By Ivan Sanchez
The United Autoworkers (UAW) began a campaign to unionize the non-union plants in the South last year on the heels of their successful negotiations with the Big 3 Automakers in Detroit. The UAW has historically faced stiff opposition in the South, marking this as a unique moment in history for the labor movement.
Just a month ago, Volkswagen workers in Tennessee voted nearly 3-to-1 in favor of joining the UAW, upending longstanding assumptions about the South. But the outcome in Alabama, where more than 5,000 workers are employed, was never going to be easy.
Autoworkers at Mercedes-Benz near Tuscaloosa have rejected joining the UAW by a vote of 2,642 to 2,045. The results are a big setback for the UAW, which had enjoyed a string of victories in recent months, starting with the historic strikes last fall against the Big Three automakers Ford, GM and Stellantis that resulted in big wage gains and benefits for workers.
Right up the road from Chattanooga is General Motors’ Spring Hill, Tennessee, complex. GM’s biggest assembly plant in America is in Arlington, Texas. Altogether, more than 7,000 UAW members work at GM facilities in the South. Ford’s two Southern plants together have 12,000 UAW members. When Ford’s Blue Oval battery and EV manufacturing plants in Memphis and Kentucky come online, they’re expected to employ thousands more UAW members.
In January, corporate groups like the National Right to Work Committee and the Center for Union Facts started targeting non-union autoworkers including The Business Council of Alabama who called its campaign “Alabama Strong.”
As the VW vote approached, Southern Governors including Kay Ivey of Alabama and Bill Lee of Tennessee campaigned aggressively against unionization efforts in their respective states. While Governor Lee failed in his efforts to stop unionization at the VW plant, Governor Ivey was more successful.
While Autoworkers at Mercedes-Benz may have lost the unionization vote, over 40 percent of the workforce voted to unionize. Before successfully unionizing the VW Plant in Tennessee, workers rejected votes in 2014 and in 2019.
While the UAW has hit a bump in its efforts to unionize the South, successes in Tennessee point to eventual successes throughout the South for workers.
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