The strike meeting reflects growing tension between the union and Volkswagen, despite its carefully cultivated image as a pro-worker company.
Tennessee, Volkswagen, and the Future of Labor
Company documents show VW’s management method is modeled on “lean production,” the philosophy created at Toyota, then popularized across the auto industry and beyond. In fact, VW is trying to out-Toyota Toyota. The German company aims to overtake its Japanese competitor and become the world’s most profitable automobile manufacturer by 2018. So the Chattanooga plant provides a window into the state of the art of brutal productivity-maximizing management schemes.
Conversations with workers on both sides of the union battle reveal that the macho culture at the plant, helped fuel the anti-union campaign by low-level management and workers, who stressed obedience to authority and masculine self-reliance as reasons to reject the UAW.
Thus, organizing a union really must be a community affair.
Union members, journalists, academics and others express differing viewpoints on the significance of the United Auto Workers union loss in the representation election at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in this New York Times' "Room for Debate" piece.
Historic election brings outside interference in the vote of Chattanooga Volkswagen workers
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