents in prison. Current UAW President Fain is the primary elected UAW president, as opposed to previous presidents that had all been appointed.
VW’s Chattanooga plant currently produces the VW ID.4 and the VW Atlas. The ID.4 was brought to Chattanooga in order to gain access to the US EV tax credit, and VW has considered bringing production of other EVs to the plant.
This was the primary success of UAW’s latest strategy, nevertheless it will not be the last. There is already one other vote scheduled for next month at Mercedes’ plant in Alabama (a state where republican lawmakers recently passed a law to try to limit employee representation). That vote will occur from May 13-17, and if successful, would mean nearly 10,000 unionized autoworkers in the South over the course of just just a few weeks.
Electrek’s Take
Unions are having a little bit of a moment in the US, in recent years reaching their highest popularity ever since surveys began asking about them.
Much of union popularity has been driven by COVID-19-related disruptions across the economy, with staff becoming unsatisfied due to mistreatment (labeling everyone “essential,” corporations ending work-from-home) and with the labor market getting tighter with over 1 million Americans dead from the virus and one other 2-4 million out of labor due to long COVID.
Unions have seized on this dissatisfaction to construct momentum in the labor movement, with successful strikes across many industries and organizers starting to organize workforces that had previously been non-union.
However, union membership has been down over several a long time in the US. As a result, pay hasn’t kept pace with employee productivity, and income distribution has develop into more unequal over time. It’s really not hard to see this influence if you plot these trends against one another.
It’s quite clear that lower union membership has resulted in lower inflation-adjusted compensation for staff, at the same time as productivity has skyrocketed. As staff have produced increasingly more value for his or her corporations, those earnings have gone increasingly more to their bosses relatively than to the employees who produce that value. It all began in the ’80s, across the time of Reagan – a timeline that needs to be familiar to those that study social ills in America.
All of this isn’t just true in the US but additionally internationally. If you have a look at other countries with high levels of labor organization, they tend to have more fair wealth distribution across the economy and more ability for staff to get their justifiable share.
We’re seeing this in Sweden at once, as Tesla staff are still striking for higher conditions. Since Sweden has 90% collective bargaining coverage, it tends to have a comfortable and well-paid workforce, and it seems clear that these two things are correlated. That strike is still continuing, but Tesla CEO Elon Musk – who just fired 14,000 people while holding the corporate hostage and begging for a $55 billion payday for himself – is seemingly uninterested in negotiating.
These are all explanation why, as I’ve mentioned in lots of these UAW-related articles, I’m pro-union. And I feel everyone needs to be – it only is smart that individuals must have their interests collectively represented and that individuals should give you the option to join together to support one another and exercise their power collectively as an alternative of individually.
This is precisely what corporations do with industry organizations, lobby organizations, chambers of commerce, and so forth. And it’s what people do when sorting themselves into local, state, or national governments. So naturally, staff should do the identical. It’s just fair.
Credit : electrek.co
