Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Weekend Contributor
Last week, Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee “ramped up his anti-union rhetoric” in hopes of persuading workers at Volkswagen AG’s plant in Chattanooga to vote against representation by the United Auto Workers. According to Reuters, on February 12th, Corker said he had been “assured” that if workers at the Volkswagen plant in his hometown rejected representation by UAW, the company would “reward the plant with a new product to build.” Bernie Woodall of Reuters said that Corker dropped that “bombshell” on the “first of a three-day secret ballot election of blue-collar workers” at the Chattanooga plant. The most troubling part—as I see it—is that Corker’s claim actually ran “counter to public statements by Volkswagen…”
The following day, Corker said that he was “very certain that if the UAW is voted down,” the automaker would announce new investment in the plant “in the next couple weeks.” It seems Corker hadn’t heard—or chose to ignore—a statement made earlier by Frank Fischer, chief executive of VW Chattanooga, “that there was ‘no connection’ between the vote at its three-year-old Tennessee plant and a looming decision on whether VW will build a new crossover vehicle there or in Mexico.”
Volkswagen officials acknowledged “their desire for a works council, arguing that their model of labor-management relations serves them well in every other country in the world, except China.” Under U.S. law, however, the company would not be able to “set up a works council without first having its employees vote for a union.”
The UAW “was dealt a stinging defeat” when a majority of employees at the Chattanooga facility voted against joining the union “after a high-profile opposition campaign led by Republican politicians and outside political groups.” According to the Washington Post, the auto union’s loss “came in spite of an unprecedented level of support from the company being organized.” Fischer who had actually “encouraged the idea of starting a German-style ‘works council’ at the plant, like those in place at Volkswagen’s other factories'” apparently was “saddened by the outcome.”
Fisher speaking after the union vote (Washington Post):
“Our employees have not made a decision that they are against a works council. Throughout this process, we found great enthusiasm for the idea of an American-style works council both inside and outside our plant,” Fischer said, reading from a statement. “Our goal continues to be to determine the best method for establishing a works council in accordance with the requirements of U.S. labor law to meet VW America’s production needs and serve our employees’ interests.”
Gary Casteel, organizer for the UAW’s Southern Region, said, “Unfortunately, politically motivated third parties threatened the economic future of this facility and the opportunity for workers to create a successful operating model that would grow jobs in Tennessee.”
Casteel was making reference to anti-union remarks made by “Tennessee’s Republican lawmakers, who threatened to withhold tax incentives from Volkswagen if the workers unionized, and attention from D.C.-based activist Grover Norquist.” UAW officials said they noticed that workers began “to turn against the union as they started hearing ‘threats and intimidation’ against the company.”
It appears that the Chattanooga auto workers may have made a big mistake when they rejected UAW membership last week. According to Huffington Post, theirs is the only “Volkswagen plant worldwide without a formal mechanism for workers’ representation.”
Huffington Post:
The German “co-determination” model mandates works councils, which connect employees to management, at all large German companies. Following the union vote, the head of Volkswagen’s works council told German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung that the automaker would hesitate to expand in the U.S. South.
“I can imagine fairly well that another VW factory in the United States, provided that one more should still be set up there, does not necessarily have to be assigned to the South again,” said works council leader Bernd Osterloh.
“If co-determination isn’t guaranteed in the first place, we as workers will hardly be able to vote in favor” of building another plant in the right-to-work South, Osterloh added.
UAW chief says Bob Corker intimidated workers at Chattanooga Volkswagen plant
Now, thanks to Senator Bob Corker and others who spoke out against UAW representation for workers at the Chattanooga Volkswagen plant it looks like the company probably won’t be rewarding the facility with any “new product” manufacturing there…or anywhere else in the “right-to-work South.”
SOURCES
Turns Out Anti-Union Volkswagen Workers May Have Screwed Themselves And The South (Huffington Post)
As Volkswagen workers vote, Tennessee senator ramps up anti-union talk (Reuters)
VW workers may block southern U.S. deals if no unions: labor chief (Reuters)
U.S. senator drops bombshell during VW plant union vote (Reuters)
Auto union loses historic election at Volkswagen plant in Tennessee (Washington Post)
All eyes on Chattanooga: VW’s workers are deciding the future of unions in the South (Washington Post)
There is no lack of female real world down to earth rational intelligent opinions on this blog and to infer there is, is not very intelligent, but displays rank partisanship, despite protestations of being independant of either left or right ideology. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, in the words of some.
MarieK,
I’m not sure what you mean by getting “smacked.” People are free to state their opinions on issues/subjects on this blog. People are also free to disagree with what others say–and to reply with a counter argument. I wouldn’t consider that “smacking” someone.
MarieK, There’s MUCH LESS smacking around than there was during the Dark Ages here. You have a civility rule in place. And, there are a few here who will have your back if someone gets personal. You’ll do just fine.
Thanks Nick Spineli good to know. I was fired because of an extended require maternity medical leave due to a boy named Nick.
Seeing things from all view points is better than living in paradigms. I’ve worked in both settings. I’ve even been a manager of union and non-unionized shops. I’m indifferent because it works and it doesn’t. All things in life roll that way.
Note to Nikki: Unions do have a role in S.C.
BY ERIN McKEE
Posted: Friday, January 27, 2012
http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20120127/ARCHIVES/301279935
Excerpt:
In her State of the State address last week, Gov. Nikki Haley stated, “We’ll make the unions understand full well that they are not needed, not wanted and not welcome in the state of South Carolina.”
Gov. Haley was born in 1972. The Central Labor Union in Charleston was chartered in 1912. The majority of labor unions in this state have been on this Earth longer than our governor. Union members in South Carolina pay taxes (and her salary), and the majority have higher wages, health benefits and retirement, which enable them to take care of their families.
Unions are needed in South Carolina. Union members are the only workers protected from at-will employment. Union members want to work with management to make their companies safe, have a contract that everyone can understand, have a grievance procedure (like due process) and protect workers.
Unions are the anti-theft device for workers. Is our state better off with low-wage jobs and no benefits? What will that do to our tax base over time, what will that do to our children, what will that do to our middle class? When labor was strong so was our middle class. What will happen to small businesses when people don’t make enough money to shop? Do we really want the big business world to take over and have more companies keeping wages so low that the workers need public assistance while they make record profits?
Gov. Haley chose a union facility to have her inauguration. She works in a Statehouse painted by the Painters Union, gets her mail from the United States Postal Service, which has the Postal Workers Union, the National Letter Carriers, the Mail Handlers Union. Most of what she buys more than likely came through the Port of Charleston, where the International Longshoremen’s Association handles cargo. She likely uses AT&T which has the Communications Workers of America union.
UPS workers who deliver packages to her office are represented by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The power she consumes is provided from SCE&G whose workers are represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Some of our very large companies like Kapstone, Mead Westvaco, Bowater, International Paper are union as are our firefighters and lots of our construction workers.
Thanks Nick! I appreciate it. I’ll get smacked a lot I’m sure.
MarieK, WOW!! I MEAN WOW. You made more sense and conveyed more truth and wisdom on this subject than all the blind union loyalists combined. While it appears a union post attracted you, that down to earth, real world, female perspective is desperately needed here. Stick around, please. There are snacks and candy.
rafflaw,
Have you read about Gov. Nikki Haley and her anti-union comments?
MarieK,
your response seems to ignore the issue of a sitting US Senator claiming that VW will bring even more jobs if the employees refuse representation. That claim was false, but for some reason that does not matter, I guess! No one is suggesting that union shops are perfect, but VW wanted the employees to have representation in order to form their workers council. Should US Senators lie to employees about imaginary new jobs or should Tenn. legislators claim that they will take away incentives for companies to bring jobs to the state if the employees vote for a union? Is that free choice?
Where’s the letter from VW stating that claim was false? How do you know? People are making free will choice for a variety of reasons. Politicians say a lot of very stupid things. In fact many out right lie to us. That has nothing to do with the free choice of the workers. I’m not missing the point. Because the union failed to gain the vote it’s just got to be someone else’s fault? Right? You must think that the american worker is stupid and easily swayed.
I’m certainly not ignorant of politicians lies or half truths. It’s only good when they lie when it suits agendas that you support? For the rest of us…we’re ignorant, right? Those VW plant workers they’re just a bunch of people with hey in their teeth. They don’t know what’s good for them.
Rcampbell,
I did not see your comment in the spam filter. I think WordPress might have eaten another.
I wish I knew what happened to my post.
The UAW can’t protect them from the same fate as Detroit and Flint. In my neighborhood a Ford plant just closed that had been there since 1925. We’re all very sad about that. I’m not saying that it’s the UAW fault, I’m just stating that the UAW can’t give ultimate guarantees.
I’m pretty naive. I just don’t understand what the big deal is. It’s the workers’ prerogative. We can’t protect everyone from themselves. People in that area aren’t blind zombie followers of politicians either. There’s going to be vocal opposition to the UAW. That’s free speech.The UAW had the benefit of their free speech right on the facility. The opposition did not.
I’m indifferent about this. Freedom of choice is job one to me. I’ve worked in union and non-union shops before. I was fired during an extended required maternity leave from a non-union shop.I also had raised tried to be denied based on bigotry. Had it be unionized, I know I wouldn’t had been fired or had these issues. Employment law ruled in my favor in both cases.The benefit of that job is that I had the freedom to excel and educate myself and build a better resume. I could go beyond and above my scope of service. That I did. Yet in the union shops, there are an entirely different set of issues. I had protection from bigotry and gender biases. Yet I was supporting a mediocre work environment and my hand was severely slapped every time that I tried to exceed the norm.
Because of the non-union shop, I learned to navigate around “isms” and stupidity. Because of the union stop, I learned to deal with painful mediocrity and a glass ceiling.
Let them pick their own poison.
Grover Norquist group plans to keep up the anti-union fear across the south
by Laura Clawson
2/18/14
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/02/18/1278515/-Grover-Norquist-group-plans-to-keep-up-the-anti-union-fear-across-the-south
Excerpt:
The right’s campaign against unions never stops. After the UAW’s narrow defeat in a union election at a Tennessee Volkswagen plant, a group that placed anti-union billboards around the area is ready to move on to where it thinks the next fight might be:
The Center for Worker Freedom, which is linked to anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist, plans to renew its battle against the UAW at plants in Alabama and Mississippi where the union wants to organize.
“Those are likely the next big ones for the UAW,” said Matt Patterson, executive director of the center. “We’ll be there.” […]
The center, created under the umbrella of Norquist’s anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform, used billboards and 30-second radio spots across the region to criticize the UAW effort and blame the union for the fiscal woes in Detroit, the struggling hub of the U.S. auto industry.
Charlton,
Thanks for the link to that story about Nikki Haley.
So much for the GOP being the party that wants government to stay out of other people’s business. Imagine not welcoming companies to bring jobs to your state–just because the employees would have union representation!
*****
UAW loss in Tenn. sparks anti-union efforts in South
S.C. governor, other states say they don’t want auto union jobs.
WBIR
http://www.wbir.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/21/uaw-loss-in-tenn-sparks-anti-union-efforts-in-south/5674873/
Excerpt:
Following the UAW’s loss during an election at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., last week, anti-union groups have vowed to use the same game plan against the union in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and elsewhere.
On Thursday, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said corporations with union representation — including General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler — should not even think about locating in her state.
“It’s not something we want to see happen,” Haley said after an appearance at an automotive conference in downtown Greenville, S.C. “We discourage any companies that have unions from wanting to come to South Carolina because we don’t want to taint the water.”
The governor urged more than 200 people at the conference, many of them auto industry executives, to keep up their guard against unions. “They’re coming into South Carolina. They’re trying. We’re hearing it. The good news is it’s not working.”
The UAW, along with Chrysler and GM, declined to comment. Ford, in a statement, said, “We are proud of our strong relationships with our stakeholders, including our UAW partners.”
A well funded Koch brother initiative…..
When Culture Eclipses Class
How the UAW could organize NYU grad students and not Chattanooga, Tennessee auto workers
Harold Meyerson
February 17, 2014
http://prospect.org/article/when-culture-eclipses-class
Excerpt:
America is where class struggle gets derailed by culture wars. It’s happened throughout our history. It happened again last week in Chattanooga.
For more than a decade, the ability of the United Auto Workers to win good contracts for its members—clustered in GM, Ford, Chrysler, and various auto parts factories across the industrial Midwest—has been undercut by its failure to unionize the lower-wage factories that European and Japanese car makers have opened in the South. Daimler, BMW, Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen—all of them ventured to the non-union South to make cars on the cheap for the American market. All these companies have good relations with the unions in their homeland, but by going south, they signaled they had little to no intention of going union in the U.S.
It wasn’t just that Southern states had those wonderfully misnamed “right-to-work” laws that meant that even if the unions won collective bargaining rights, workers didn’t have to pay dues to the union for raising the wages. In much of the white South, particularly among the Scotch-Irish descendants of Appalachia, the very logic of collective bargaining runs counter to the individualist ethos. It was no great challenge for UAW opponents to depict the union as the latest in a long line of Northern invaders, which is precisely what one anti-union activist did during the UAW’s campaign to unionize Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant. In an op-ed in the Chattanooga Times Free Press that ran several weeks before last week’s vote at Volkswagen, Matt Patterson of the Center for Worker Freedom (a spin-off of Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform), compared the UAW’s campaign to the Union Army’s occupation of Eastern Tennessee during the Civil War and urged workers to repel it as Confederates forces had done to that Union army at the battle of Chickamauga. Clearly, this was not an argument Patterson would have made had the plant employed more than a handful of African-Americans, but Chattanooga remains one of the whiter bastions of the New South. (The website established by the Center for Worker Freedom is emblazoned with a logo reading “Liberating Labor, One Worker at a Time”—quite the slogan for a group that equated its anti-union struggle with a battle to defeat the army that actually freed Chattanooga’s slaves in 1863.)
For all of labor’s troubles organizing in the white South, Volkswagen was the one campaign that labor thought it could win. Under the leadership of Bob King, the union had won the support of the German auto-and-steel workers union, IG Metall, which, under the terms of Germany’s “co-determination” law, controls half the seats on Volkswagen’s corporate board. Indeed, due to Volkswagen’s Nazi roots, the American authorities in postwar Germany made the company go one step further, requiring a two-thirds majority from board members for any significant policy decision—in effect, giving the union veto power over Volkswagen’s various projects. Many of the workers who opposed the very idea of a union at Chattanooga argued, rightly, that Volkswagen was a good employer that paid them well and respected their rights. They failed to realize that the company’s conduct had been largely shaped by influence that IG Metall wields over VW’s labor relations.
Working with his German union counterparts, King persuaded Volkswagen to establish a works council—a consultative labor-management council mandated by German law to meet regularly to shape company practices on work shifts, overtime and kindred issues—at Chattanooga. The Chattanooga works council would be the first on American soil, but under the terms of U.S. labor law, it could only be established if workers authorized a union to represent them. The very idea of a works council bolstered King’s argument that the UAW sought a less adversarial relationship with its employers. There was precedent for such a relationship. Indeed, Walter Reuther, the UAW’s legendary president from 1947 to 1970, had proposed a form of co-determination in his negotiations with General Motors in the mid-1940s, but GM would have none of it. Ironically, Reuther—of German-American descent—had close relations with the postwar founders of IG Metall, and encouraged the American authorities in post-war Germany to promote the kind of partnership labor relations that that nation enjoys to this day. With an employer like Volkswagen, King saw an opportunity to rebrand his union in a similarly non-adversarial way.
From a political standpoint, it was a necessary re-branding. The UAW had taken a terrific beating during the auto bailouts of 2009, receiving much of the blame for the near bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler. The fact that Ford, operating under the same UAW contract as the two other car makers, was nowhere near bankruptcy should have raised serious questions about the union’s culpability for Detroit’s demise, but King’s predecessor as UAW president, still in office at the time, was almost criminally incapable of mounting a public defense of the union. None was mounted, and the UAW entered popular imagination as the most inflexible of labor organizations.
Here’s another take we haven’t considered:
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/02/18/pers-f18.html
Thirteen billboards, one paint-shop worker helped defeat union at VW plant in Chattanooga
By Kevin Drawbaugh and Nick Carey
WASHINGTON/CHATTANOOGA
Sat Feb 22, 2014
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/22/us-autos-uaw-election-analysis-idUSBREA1L13220140222
Excerpt:
UNPRECEDENTED CAMPAIGN
Anti-union activists say there was no coordinated campaign to defeat the UAW and no strategizing with Republican politicians who were speaking out against the vote. But several of the high-profile conservative groups and their affiliates previously have worked together on such hot-button issues as right-to-work and the rights of public employee unions.
These included the National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation, Americans for Tax Reform and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. All are based in or just outside of Washington, and all helped to get right-to-work legislation passed in Nevada.
“It was a fairly intensive campaign, the likes of which we haven’t seen previously in an NLRB election,” said John Logan, director of Labor and Employment Studies at San Francisco State University, of the Chattanooga effort.
As union elections go, the one in Chattanooga was unusual because the employer did not oppose the union. Union leaders, more used to facing opposition from company bosses on the shop floor, appear to have been caught off-guard by their opponents’ strategy to take their campaign from the factory to the streets of Chattanooga.
“The ferocity of outside political and financial forces was unprecedented,” said AFL-CIO leader Richard Trumka at his union’s winter meeting this week in Houston. Trumka described the opposition’s campaign in Chattanooga as “an experiment by forces of right-wing zealotry.”
Conservative Republicans, including Tennessee’s governor, spoke out strongly against the UAW in the final days of the election campaign. Among the most vocal critics of the union was Senator Corker, the former mayor of Chattanooga who helped bring the plant to his city in 2008.
Some conservative leaders acknowledge that defeating the UAW in Chattanooga was crucial to their broader battle-plan to keep organized labor from making inroads in southern states.
“GATEWAY TO THE SOUTH”
Grover Norquist, a conservative activist who heads the influential Washington-based Americans for Tax Reform, described the UAW vote at Volkswagen as “step one” in a union march on the south. “They get this (plant), then they start moving toward the other large companies … This is the gateway to the South, and by that I mean all the right-to-work, not heavily unionized states.”
Norquist said the strategy of the Center for Worker Freedom, an affiliate of his Washington group, was to focus on the community and not just the workers at the plant. Volkswagen had barred anti-union groups from campaigning on company premises.
The Center for Worker Freedom bought up every available billboard it could find in town – 13 in all, he said.
“The various billboards weren’t just to make sure that everyone driving to the plant would see them but also so that everybody in town would see them,” said Norquist.
One billboard linked the UAW to Democratic President Barack Obama, whose national approval ratings are dismally low, and another to the demise of auto hub Detroit, which filed the biggest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history last July.
While the UAW has focused much of its post-election ire on Corker, anti-union activists say a key player in their effort in Chattanooga was Patterson, a little-known Norquist lieutenant who heads the Center for Worker Freedom.
Patterson began laying the anti-union groundwork in Chattanooga last spring, while still working for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He began writing a series of opinion pieces for newspapers and helped organize local events.
“I thought if the UAW was going to have a victory in the South, then this was going to be the place where they had the best chance,” Patterson said in an interview.
Patterson was one of the featured speakers at an anti-union town hall last July in Chattanooga. The event was organized by Mark West, head of the Chattanooga Tea Party, and his neighbor Don Jackson, former head of VW’s Chattanooga plant.
Anti-union activists deny coordinating their efforts. But West and Jackson said Patterson shared information, including newspaper articles and opinion pieces, with Mike Burton, 56, a paint shop worker at the VW plant who last summer began organizing anti-UAW workers in Chattanooga and later formed a group called Southern Momentum.
Why Volkswagen is helping a union organize its own plant
By Lydia DePillis
February 10, 2014
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/02/10/why-volkswagen-is-helping-a-union-organize-its-own-plant/
Excerpt:
…While the big three American carmakers are all unionized, so far the foreign companies have avoided it by locating in Southern states with strong Right to Work laws. From their perspective, unions usually just mean work stoppages, expensive benefit plans, and the inability to fire people at will.
That’s what’s weird about the VW vote: The German company is campaigning for the UAW, not against it, in a kind of employer-union partnership America has seldom seen. What gives?
Well, VW is kind of different, as automakers go. It understands how having a union can boost productivity and allow it greater flexibility in adjusting to downturns. It should know: The rest of its plants are unionized too.
This would also be something new for the United Auto Workers. They wouldn’t have the same relationship with VW as they do with Chrysler, General Motors, and Ford. Rather, the idea is to create something called a “works council,” which are widespread across Europe and enjoy tremendous influence over how plants are run. In America, that kind of body can’t be established without a union vote — but crucially, the works council would be independent of the union, meaning the UAW would give up some control as soon as it gained it.
While the details of the arrangement would be ironed out after the election, works councils — which are elected by all workers in a factory, both blue and white collar, whether or not they belong to the union — usually help decide things like staffing schedules and working conditions, while the union bargains on wages and benefits. They have the right to review certain types of information about how the company is doing financially, which often means that they’re more sympathetic towards management’s desire to make cutbacks when times are tough. During the recession, for example, German works councils helped the company reduce hours across the board rather than laying people off, containing unemployment until the economy recovered…
Works councils are also typically not allowed to call strikes, but they also don’t usually need to, because their authority is baked into their agreements with the company (and, in Europe, usually enforced by law). If the UAW wants to strike over wages and benefits, it’s still able to do so, but the likelihood of arriving at a mutually agreeable solution without one is much higher.
That’s why VW wants its plant to go union. According to VW’s global works council leader, Bernard Osterloh, the company even sees its culture of worker codetermination as a “competitive advantage.”
Working is an individual right. Any State law which forbids it, should be unconstitutional, as there should be no law which forbids unionizing. Unions are Voluntary Associations, a hall mark of capitalism, the right of association, as is it’s foundation, the protection of individual rights and property.
Of course, when the BAR members started monopolizing State legislatures and started passing UPL laws, it also broke the fundamental right to work. hence, why I said the BAR should be excluding from voluntary associations that have contributed to the benefit of our nation. Congress also passes laws that they themselves do not have to follow; go figure. You cannot practice law unless you join our voluntary association and to join our voluntary association, you must go to the law schools we approve and pass the law tests we create?
And we wonder why justice is so aloof in our great nation.