Voting to unionize, Volkswagen workers at the Chattanooga plant belong to the United Auto Workers. The vote was aimed at unionizing 150,000 workers at non-union auto plants across the United States.
The first union election was held through the UAW‘s ambitious organizing campaign. There are going to be a lot of improvements in the automobile workforce and a lot of changes in the automobile industry due to the election.
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The plant has approximately 4,300 eligible voters. About 2,200 votes were cast in favor of union formation. The union made the call after the votes were counted late on Friday night.
The Chattanooga factory’s first auto plant turned into a union in the 1940s.
Earlier it was known that the UAW union would definitely win because there were many workers who agreed and they expressed it through voting.
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“The UAW is sending a strong signal that big change may be coming to places where most thought the labor movement was dead and buried,” said professor Sharon Block, executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School.
“In the wake of the settlement of the strikes at the Big Three this fall, the transplant auto companies in the south gave their workers wage increases – the UAW bump – thinking that they could buy off their workers on the cheap. The UAW’s organizing campaign throughout the transplant companies in the south is a bet that workers can’t be bought off so cheaply. The UAW’s message to these workers is: ‘Don’t settle for crumbs.’”
A Volkswagen spokesperson said in an email before the vote:
“We respect our workers’ right to a democratic process and to determine who should represent their interests. We fully support an NLRB vote so every team member has a chance to a secret ballot vote on this important decision.”
“Volkswagen is proud of our working environment in Chattanooga that provides some of the best-paying jobs in the area.”
