The UAW could make history in the next 72 hours as VW workers vote on union

The UAW is on the precipice of potentially making history this week as some 4,300 autoworkers at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee vote on whether they want union representation.

The polls opened at 4:45 a.m. Wednesday. The secret-ballot voting, which takes place inside the plant and is run by the National Labor Relations Board, goes until 8 p.m. Friday, with results expected later that night, according to the NLRB and a Volkswagen spokesman.

Labor experts say if the UAW wins at VW Chattanooga, it will be a historic and hard-won victory, after repeated failures over the past decade to organize foreign automaker plants in the South. For one thing, it would add thousands of members to the UAW. UAW membership is far below its 1979 peak of 1.5 million. The union currently counts almost 400,000 active members and 580,000 retired members.

"This is a defining moment for the UAW. A victory really sets a precedent and breaks the glass ceiling that you can’t organize auto factories in the South," said Harley Shaiken, a labor expert and professor emeritus at the University of California-Berkeley. "A victory doesn’t automatically translate into a victory at other nonunion automakers, but it sets the standard and the momentum. So victory is a huge gain.”

GOP governors in South resist UAW

If the vote fails, Shaiken said it will be disappointing, but the UAW still stands a chance with other nonunion factories. Last week, Mercedes-Benz workers in Alabama petitioned the NLRB to allow them to vote on joining the UAW.

Just hours before voting was to start, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee and five other Republican governors in Southern states with nonunion automakers, penned and signed a lengthy letter Tuesday saying they are "highly concerned" about the UAW's unionization campaign, which they said is "driven by misinformation and scare tactics."

"Companies have choices when it comes to where to invest and bring jobs and opportunity," the governors' letter stated. "We have worked tirelessly on behalf of our constituents to bring good-paying jobs to our states. These jobs have become part of the fabric of the automotive manufacturing industry. Unionization would certainly put our states’ jobs in jeopardy — in fact, in this year already, all of the UAW automakers have announced layoffs."

Big wins, temporary layoffs

The letter goes on to insinuate the election of union representation will mean job cuts.

"We’ve seen it play out this way every single time a foreign automaker plant has been unionized; not one of those plants remains in operation," the letter said. "And we are seeing it in the fallout of the Detroit Three strike with those automakers rethinking investments and cutting jobs."

The UAW did not immediately respond to a request for a comment about the letter.

But in terms of rethinking investments, not necessarily. Just days after union members ratified the GM contract, the automaker initiated a $10 billion stock buyback to boost the stock price and return money to shareholders, the Free Press reported. Layoffs are nuanced. GM did say in December it would lay off 1,314 employees at two factories in Michigan due to end of production of two vehicles. GM is retooling one of the plants, Orion Assembly, to build new electric pickups in late 2025. As the Free Press reported, GM said it will offer affected employees jobs elsewhere in the company.

At Ford Motor Co., a supplier issue earlier this year forced it to pause production of the new 2024 Ford F-150 for more than five days at the factories that build the pickup, resulting in temporarily laying off about 5,200 UAW workers.

At Stellantis, the company has trimmed its workforce in recent months, but the overall picture is murky because it hasn’t clarified how many jobs are being eliminated. The company noted that a round of cuts announced in December for plants in Detroit and Toledo was significantly smaller than originally described, but a separate round of cuts affecting supplemental workers across company facilities rolled out last month.

None of those temporary layoffs have overshadowed the driving force behind VW workers signing cards on the UAW's website seeking to join the union: The UAW's big contract wins against the Detroit Three last fall followed a 46-day strike.

The union won members a cost-of-living-adjustment, the elimination of wage tiers and bonuses for retirees. Right after the UAW won wage gains of 25% across 4½-year contracts with the Detroit automakers, Nissan, Honda, Hyundai, Toyota and Volkswagen all offered raises of 9% to 14% to their U.S. workforces.

Therefore, Shaiken said the governors' letter is not likely to sway the vote much, noting that, "the governors have written an ideological statement, not what is taking place in the working world today."

Here's the average pay at VW

The workforce at VW Chattanooga was one of the first nonunion automakers in the country to launch its public campaign to unionize, with 30% of the workers at the plant signing the cards in December. The UAW has declined to say how many employees at the VW factory have signed the union cards, but it has previously stated it wanted 70% of a workforce to sign cards before an organizing committee made up of plant workers filed a petition to take a plant vote.

VW broke ground on the Chattanooga plant in 2009 and has invested $4.3 billion in it over the years, a VW spokesman said. The plant assembles the the ID.4 EV and houses the company's Battery Engineering Lab. It also builds the Atlas and Atlas Cross Sport.

Its production supports about 125,000 direct and indirect jobs across the country, he said. The automaker supports employees’ right to decide the question of representation and the NLRB's secret ballot election, the spokesman said, adding that VW believes employees already have a strong voice in the Chattanooga plant.

"Part of being invested in people and their well-being is listening. Everyone has direct access to their manager and our plant leadership is right off the factory floor," the spokesman said, adding that the CEO’s desk is near the plant floor and “anyone can come up and express concern or express feedback.”

The average Chattanooga employee will gross $60,000 this year, the VW spokesman told the media. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median household income in Chattanooga in 2022 was $57,703. If an employee meets attendance requirements and takes overtime, many will earn $70,000, he said. VW contributes up to 9% toward employees' 401(k) plans, according to its fact sheet at www.vw.com/chattanooga.

Favorable odds for the UAW

The UAW has a history of trying to organize, and failing, in the South, particularly at that plant, which is VW's only plant in the United States. In 2014, the union was confident it would win a vote at the VW plant because it had a majority who had signed cards in favor of a union.

But on Day One of a three-day vote, the Republican leadership of Tennessee mounted a campaign to vote no. The GOP's campaign worked, in part because the former mayor of Chattanooga insinuated that VW would not allocate future products to the plant if it unionized. In 2019, the UAW again narrowly lost a vote at the plant.

But the circumstances for UAW have improved greatly since 2019 vote, said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He said the governors' letter is unlikely to impact results this time because in an election year, what matters most is that the workers at least get a chance to vote.

"The odds are much more in their favor this time as they only need to increase by 2% from their last vote," Wheaton told the Free Press. "About 75% to 80% of the general public supported UAW in Detroit Three strikes. Losing the election would certainly sting, but it would not be fatal."

Last month UAW President Shawn Fain told the Free Press he expects to organize at least one new automaker plant in the country this year, possibly more. Fain said all he needs is one plant to take it to a vote and win to provide the momentum to win more, he said.

If Fain fails, Erik Gordon, a professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, said, "It won't end their campaign to organize Southern plants. They might rethink their approach, but they won't rethink their goal of getting control over all the country's car and truck manufacturing."

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Contact Jamie L. LaReau: jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. Read more on General Motors and sign up for our autos newsletter. Become a subscriber.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: UAW is poised to make history if VW workers elect to unionize this week