Auto workers at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee voted in a landslide to unionize Friday night, bucking the opposition of Republican governors across the South, including Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) released the final 2,628 to 985 vote tally — with 73% of the Chattanooga VW workers voting to join the United Auto Workers (UAW) — late on April 19. The UAW will represent over 4,300 workers total; Volkswagen said 3,613 workers cast votes, an 83.5% turnout rate. It was the third time the plant’s workers had tried to unionize with the UAW since 2014.
It’s also the first time workers at a foreign-owned carmaker in the South have voted to unionize — a watershed moment for a region that has touted its non-union labor force to attract overseas carmakers and, now, EV battery plants. And it may not be the last.
The UAW has already filed for a union election at a Mercedes plant in Vance, Alabama. The NLRB will administer the vote for 5,000 eligible workers from May 13-17.
But the historic Chattanooga victory for organized labor did not occur without serious pushback. In the lead-up to the union vote, which ran from April 17 to April 19, the Republican governors of six Southern states — Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina and Texas — issued a joint statement opposing the UAW’s bid to unionize the VW plant and raising the spectre of job cuts.
“Unionization would certainly put our states’ jobs in jeopardy — in fact, in this year already, all of the UAW automakers have announced layoffs,” their statement said. “Every single time a foreign automaker plant has been unionized; not one of those plants remains in operation,” the governors warned.
The governors went on to accuse the UAW of making false promises and serving political, rather than worker interests. “They proudly call themselves democratic socialists and seem more focused on helping President Biden get reelected than on the autoworker jobs being cut at plants they already represent,” their statement said.
The UAW endorsed Biden for reelection in January. Under NLRB leadership appointed by the Biden administration, the agency has more assertively wielded its authority to decide labor law cases that protect workers’ rights to organize. Biden appointed Jennifer Abruzzo as the NLRB’s general counsel in 2021 and controls three of the five seats on the NLRB board, with Republicans controlling the other two.
Kemp on CNBC Friday said strong economic results in Southern states such as Georgia are due to the absence of unions, and took aim at UAW president Shawn Fain for engaging in “Bernie Sanders-like tactics.”
“Our increase in wages is well above the national average, because of companies like this paying better wages … and what the UAW is doing is gonna destroy those types of relationships. We’ve seen that in the Northeast and, simply, we don’t want to see it in the Southeast,” he said.
Georgia has attracted a number of foreign auto and parts-making plants, including Kia Corp., Honda Motor Co., and Hitachi Automotive Systems. It is also home to Blue Bird’s electric school bus plant in Fort Valley, Georgia, where over 1,100 workers voted in May 2023 to join United Steelworkers by a 62% majority, after earlier failed attempts.
Warning that unionizing will cause employers to cut jobs is a common anti-union tactic. But Volkswagen in 2022 hired over 2,000 workers for a new production line, the all-electric ID.4, at the Chattanooga plant, according to Payday Report. That brought in a younger generation of more change-oriented workers, said the labor publication, which has covered the UAW’s VW plant campaign for over a decade.
After the UAW victory, Fain, told the VW workers in Chattanooga: “Many of the talking heads and the pundits have said to me repeatedly, before we announced this campaign, you can’t win in the South. They said Southern workers aren’t ready for it. … But you all said — Watch this.”
Data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the South has the lowest proportion of unionized workers in the country. Nationally, 10% of workers are in a union, but in Georgia it’s just 4.6%.
In March, the Georgia legislature passed Senate Bill 362, aimed at making it harder for workers to unionize. The bill would prohibit companies receiving state economic development incentives from voluntarily recognizing a union, or else be required to repay them. It awaits Kemp’s signature before becoming law.
