The Volkswagen plant would boost UAW's flagging membership, way down because of plant closings and automation. It represented more than 1 million people at auto assembly plants in the 1980s, but only 155,000 at GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler today.
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The German automaker's U.S. subsidiary earlier this month brought a case in a Washington, D.C.-based federal appeals court seeking to overturn a vote by a group of skilled trade workers at its Chattanooga, Tennessee, assembly plant to join the United Auto Workers.
The dispute is a high-profile test of whether unions, an seek new members by targeting smaller groups, rather than organizing whole plants or companies as in the past.
What is notable about the ‘Dieselgate’ scandal is not that corporate executives lie and cheat, but its environmental scope. By rigging the emissions tests, Volkswagen cars may have added nearly a million tons of air pollution to the atmosphere annually – roughly the same as combined annual emissions for all power stations, vehicles, industry and agriculture in England. And, according to the New York Times, VW executives might not face any U.S. criminal charges.
As the Volkswagen case shows, the more trouble caused by closed-off code embedded in an ever-increasing number of physical objects, the more the makers of those objects will struggle to shield themselves from calls for transparency. When code inflicts real harm, such as Volkswagen’s polluting cars, the creators of that code must be held accountable. It’s time to start demanding that smart things open up.
The brand new Local 42 has already begun signing up and swearing in members who work at the VW plant looking toward winning a majority.
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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.
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