Next month, roughly 4,300 employees at Volkswagen’s Tennessee plant will vote to determine whether they will unionize following a months-long campaign run by the United Auto Workers (UAW) union.
According to a UAW press release, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) will oversee a secret ballot election at the Chattanooga facility, scheduled for April 17, 18, and 19, after a super-majority of Volkswagen employees signed union authorization cards last week. The factory was the first to see unionization support hit 30%, reaching the number after just two weeks of campaigning.
Hoping to leverage the heightened awareness resulting from its historic negotiation victory against the Detroit-Three automakers last year, the UAW has now been running unionization efforts at multiple facilities across the U.S. for nearly six months. While the group’s goal is to expand its membership and reach, an aim it has committed $40 million to achieve, a key challenge to its campaign is the large number of factories, including Volkswagen’s Tennessee plant, that are located in the southern U.S., where anti-union sentiment and policy are routine. Most non-unionized automakers have also introduced recent pay increases, many of which were implemented in the days following the UAW’s six-week strike, potentially deterring interest in unionization.
Despite this, the UAW says it has seen widespread support and claims to have secured more than 10,000 authorization cards since last year. While the group is campaigning at more than two dozen facilities in the U.S., it only reports on activity at sites where one-third of the workforce has committed their support to unionization. So far, only four campaigns have been revealed: one at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant, one at Mercedes Benz’s plant in Vance, Alabama, one at Hyundai’s Montgomery, Alabama plant, and one at Toyota’s plant in Troy, Missouri.
