Unions Can Win in the South
Workers in Tennessee have made history. On Thursday, the United Auto Workers announced that it had finally reached a tentative agreement with management at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which unionized in 2024. If the workers approve the deal, it’ll be the first union contract outside the Big Three auto manufacturers in a Southern state.
Auto companies, especially foreign manufacturers, have been moving operations to Southern states for decades, far away from union strongholds in the Rust Belt, where wages were higher and labor laws were stronger. Unions have been struggling to find a foothold in the South for decades. But if the 3,200 shop workers in Chattanooga vote to ratify the contract, it will help unions gain a stronger foothold there.
With the Trump administration dismantling labor protections, getting to this point was an uphill battle. “I think their struggle has also illustrated some of the existing, very persistent flaws in our labor law system,” said Jennifer Sherer, who directs the Worker Power Project at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “The fact that it took, you know, almost two years from their organizing victory to the first contract … workers should never have to wait that long.”
Union workers, broadly, enjoy higher pay and better job protections than nonunion workers do, so it’s no surprise that the agreement will instantly improve the Volkswagen workers’ lives: a 20 percent wage increase across the board over the life of the contract, better health care, guaranteed paid time off, and agreements to protect workers from unfair discipline and to give them a say in decision-making. “This deal proves what happens when autoworkers stand up and demand their fair share,” UAW president Shawn Fain said after the deal was announced. “People said Southern autoworkers could never form a union or win a union contract. Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga said, ‘Watch this.’”
The agreement could have implications beyond the plant—for nonunion workers in the state, autoworkers across the South, and efforts to unionize throughout the region—by proving that organizing efforts can succeed there. Legislators and employers in the South have long suppressed labor organizing as a way to disempower Black workers and depress wages. There are unions in Southern states, of course, but laws like “right to work” make it more difficult for workers to organize. Arkansas and Florida were the first to pass these laws, and many other states passed them in the 1940s and 1950s. Today, every Southern state has a right-to-work law, and union membership there remains much lower than in other regions.
Those conditions make workers less confident in, and perhaps less knowledgeable about, organizing for better pay and conditions. In fact, the UAW lost two other votes to unionize the Volkswagen plant before it prevailed in 2024. In general, organizers in the South often have to work harder to educate and inform workers about their rights to unionize in the first place, because there are fewer union members within neighborhoods and communities to help build basic knowledge about worker rights. “The fewer union members there are in a particular community, the more cut-off people are from just basic knowledge about what their rights are and what their options are for organizing,” Sherer said.
When the Chattanooga Volkswagen workers voted to unionize in 2024, Joe Biden was president and he had taken steps to bolster the National Labor Relations Board. Workplace rules and the willingness to enforce them have all weakened under Trump: The NLRB even went without a quorum for most of last year.
But ideology will always eventually have to bend to facts on the ground. Inequality is still rising in the U.S. The voters who trusted Trump on the economy have lost faith in him, especially as it becomes ever more clear that he’s watching out for his rich friends and donors. Consumer sentiment remains at historic lows, and the country’s economy is being held together by fragile AI hopes. Eventually working-class Americans will seek ways to guarantee some stability, no matter where they live.