Southern Autoworkers Organize, Business Class Tries to Wallop Them

https://prospect.org/labor/2024-02-15-southern-autoworkers-organize-vw-business-class-tries-to-wallop/

Workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, face a coordinated attack on their organizing, but have learned from two prior losses.

by Luis Feliz Leon

February 15, 2024

On January 29, the United Auto Workers (UAW) announced that more than 10,000 workers across 13 non-union plants have signed union cards since last November, when the union announced an ambitious goal to organize 150,000 autoworkers.

A majority of those who have signed up are located in the South. At Hyundai and Mercedes in Alabama, workers recently crossed the threshold of having 30 percent of their co-workers sign union authorization cards, joining workers at Volkswagen’s assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who reached that milestone last December.

Successfully organizing those plants would be one of the biggest breakthroughs for worker power in nearly a century. In response, the region’s business class—an unholy trinity of company bosses, state politicians, and Washington front groups backed by billionaires—has initiated its counteroffensive, smearing the UAW as an out-of-state special-interest group and fearmongering about job losses.

Until last Friday, auto company managers were employing the predicable yet effective tactics highly paid union avoidance consultants recommend—intimidating workers for distributing union literature at plant gates, trashing their flyers in break rooms, and preventing them from wearing union T-shirts at work. The UAW has filed unfair labor practice charges for these tactics against Rivian, Toyota, Honda, and Volkswagen, which leads the pack with five charges over surveillance, threats, and coercive work rules.

FULL story at link above.