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In Tough Loss, the High-Profile UAW Campaign at Mercedes-Benz in Alabama Falls Short
By Sarah Jaffe - In These Times, May 17, 2024
Workers at the Mercedes-Benz U.S. International plant in Vance, Alabama came up short in their first union election on Friday, May 17, with 2,045 votes to join the United Auto Workers and 2,642 against.
A brief but high-energy campaign that saw real improvements won at the plant and a worker-led effort to organize failed to create a wave after the high-profile Volkswagen workers’ win in April in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
“These courageous workers reached out to us because they wanted justice. They led us. They led this fight. And what happens next is up to them,” UAW President Shawn Fain told reporters shortly after the vote count. “Justice isn’t just about one vote or one campaign. It’s about getting a voice and getting your fair share. Workers won serious gains in this campaign. Don’t lose sight of that. The UAW bump, they killed wage tiers. They got rid of a CEO that had no interest in improving. Mercedes is a better place thanks to this campaign and these courageous workers.”
Rob Lett, a worker at the Mercedes-Benz plant, notes that “essentially this is a post-Covid world and corporations have to understand that they can’t treat people in any haphazard way and think that they’ll just hold their heads down and say, ‘No, I can’t do any better.’ People understand now that life’s too short.”
Rick Webster, another member of the organizing committee at Mercedes, told me, “The vote shows that we do have a really strong base though, and we just got to continue this fight. Obviously, everybody’s going to be looking at Mercedes to see what they do from here. Are they actually going to try and improve conditions in the workplace to try and sway our base to come to their side? Or are they just going to continue like nothing ever happened?”
“If it had been a landslide for the company,” he continued, “yeah, I’d probably feel pretty deflated at that point. But with those numbers, I feel really good about that.”
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