After VW plant victory, UAW targets Mercedes in Alabama

The United Auto Workers made history by winning its first union vote in an auto plant in South America. They must now prove that success was no fluke by securing a second win at the Mercedes factory in Alabama next month.

UAW representatives at the VW plant will also have to show courage in negotiating a contract that gives workers what they fought for: better benefits, increased workplace safety and a better work-life balance.

Volkswagen’s landslide victory in Tennessee is expected to provide a key boost to UAW President Shawn Fain’s $40 million campaign to expand the union outside Detroit, the South and West, targeting 13 non-union auto companies, including Toyota and Tesla.

Mr. Fain, a strike leader who enjoyed last year’s struggle with Detroit employers, which won double-digit raises and cost-of-living adjustments, told a group of VW workers that the union would continue the fight with Mercedes. “Let’s win more for the working class across the country,” he said.

The vote at the Mercedes factory, scheduled for mid-May, is expected to be more difficult than that of VW, which took a neutral position in the vote.

Mercedes said it respects the right of workers to organize and wants them to make the right decision. But in a letter to workers in January, the company said union organizers “can’t guarantee anything” and that some workers refused to unionize because of competition.

“Mercedes is running a more aggressive anti-union campaign than Volkswagen inside the factory,” said John Logan, a professor of labor law at San Francisco State University.

But he added that VW’s landslide victory, which saw 73 percent of eligible workers vote in favor of unionization, would provide a major boost to unionization efforts at other factories across the South.

“If they also get this victory, I wouldn’t be surprised to see elections at Hyundai, Honda and Toyota in the coming months,” he said.

The UAW says a “vast majority” of the roughly 5,200 eligible workers at the Mercedes assembly plant in Vance, Ala., and the nearby Woodstock battery plant support it. UAW policy is to require a vote once 70 percent of workers have signed a union membership card.

This will largely depend on the state of the economy and the perception of job security. In the anti-union South, where the UAW has lost several battles in the past, six Republican governors have vehemently opposed the union’s current campaign, calling it a threat to job security, with automakers facing higher costs. of work.

Before the UAW’s collective bargaining agreement with the three Detroit automakers last fall, Ford officials said their U.S. labor costs stood at $64 an hour, versus an estimated $55 for foreign automakers and $45 to $50 an hour. electric car leader Tesla. .

Workers at two other factories in the southern United States – a Hyundai plant in Alabama and a Toyota parts plant in Missouri – have also launched union organizing drives, 30% of workers who signed cards showing their support for the UAW.

Workers at the VW plant said they would begin meetings on Sunday to strategize contract negotiations.

“The real struggle is to get your fair share,” Fain told VW employees Friday evening.

VW employee Jeremy Bowman, who hopes to be part of the factory’s organizing committee, agrees. “The fight has just begun,” he said. (Reporting by Nora Eckert; Editing by Peter Henderson and Edwina Gibbs)