http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/after_uaw_defeat_at_volkswagen_in_tennessee_theories_abound
BY Mike Elk
On
February 14, United Auto Workers President Bob King (L) and
Secretary-Treasurer Dennis Williams (R) prepare to respond to the
union's election loss at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn.,
which the UAW blames on interference from right-wing politicians. (Mike Elk)
Workers and organizers cite outside interference, management collusion, union missteps, two-tier agreements and Neil Young
“I am excited,” auto worker Justin King told me as he put on his cowboy
boots to get ready for the victory party planned for late Friday night.
At approximately 10 p.m., the
United Auto Workers union and Volkswagen would announce the results of a three-day union election at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn.
King had reason to be excited. For nearly three years he had campaigned
to get the union into his plant. As one of the leaders of the drive,
his sense was that the UAW had the support of the majority of the
plant’s 1,550 hourly workers. Unlike in most union drives, organizers
didn’t have to worry about the company threatening workers’ job, because
Volkwagen had agreed to remain neutral in the process, so King felt
cautiously optimistic that the support would hold.
But Justin King never got to enjoy his victory party. An hour after we
spoke, retired Circuit Court Judge Samuel H. Payne announced to a
roomful of reporters assembled in a Volkswagen training facility that
the UAW had lost the campaign, with 626 workers voting in favor of the
union and 712 voting against. To the labor reporters, who had seen many
union election results, it was jaw-dropping news. How could a union lose
an unopposed campaign?
Volkswagen signed a 22-page neutrality agreement pledging not to
interfere in the union election at the Chattanooga plant. The company
even let the union onto the shop floor in early February to give a
presentation on the merits of organizing.
It is impossible to say why each of those 712 workers voted against the
union and what the UAW could have done differently to win them over one
by one. However,
In These Times’ interviews with both
pro-union and anti-union workers—as well as low-level Volkswagen
supervisors, top UAW officials and community activists—point to a
confluence of factors, including outside interference by GOP politicians
and unsanctioned anti-union activity by low-level supervisors. Some
questioned, too, whether missteps by the UAW and concerns about its
prior bargaining agreements played a role.
GOP influence
The UAW was quick to blame the loss on public anti-union threats by
right-wing politicians. Immediately following the election results, UAW
President Bob King informed reporters, “We are obviously deeply
disappointed. We're also outraged by the outside interference in this
election. Never before in this country have we seen a U.S. senator, a
governor and a leader of the Legislature threaten the company with
incentives and threaten workers with a loss of product. That's
outrageous.”
Last week, Tennessee’s Republican Governor Bill Haslam
told the Tennessean,
“I think that there are some ramifications to the vote in terms of our
ability to attract other suppliers. When we recruit other companies,
that comes up every time.”
On Monday, two days before the election began, Republican State Senate
Speaker Pro Tempore Bo Watson and Republican House Majority Leader
Gerald McCormick suggested that Volkswagen might not receive future
state subsidies if the plant unionized.
Then on Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.)—the former mayor of
Chattanooga—who had pledged the previous week not to comment publicly
about the ongoing election,
waded back into the debate
to declare, "I've had conversations today and based on those am assured
that should the workers vote against the UAW, Volkswagen will announce
in the coming weeks that it will manufacture its new mid-size SUV here
in Chattanooga.”
When Volkswagen Chattanooga Chairman and CEO Frank Fischer refuted
Corker, saying the union election would have no effect on the SUV
decision, Corker
doubled down.
"Believe me, the decisions regarding the Volkswagen expansion are not
being made by anyone in management at the Chattanooga plant, and we are
also very aware Frank Fischer is having to use old talking points when
he responds to press inquiries," Corker
said in
a statement on Thursday. "After all these years and my involvement with
Volkswagen, I would not have made the statement I made yesterday
without being confident it was true and factual."
At a press conference following the vote announcement, UAW
Secretary-Treasurer Dennis Williams echoed union president Bob King in
blaming the loss of support for the union on the Republican politicians’
statements.
“When the governor made his comments, we saw some movement at that
time,” said Williams. “When Sen. Corker said he was not going to be
involved and then he came back from Washington, D.C., we had a feeling
that something was happening. Forty-three votes was the difference, so
it’s very disturbing when this happens in the United States of America
when a company and a union come together and have a fair election
process.”
The UAW also announced shortly after the election that it was exploring
legal options and might petition the National Labor Relations Board to
order a new election because of the threats issued by Corker, the
governor and the leaders of the Tennessee State House and Senate.
Opposition at the plant
However, threats of workers losing their jobs are routine during union
elections—though they usually come from management, not outside
forces—and unions still often prevail. Both pro-union workers and
anti-union activists said that other factors played key roles in
derailing the union drive.
While the neutrality agreement forbade Volkswagen from campaigning
against the drive, plant worker and union activist Byron Spencer says
that low-level supervisors and salaried employees—who were not eligible
for the union—ignored the directive and actively opposed the drive. He
also reports seeing multiple low-level supervisors and salaried
employees at the plant wearing “Vote No” T-shirts in the days leading up
to the union election.
Pro-UAW worker Wayne Cliett says there is no doubt in his mind that the
opposition by salaried employees hurt the campaign. “The salaried
people from Pilot Hall [the prestigious research and development center
at the plant] stood out front every day this past week with [anti-UAW]
shirts on, and I truly believe they swayed the votes their way,” says
Cliett.
Indeed,
In These Times interviewed one salaried employee, Mary Fiorello, who actively participated in the
No 2 UAW committee, an anti-union effort organized by a group of hourly workers, who were eligible for the union.
“You have to look at from the point of view of a salaried support
person,” says Fiorello. “My job here is to help them do their job. I
don’t get paid if they don’t make cars, and the union makes it all that
harder. If they want to ask me for help on something and its a union
facility, they can’t even come up and ask me for help. And it makes it
so much tougher for us here to be a team—and we are a team, and it’s
upsetting when a group comes down from Detroit and tells us how we
should be.”
Criticisms of the UAW
The No 2 UAW campaign used the very neutrality agreement that the UAW signed
to argue that the union was making corrupt deals with management without worker input. The anti-union campaign argued that the
neutrality agreement
seemed to indicate that UAW would not bargain for wages above what was
offered by Volkswagen’s competitors in the United States. UAW and
Volkswagen agreed to "maintaining and where possible enhancing the cost
advantages and other competitive advantages that [Volkswagen] enjoys
relative to its competitors in the United States and North America."
"We got people to realize they had already negotiated a deal behind
their backs—[workers] didn't get to have a say-so," hourly plant worker
Mike Jarvis of No 2 UAW told reporters outside of the plant last night.
Fiorello also cited the UAW’s past concessions in bargaining with other
automakers as another example of why she opposed the union. In a
series of contract negotiations
in the late 1990s and 2000s, the UAW agreed to a two-tier wage system
at Volkswagen’s competitors at the Big Three automakers—General Motors,
Ford and Chrysler. Two-tier agreements specify that new hires will earn
significantly less than existing workers. Fiorello notes that currently,
new non-union assembly line workers at Volkswagen start at
$14.50 an hour—which, with cost-of-living differences between Tennessee and the Midwest factored in, is arguably slightly higher than the
just-under-$16-an-hour starting pay under the UAW two-tier contracts at the Big Three.
“See, that’s the kind of problem. Our guys are being paid more than the union [workers at the Big Three],” says Fiorello.
“What the UAW is offering, we can already do without them,” says hourly
worker Mike Burton, who created the website for the No 2 UAW campaign.
“We were only given one choice [of a union]. When you are only given one
choice, it’s BS. It would be nice if we had a union that came in here
and forthright said, “Here is what we can offer.”
“I am not anti-union, I am anti-UAW,” Burton continues. “There are
great unions out there, and we just weren’t offered any of them.”
Burton’s argument seemed to mirror that of Sen. Bob Corker, who
routinely made statements such as, “"It's not about union or anti-union, it's about the way the UAW conducts business."
When asked by
In These Times if the UAW’s history of two-tier
contracts hurt the unions’ ability to win over skeptical workers, UAW
President Bob King responded, “I don’t know. I am not going to speculate
because I wasn’t in the plant.”
Questioned by
Lydia DePillis of the Washington Post
about why the union had agreed to cost-containment measures as part of
the collective bargaining agreement, King responded, “Our philosophy is,
we want to work in partnership with companies to succeed. Nobody has
more at stake in the long-term success of the company than the workers
on the shop floor, both blue collar and white collar. With every company
that we work with, we're concerned about competitiveness.”
Some labor observers have questioned whether provisions in the
neutrality agreement may have also hampered the UAW’s ability to make
its case. “Though neutrality agreements often help avoid vociferous
employer opposition, unions also have to give up powerful organizing or
negotiating tools,” says Moshe Marvit, a labor lawyer and fellow at the
Century Foundation. In the case of the Chattanooga drive, the neutrality
agreement barred the UAW from making negative comments about
Volkswagen. It also specifically prevented the UAW from holding
one-on-one meetings with workers at their homes except at the worker’s
express request. House visits are a common tactic used by union
organizers to build trust with workers and answer questions about
individual needs and concerns. One American Federation of Teachers union
organizer, Peter Hogness, was so shocked that the UAW didn’t do house
visits that he sent me a message today to ask me if it was true.
When asked by
In These Times if the inability to make house visits hurt the union drive, UAW Secretary-Treasurer Dennis Williams simply responded, “No.”
Also, pro-union community activists, who spoke with
In These Times
on condition of anonymity out of fear of hurting their relationships
with the UAW, spoke about difficulties in getting the UAW to help them
engage the broader Chattanooga community. Many activists I spoke with
during my two trips to Chattanooga said that when they saw the UAW being
continually blasted on local talk radio, newspapers and billboards,
they wanted to get involved to help build community support.
However, they say that the UAW was lukewarm in partnering with them. Indeed, when I attended a forum in December organized by
Chattanooga for Workers,
a community group designed to build local support for the organizing
drive, more than 150 community activists attended—many from different
area unions—but I encountered only three UAW members. Community
activists said they had a hard time finding ways to coordinate
solidarity efforts with the UAW, whose campaign they saw as insular
rather than community-based.
“There’s no way to win in the South without everyone that supports you
fighting with you,” said one Chattanooga community organizer, who
preferred to remain anonymous. “Because the South is one giant
anti-union campaign.”
A harsh Southern climate
Still, at the end of the day, unions make missteps in union elections
all the time and often face opposition from management, and the workers
still sometimes win. Indeed, the NLRB reports that unions won
60 percent of elections conducted in fiscal year 2013. So why didn’t the UAW win in Chattanooga?
“We thought we had the number we needed,” says Cliett. “We could
analyze for days and not really know for sure, but I do think the last
minute blitz of negative campaigning from our politicians turned some
votes to no. What is going on with these people? Lynyrd Skynyrd may not
have liked the song written by Neil Young, ‘Southern Man,’ but Neil had a
point.”
In the 1974 song “Sweet Home Alabama,” Ronnie Van Zant of Lynyrd
Skynyrd sings, “Well I hope Neil Young will remember: A Southern man
don’t need him around anyhow.” The lyric is a reference to Canadian
singer Neil Young’s “Southern Man,” which criticized Southerners for
being opposed to social change.
But for one Southern man, progress still feels achievable. “I'm a
stubborn man,” says Cliett. “Some are talking about quitting. I will be
walking into the plant on Monday with my head held high and preaching
the message of solidarity.”
Full disclosure: The author’s mother worked on an auto assembly
line at a VW plant in Westmoreland County, Pa., until it closed in 1988,
and was a member of UAW. UAW is a website sponsor of In These Times.
Sponsors have no role in editorial content.
One
of the most confusing aspects of the last decade’s education reforms is
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useful, even progressive. The reforms are crafted to seduce liberals
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of increasing educational opportunity. Testing was sold to liberals as
a way to hold schools accountable. Now a national curriculum, the
Common Core, is being peddled as essential to give all students the
rigorous education (they love that word “rigorous”) they need to compete
in a global economy in the 21st century.