auto workers

By Luis Feliz Leon - Labor Notes, April 5, 2024

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.

By Julia Conley - Common Dreams, April 5, 2024

The alleged illegal union-busting that Mercedes-Benz autoworkers in Vance, Alabama accused the car company of in a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board has not weakened the resolve of pro-union employees, a supermajority of whom now support a union election, according to the United Auto Workers.

The union announced Friday that more than 5,000 workers at the company's nonunion plant have filed a petition with the NLRB in favor of an election, with the workers aiming for a vote by early May.

"It's time for change at Mercedes," said the UAW. "It's time for justice in Alabama. It's time for Mercedes workers to stand up. That's why Mercedes workers have filed for their vote to join the UAW, and to win a better life."

The announcement comes weeks after Volkswagen employees in Chattanooga, Tennessee filed for a union election that's expected to be held April 17-19.

By Francesca Gabbriellini and Giacomo Gabbuti - Jacobin, April 4, 2024

On Saturday, March 25, the streets of Florence were filled with thousands of people from all over Italy, marching in solidarity with workers from the former GKN factory in nearby Campi Bisenzio. The struggle at the plant had begun on July 9, 2021, when the auto parts producer’s 422 workers were abruptly dismissed. Contrary to the plans of the owner — British investment fund Melrose Industries — the workers occupied the plant, and they have been keeping it (and the millions of euros’ worth of machinery it contains) in order ever since. It is now the longest factory occupation in Italian history.

In that time, the workers at the ex-GKN plant have launched a massive solidarity movement, fighting to prevent the plant from being yet another milestone in Italy’s long deindustrialization. As we explained in an article last summer, this dispute is remarkable for many reasons. It comes amidst a political situation where the Left in its various forms has been shut permanently out of Parliament and increasingly marginalized in society, and indeed where post-fascist movements have extended their grip. It also confronts the generally dismal power relations in the world of labor — Italy is the only Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country where wages have fallen in real terms over the last three decades.

But the period since last summer has also seen many developments: not only because of the broader solidarity for the workers, but also because this dispute is combined with the fight for a just transition. Tellingly of this broader cause, the call for the March 25 march was signed by hundreds of associations — from unions to movement spaces, via students, parties, social centers, civic lists, and personalities, including international figures such as Miguel Benasayag, Adrian Lyttelton, and João Pedro Stedile. It closed with the slogan: “Let’s break the siege, let’s try to make the future.”

The ”siege” against these workers takes the form of the nonpayment of their salaries for some six months — a “de facto dismissal,” which has put them in the absurd condition of having neither social security nor salary, even as they deal with soaring inflation. The “future” here invoked means public intervention so that the liquidation procedure by the new owners is stopped, and the workers are allowed to pursue their own “reindustrialization from below.”

Indeed, for decades, Italian institutions have given up on any attempt at industrial policy — a situation that hasn’t changed with Europe’s post-pandemic recovery plans. The ex-GKN Factory Collective and those in solidarity with it are instead taking their own initiative to move toward a green transition. The aim: to reverse the spiral of relocations, divestments, and starvation wages that Italy has been heading down for at least three decades. To avoid a once great factory ending up as an empty shed, ready to become an eco-monster or the latest site of real estate speculation, the workers are striving to recover it on a cooperative basis, advancing their own plan to produce photovoltaic panels, batteries, and cargo bikes.

The workers’ collective has created broad alliances, with movements ranging from feminists to green causes. This is particularly visible in the climate strikes it has organized together with youth-led movements over the last two years. The ex-GKN struggle thus combines what is also called an “old” form of mobilization — the defense of workers’ jobs and a distinct class-based view of social relations — with a “new” one, i.e., the fight against climate change. For want of public intervention, it has launched a crowdfunding drive also supported by the Italian wing of Fridays for Future, with a view to “popular shareholding” in the future cooperative. But to understand why this support is important, it is worth explaining how we got to this point.

By Julia Conley - Common Dreams, March 26, 2024

A month after the United Auto Workers announced that a majority of workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama had signed union cards, employees struck a defiant tone Tuesday as they filed official complaints of union-busting by the company with the National Labor Relations Board.

Workers detailed the illegal disciplinary measures management has taken against them for taking leave and objecting to anti-union materials that have been shown in captive-audience meetings since most of the plant's 6,000 workers indicated they want to join the UAW.

"Since we started organizing, I put in my [Family and Medical Leave Act] leave with management multiple times and every time they said they lost the paperwork," Lakeisha Carter, who works in the company's battery plant, told the UAW. "It's just plain retaliation from Mercedes, but I'm not going to be intimidated."

By Bill Gallegos and Manuel Pastor - The Nation, March 11, 2024

A progressive version of the right’s Southern strategy could remake our politics—and ensure that the cars of the future, and the batteries they run on, are built by union labor.

While analysts have pointed to a recent slowing in demand for electric vehicles (EVs), the long-term picture remains clear: Annual global EV sales are projected to nearly triple between now and 2030. That trend represents some potential good news for the climate. But it’s also raised concerns—most sharply reflected in last year’s strike by the United Auto Workers (UAW)—about what will happen to both existing and prospective workers.

One big problem: The new “Battery Belt”—prompted by federal policies to move to zero emission vehicles and build an adequate charging infrastructure—is being developed in many Southern states where manufacturers seek to take advantage of low wages, few regulations, and a divided working class.

While we can’t stop the flow of federal climate dollars to those states—a fiscal largesse that seems particularly ironic since so many of their Republican leaders deny climate change—we can and should change the conditions that make them a lure for multinationals seeking to exploit low costs. That, in turn, requires widening the circle of support for a truly transformative move to a clean energy economy.

The combination of worker vulnerability and political division in the South has deep historic roots. The field of exploitative corporate dreams was made possible by a US labor movement that has never been able to follow through on its post–World War II promise to organize the South—a region whose anti-union politics stem in part from a legacy of slavery and racism.

But change may be coming. Even as presidential candidate Donald Trump was trolling autoworkers to persuade them that electrical vehicles would be the end of their jobs, the UAW’s 2023 strike led to contracts that raised wages, did away with two-tier labor systems, and opened the way to unionization up and down the supply chain for electric vehicles.

By Steven Greenhouse, Union Jake, and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, March 8, 2024

By Alex N. Press - Jacobin, March 8, 2024

In Vance, Alabama, nineteen miles east of Tuscaloosa, workers at the Mercedes-Benz US International (MBUSI) plant make the Mercedes GLE, GLE coupé, and GLS model series as well as the all-electric EQS SUV and EQE. They’ve also started building something else: a union. On the heels of the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) victorious strike against the Big Three automakers last fall, the union has gone on the offensive, vowing to organize some 150,000 nonunion autoworkers at thirteen companies across the country.

The union has tried to organize some of these plants before — and failed. The South has proven an almost entirely impenetrable citadel for the entirety of modern US labor history. Yet the UAW is heeding these workers’ calls, directing its focus and $40 million in extra resources to try again, and on a far larger scale.

The UAW has failed before, but now, the context has changed: members’ success at the Big Three has ignited a sense of possibility in their nonunion counterparts, and the union’s new leadership, determined to cast off the corruption of old and trust in the power of the membership and the desire to organize across the entire working class, is encouraging precisely such ambitious thinking. If workers were ever going to pull this one off, now is the time.

The first shop where a majority of workers signed union-authorization cards was Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which employs some 5,500 workers and was the site of previous failed UAW campaigns. On February 27, MBUSI’s workers announced that they were the second plant to reach that milestone, with a majority of the shop’s roughly six thousand employees having signed union cards. (Workers at Hynduai’s plant in Montgomery, Alabama, have also gone public with a UAW campaign, announcing last month that 30 percent of the plant’s four thousand workers have signed union cards.)

By Luis Feliz Leon - Labor Network for Sustainability, March 8, 2024

Auto workers at a Toyota engine plant in Troy, Missouri, have signed up 30 percent of their 1,000 co-workers to join the United Auto Workers (UAW)—a first at Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, on the heels of the union’s announcements of organizing campaigns at Volkswagen, Hyundai, and Mercedes-Benz.

Workers at the plant just outside St. Louis build 2.6 million cylinder heads per year. Should they stop building them, it would cut off supplies for all of the company’s engine plants in North America. Toyota is still working to build up its supply of chips and other inventory, following pandemic lockdowns and global supply-chain snarls.

In the body of a vehicle, these cylinder heads are as essential as human lungs, controlling the flow of air and fuel into the combustion chamber, powering a vehicle’s performance on the road.

In a new video, “We Keep Toyota Running,” workers describe the steep cost at which that performance comes. “People say Toyota engines last forever,” a worker says in the video. “We know what makes it possible: our hands, our backs, our knees, our work. We carry the proof every day: injuries, surgeries, disabilities.”

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, March 5, 2024

By Harold Meyerson - The American Prospect, February 26, 2024

In an event that’s way more groundbreaking than it should be, the United Auto Workers announced last week that it is committing $40 million to organize the workers in the nation’s non-union auto and battery factories: “particularly,” the announcement said, “in the South.”

A union appropriating that level of funding for on-the-ground organizing isn’t something we’ve seen very much, if at all, in recent decades—at least, not in industries where management views their workers as replaceable, which is how management commonly views most workers in manufacturing, retail, transportation, food services, and the like. In the playbook of American business, replaceable workers can be fired for participating in or just supporting an organizing campaign, and even though such firings are illegal, the penalties for violating that law have long been negligible. In going all in to organize the nation’s Volkswagen, Honda, Toyota, Mercedes, Tesla, and other factories, the UAW executive board had three good reasons to think their union could overcome what has been this most daunting of obstacles.