NYT: Could the Union Victory at VW Set Off a Wave?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/20/business/economy/uaw-union-future.html

Some experts say the outcome at a plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., may be organized labor’s most significant advance in decades. But the road could get rockier.


The president of the United Automobile Workers union, Shawn Fain, visited the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., last year.Credit...Olivia Ross/Chattanooga Times Free Press, via Associated Press

By Noam Scheiber

Noam Scheiber has covered labor unions since 2015.
April 20, 2024

By voting to join the United Automobile Workers, Volkswagen workers in Tennessee have given the union something it has never had: a factory-wide foothold at a major foreign automaker in the South.

The result, in an election that ended on Friday, will enable the union to bargain for better wages and benefits. Now the question is what difference it will make beyond the Volkswagen plant.

Labor experts said success at VW might position the union to replicate its showing at other auto manufacturers throughout the South, the least unionized region of the country. Some argued that the win could help set off a rise in union membership at other companies that exceeds the uptick of the past few years, when unions won elections at Starbucks and Amazon locations.

“It’s a big vote, symbolically and substantively,” said Jake Rosenfeld, a sociologist who studies labor at Washington University in St. Louis.

FULL story at link above.