Mercedes-Benz workers in Vance,
Alabama have filed for an election to vote on
whether to join the United Auto Workers.
Auto
workers are gearing up to smash through
anti-union bulwarks in Alabama and Tennessee.
In
Chattanooga, Tennessee, at the only Volkswagen
factory in the world without a union, votes
will be counted April 19 as 4,300 workers who
make the Atlas SUV and the ID.4 electric
vehicle decide whether to join the United Auto
Workers.
“We didn’t think things would
happen so fast,” said VW worker Victor
Vaughn.
Momentum
spurred them forward. The organizing committee
recruited 300 co-workers as election captains.
“We have well over 90 percent coverage within
the plant, every position, every line,” said
Vaughn. “At that point we knew, ‘Yes, we’re
where we need to be.’”
Next
up will be Mercedes. Workers in Vance,
Alabama, at one of only two nonunion
Mercedes-Benz factories on the planet, filed
for an election today; a vote is expected soon
after the VW vote.
The
5,000 workers there make the highly profitable
luxury GLE SUVs and the Maybach GLS, which
retails for upwards of $170,000.
“You never know when a person
goes inside a booth,” said Mercedes worker
Jeremy Kimbrell. “Nobody’s watching, and the
company’s got a month to scare the hell out
of them. But I feel pretty good about the
vote. Workers finally stood up for
themselves and are ending the Alabama
discount.”
More
than 10,000 workers at 13 non-union carmakers
across two dozen facilities nationwide have
signed union cards since last November, when
the UAW announced an ambitious goal to
organize 150,000 workers at major non-union
auto and battery plants.
That
roughly mirrors the UAW’s existing Big 3
membership.
EVERYONE
HAS A WHY
“Each employee has their
why—why they wanted to start the process to
form a union,” Vaughn said.
The
main issues at VW are quality health care,
retirement security, safety, and paid sick
days—currently they get none.
“In mid-February, we had
quite a few people coming in sick because
they didn’t want to get penalized,” said
assembly line worker Isaac Meadows. “And
then of course they got everybody else sick,
and then we have a whole bunch of people
out. Everybody’s getting disciplinary action
and losing bonuses just because they’re sick
and they can't come to work.”
Workers
do have a time-off bank, but annual plant
closures for retooling eat into it. Meadows
gets 96 hours of paid time off. “When we have
our scheduled shutdowns, the company takes
most of it,” he said. “And then when we do
come back to work, we’re required to work a
lot of Saturdays.”
GOT
OUT OF THE WAY
The
vote at Mercedes follows two decades of
attempts that never got that far. What
changed?
“The union got out of the way
and let the workers organize,” said
Kimbrell, a veteran of multiple failed
campaigns in his 25 years here. “They’ll
talk to a co-worker and be more honest than
they will with a union organizer who calls
them on the phone that they don't know.”
In
past union drives, said Mercedes worker Jacob
Ryan, UAW organizers wouldn’t let organizing
committee members talk to their co-workers
inside the plant. Instead, the union set up a
tent across the street for workers to sign a
paper card.
“That’s sneaking
around—acting like you’re doing something
wrong,” Kimbrell said. Worker leaders
struggled to build up a committee; after a
month, recruits would lose interest and stop
answering their phones or showing up for
meetings.
In
2014, a worker who had supported the union,
Kirk Garner, publicly asked the UAW to stop
the organizing drive. “This has gone on for
two and half years, and people are burnt out,”
he said, after the pro-union committee
dwindled from 180 workers to 50, according to
Stephen Silvia’s recent book The
UAW’s Southern Gamble.
Another
worker, Jim Spitzley, tried to organize with
the Machinists instead. “There’s a lot of
people that will not sign a card with the
UAW,” he said. “They’re tired of it. They’ve
done it before and nothing has come of it.”
Both
Garner and Spitzley are backing the current
drive.
’FLEXED TILL WE BROKE’
After
the Great Recession, Mercedes management
increased production volume to keep up with
European luxury manufacturers Audi and BMW.
The chief operating officer made the pitch to
workers with a chart showing how far behind
Mercedes was.
To
increase the company’s competitive edge, “we
changed the way we went about things,”
Kimbrell said. “From being more focused on
quality and stopping the line, pointing out
issues, making sure that it's built right the
first time, it became about volume.”
That
meant speedup and injuries, a plant expansion
with additional shifts, and the introduction
of temps who came to represent a quarter of
the workforce. “Thanks for your continued
flexibility,” every memo said.
To
Ryan, that was a slap in the face. “It’s not
flexible,” he said. “We don’t have a choice.
One of the reasons for me wanting this
union—it’s time for them to be flexible.
They’ve flexed us till we’ve broken.”
Meanwhile,
then-UAW President Bob King was touting the
union’s embrace of “innovation, flexibility,
and continuous improvement,” leaning into
transnational union cooperation with IG Metall
and Daimler works councils.
In
these years, Kimbrell said, the argument for a
union was a “marginal” increase in benefits
and pay, at best. Once a UAW assistant
director even tried to sell him on two-tier
pay. “Two-tier was an abomination to me,” he
said. “It disgusts me. I told the guy, ‘I will
never sign a contract with two-tier pay on
it.’”
“You can’t draw red lines,”
the union official said. “By god, I just
drew one,” Kimbrell said. “You can’t tell me
what to think!”
WORKER
TO WORKER
But
last fall, Kimbrell watched on Facebook Live
as UAW President Shawn Fain threw
Stellantis's contract
offer in
the trash.
When
the Big 3 auto bosses moaned that workers’
demands would wreck the economy, Fain shot back,
“We’ll wreck their economy, the economy that
only works for the billionaire class and not
the working class.”
Collaboration-as-usual
unionism was over.
In
November, Kimbrell and about 20 co-workers
spoke to UAW Organizing Director Brian
Shepherd, while weighing the option of an
independent union. After some contentious
meetings, they chose the UAW.
The
union agreed to let workers run their own
campaign inside the plant, giving them access
to real-time information about cards coming in
and flexibility on when to file for an
election. The workers credit the UAW for its
research, legal, and communications
support—but this time, they say, the heart of
the campaign is their collective force inside
the plant.
Workers
seek out openly pro-union leaders on the floor
to ask how they can help with outreach. The
committee is organized into subgroups, with
visible leaders across the plant. The campaign
has relied especially on people whose jobs
allow them to roam freely, such as material
handlers.
Union
leaders used to emphasize their role as master
negotiators on behalf of a passive workforce.
But now the union has loosened the reins and
support has grown fast, keeping the drive in
the headlines and generating fresh momentum: a
virtuous cycle.
These
drives share some of the bottom-up dynamism of
the Starbucks Workers United campaign.
Union-busters have noticed the parallel too;
in captive-audience meetings they point to
Starbucks workers struggling to win a
contract.
OUTSIDE
INTERFERENCE
Lobbyists
and politicians in Tennessee and Alabama have
mobilized against the union drives—tactics
that figured heavily in the past UAW
failures at
VW.
Hamilton
County Mayor Weston Wamp called a press
conference (on April Fool’s Day) outside the
Chattanooga plant to announce that “the UAW is
a sinking ship.”
“We employees are the union,
and to have our county mayor come out
against the union was really disheartening,”
said Vaughn. “Had an election been going on
for the county mayor seat right now, I can
guarantee you that he would have lost by a
landslide, probably to a write-in
candidate.”
Mercedes-Benz
U.S. International CEO Michael Göbel told
workers that forming a union would mean
strikes, costly dues, and roadblocks to
conflict resolution, Bloomberg reported.
“I don’t believe the UAW can help us to be
better,” Göbel said.
Alabama
business groups have set up anti-union
websites and dotted the highways near the
plant with billboards. They’ve also tried to
sponsor anti-union groups in the plant, but
without much success, beyond whispers of a few
workers pledging to withdraw their union
cards, according to Kimbrell. Compare that to
a previous drive when 200 workers joined an
anti-union group.
“The Alabama model for
economic success is under attack,” wrote
Governor Kay Ivey in an op-ed opposing
the union campaigns at Mercedes and Hyundai,
calling car manufacturing one of the state’s
“crown jewel industries.”
“She’s damn right it is!”
Fain responded on April 2. “It’s under
attack because workers are fed up with
getting screwed.”
NOT
THE BOSS’S FRIEND
Since
the last union efforts, the workforce has
become majority Black. When the company used
one of its Black managers to spew
union-busting talking points, workers saw
through it and laughed off the company’s
“pathetic” attempt to pander.
None
of the four major auto plants in
Alabama—Mercedes, Hyundai, Toyota, and
Honda—nor their suppliers are located where
Black majorities live. But workers like Moesha
Chandler have moved to get auto jobs.
She
grew up in Uniontown, a small town about an
hour away, with no grocery stores and no
high-paying jobs.
At
Mercedes she found higher pay, but little
respect. Group leaders use “discretion,” she
says, to abuse their authority, grilling
workers about bathroom breaks, denying them a
break even to take insulin.
“That’s what plowed the
fields—the treatment,” Kimbrell said. “And
then the workers, we cultivated the anger at
the company.”
In
previous organizing drives, the UAW presented
itself as the best way to collaborate for
win-win solutions—even promising in advance
not to go for “uncompetitive” wages. But what
worker needs a union to help kiss the boss’s
ass?
Kimbrell
prefers Fain’s approach: openly
adversarial.
“People see that, and they’re
like,
yeah, we don’t want to hold hands,”
he
said. “We’ll tell them, ‘What you’re
doing
is wrong. We don’t want that, we
want
this. And we’re the workers, so
yeah,
we’re not your friends.’”
