Portside

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UAW News

February 14, 2014
United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW)

http://www.uaw.org/articles/historic-election-brings-outside-interferen…

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. - Workers at Volkswagen's Chattanooga plant today have voted against union representation that would have led to the establishment of a works council that would have been the first such model of labor-management relations in the United States.

At the end of voting on Friday, Volkswagen workers voted against joining the union in a vote of 712 to 626.

The decision follows three days of voting during an election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board and comes amid a firestorm of interference and threats from special interest groups.

"While we certainly would have liked a victory for workers here, we deeply respect the Volkswagen Global Group Works Council, Volkswagen management and IG Metall for doing their best to create a free and open atmosphere for workers to exercise their basic human right to form a union," said UAW President Bob King.

"We commend Volkswagen for its commitment to global human rights, to worker rights and trying to provide an atmosphere of freedom to make a decision," said UAW Region 8 Director Gary Casteel, who directs the union's Southern organizing.

"Unfortunately, politically motivated third parties threatened the economic future of this facility and the opportunity for workers to create a successful operating model that would grow jobs in Tennessee."

"While we're outraged by politicians and outside special interest groups interfering with the basic legal right of workers to form a union, we're proud that these workers were brave and stood up to the tremendous pressure from outside," said UAW Secretary-Treasurer Dennis Williams, who directs the union's transnational program. "We hope this will start a larger discussion about workers' right to organize."

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Tennessee Volkswagen plant employees vote against joining United Auto Workers

By Bernie Woodall, Reuters

February 14, 2014
The Raw Story

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/02/14/tennessee-volkswagen-plant-employ…

CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee (Reuters) - In a stunning defeat that could accelerate the decades-long decline of the United Auto Workers, employees voted against union representation at Volkswagen AG's Chattanooga, Tennessee plant, which had been seen as organized labor's best chance to expand in the U.S. South.

An official overseeing the vote, retired Tennessee Circuit Court Judge Sam Payne, said that a majority had voted against UAW representation by 712 to 626. Some 89 percent of workers voted, he said.

The plant's workers voted by paper ballot over the past three days, with individual votes hand-counted after the election closed at 8:30 pm ET on Friday.

The loss could further dent the prestige of the UAW, whose membership has plummeted 75 percent since 1979 and now stands at just under 400,000.

It also is likely to reinforce the widely held notion that the UAW cannot make significant inroads in a region that historically has been steadfastly against organized labor and where all foreign-owned assembly plants employ nonunion workers.

The vote faced fierce resistance from local Republican politicians and national conservative groups who warned that a UAW victory could hurt economic growth in Tennessee. While voting was under way on Wednesday, Republican U.S. Senator Bob Corker said VW would announce new investment in the plant if the UAW lost the secret ballot.

"We think it's unfortunate that there was some outside influence exerted into this process," Gary Casteel, regional director of the UAW, said after the results were announced, adding that the influence needed to be "evaluated".

Legal experts earlier in the day said they saw a difficult path to challenging a vote against unionization, based on Corker's comments, given broad free speech protection for U.S. Senators.

President Barack Obama waded into the discussion on Friday, accusing Republican politicians who oppose unionization of being more concerned about German shareholders than U.S. workers.

For VW, the stakes also were high. The German automaker invested $1 billion in the Chattanooga plant, which began building Passat mid-size sedans in April 2011, after being awarded more than $577 million in state and local incentives.

VW executives have said a new seven-passenger crossover vehicle, due in 2016 and known internally as CrossBlue, could be built at either the Chattanooga plant or in Mexico.

An announcement on where the vehicle will be produced could come as early as next week, VW sources said.

(Additional reporting by Paul Lienert in Detroit and Andreas Cremer in Berlin; Editing by Matthew Lewis, Ross Colvin and Ken Wills)

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A Titanic Defeat

By Erik Loomis

February 15, 2014
Lawyer, Guns and Money

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/02/a-titanic-lost

The United Auto Workers lost its attempt to unionize the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga after Tennessee politicians interfered to defeat the vote when VW acquiesced to unionization.

    In a defeat for organized labor in the South, employees at the Volkswagen plant here voted 712 to 626 against joining the United Automobile Workers.

    The loss is an especially stinging blow for U.A.W. because Volkswagen did not even oppose the unionization drive. The union's defeat - in what was one of the most closely watched unionization votes in decades - is expected to slow, perhaps stymie, the union's long-term plans to organize other auto plants in the South.

    A retired local judge, Samuel H. Payne, announced the vote results inside VW's sprawling plant after officials from the National Labor Relations Board had counted the ballots. In the hours before the votes were tallied, after three days of voting at the assembly plant, both sides were predicting victory.

    The vote this week came in a region that is traditionally anti-union, and as a result many said the U.A.W. faced an uphill battle. The union saw the campaign as a vital first step toward expanding in the South, while Republicans and many companies in Tennessee feared that a U.A.W. triumph would hurt the state's welcoming image for business.

It's hard to overstate what a terrible defeat this is. Here you had the company suggesting the UAW enter their plant so they could create the American version of the German works council that would be illegal without a union election (would violate the company union provisions of the National Labor Relations Act). The UAW will never receive a more favorable opportunity in the American South and just like its failures in the 90s, it came up short. From what I have read so far, it does not seem the UAW messed up the campaign. They did agree with VW to not do home visits, since those went against German union norms. If the UAW had conducted home visits, no doubt they would have more effectively fought back Bob Corker and Grover Norquist and the outside group propaganda. But if they had pushed home visits from the beginning, they wouldn't have had a campaign because VW wouldn't have gone along.

So why did it fail? We can't blame it all on the politicians and scaremongering. Yes, that probably clinched the failure, but it did not turn 712 votes. There were almost certainly several hundred no votes from the beginning. Why? First, the white South has always been very difficult to organize. A combination of ideas of self-reliance, the fact that unions are seen as something northern with Yankee ideas, the impact of evangelical religion, and a culture that united rich whites and poor whites through racial solidarity that also created other ties within communities that cut across class have all made unionization strikingly difficult. For an additional example of the last point, see how the people of West, Texas rallied around the fertilizer plant owner last year after his facility caused an explosion that wiped out half the town. They went to church with him after all. So there are long, historical struggles to unionize white workers here that go back to the textile towns of southern Appalachia in the 20s and the failure of Operation Dixie in 1946. And while I have not seen any demographics on the racial breakdown of workers in Chattanooga, pretty much all I've seen in interviews are white; at the very least, it seems to lean pretty heavily white. So outside groups tainting the UAW with Obama no doubt helped, but it doesn't explain 712 votes.

There's also the specter of capital mobility looming over the plant. Even though VW said it wasn't moving the plant, this was a major theme of the outside groups and it does seem to have affected some workers. Despite left-leaning labor activists beating up Big Labor for a lack of union democracy, far and away the top reason for labor's decline is the jobs disappearing to nonunion states and to foreign nations. Given what capital mobility did to Detroit and the subsequent almost mythological role Detroit has played in American culture, it becomes easy to taint the UAW with the decline of Detroit, which was a central part of the anti-union strategy. On top of that, the UAW having to agree to two-tiered contracts so the Big Three auto makers would keep jobs in Michigan and Ohio, contracts that drastically lowered wages for new workers, did not lend itself to potential new members thinking the UAW was going to make their lives better. That's a tough spot for the UAW to be in and the blame goes to capital mobility because if the UAW doesn't agree, those jobs are gone and Lansing and Toledo and other union towns are just dead. So long as corporations can move at a whim, it will be tremendously difficult for labor to win meaningful victories.

But I think another major reason for this loss was that it was never clear to many workers why they were joining a union. Some claim to have been UAW members in the past and had a bad experience, which is the kind of low-level complaining fairly common in all unionized workplaces, often by people who lost a grievance or who screwed up and the union didn't take on their hopeless case, or they weren't friends with the shop steward, or whatever. Who knows. But in any case, the usual union victory results from dissatisfied workers organizing with demands. That really wasn't the case here. To quote a union organizer friend of mine, "If the vote becomes "Can we trust the Union?" instead of "Should we unite to solve our problems?", the boss wins." I think this is fundamentally what this vote was about.

The UAW is considering filing to have the election thrown out because of Bob Corker's intimidation and there is a real chance he crossed the line. But this is probably a dead campaign. And it's hard to see how the UAW or any union comes into southern factories and wins major victories at this point. Incredibly dispiriting.