UAW eyeing further southern expansion after win at Volkswagen's Tennessee plant

The United Auto Workers (UAW) has notched a breakthrough win for southern expansion following its successful strike against Detroit's Big Three automakers last year.

Last week, the workers at Volkswagen's factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted 73% in favor of joining the UAW, marking the union's first victory in a renewed push to organize nonunion plants – most of which are owned by European and Asian automakers in the South.

The UAW is feeling the momentum.

"The workers at VW are the first domino to fall," UAW President Shawn Fain told The Guardian in an interview Sunday. "They have shown it is possible. I expect more of the same to come. Workers are fed up."

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Labor relations consultant Jason Greer, president of Greer Consulting Inc., and a former board agent with the National Labor Relations Board agrees.

"I'm impressed," Greer told FOX Business in an interview about UAW's latest win. "I think what we're seeing is a UAW that's been very smart about how to organize; they have learned how to tap into the heart of the employees."

Greer noted that Volkswagen – whose other plants are all outside the U.S. and are already unionized – remained neutral and did not put up a fight in the UAW's unionization bid. But he said the potential impact on the South, made up of right-to-work states, could be significant.

"When you have employees from southern states who've been traditionally nonunion and haven't even really felt like there was a need for a union, all of a sudden sit around, saying, 'Well, I'm working for 15 bucks an hour, but this newly unionized facility down the street, they just got 30 bucks an hour. Why wouldn't I want that?' I think it speaks to the growing sense of the ‘us versus them’ divide that has taken hold not just in the South but really across the country," Greer said.

He added, "There's almost this new labor movement happening, and the labor movement looks a lot different than it did in the past."

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Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Committee, told FOX Business there are a couple of things that make this different and probably give it some legs, at least for the near term.

"One is that the government is now engaged in this business," Mix said, saying that President Biden is leading an "all-hands-on-deck effort by the executive branch to give union officials dramatic new powers over workers and using basically every agency at the federal government to do so."

He pointed to the United Steelworkers (USW) successfully unionizing a Georgia factory owned by bus maker Blue Bird last year as the first victory.

The facility, which makes electric buses, was granted enormous federal subsidies, and Mix said the Department of Energy, for instance, can pressure companies to remain neutral in a union election in order to qualify for the federal funds.

Indeed, in announcing its victory in September, the USW said in a press release that Blue Bird's "anti-union rhetoric may have been somewhat muted by the fact that the company, which produces low-emission and electric vehicles, is slated to receive an infusion of federal funding through the Biden administration’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure law, the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act to boost domestic production of semiconductors, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $370 billion for clean energy initiatives."

"It was kind of the thumb of the government on the scale," Mix said. "And one of the things that I think you'll see that is a common denominator in these battles going forward … is that there's going to be an electric battery component in all of this or some kind of electric vehicle component and all of this effort by the UAW over the next five years if Biden wins re-election."

He said Volkswagen's Tennessee plant makes EVs, and the UAW's next target – the Mercedes plant in Vance, Alabama – also makes electric SUVs.

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Mix said that another reason the UAW is seeking to unionize in right-to-work states is because they have to, saying "that's where the jobs are now."

The Right to Work chief presented Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing that from 2013 to 2023, manufacturing jobs grew by 12.3% in right-to-work states, compared to 2.5% in "forced union" states.