A defeat for Big Labor

Workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga rejected a bid by the United Auto Workers to gain a crucial foothold in the South.

In a stinging defeat for organized labor, workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., last week rejected a bid by the United Auto Workers to gain a crucial foothold in the South. The 712–626 vote came even though VW didn’t oppose the factory’s unionization, which would have allowed the company to introduce the kind of German-style works councils that promote worker-management collaboration in its facilities elsewhere. But Republican public officials in Tennessee strongly opposed the UAW’s effort, arguing that companies and labor flourish best in “right to work” states without unions.

Union organizers simply failed to convince these workers “that their lives would be better with the UAW than without it,” said Tom Walsh in the Detroit Free Press. The VW workers saw no prospects of getting better wages and benefits by paying union dues. That left them vulnerable to the arguments of the state’s top Republican officeholders, Sen. Bob Corker and Gov. Bill Haslam, who warned that Tennessee’s growing auto sector would go the way of Detroit if the union prevailed.

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