Abstract
Keywords
The George F. Landegger Collection of Alabama Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Mercedes-Benz U.S. International Plant located in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama.
“Organize the South!” has long been a progressive imperative, from the interracial Union Leagues that sought to defend Reconstruction-era radicalism to the great textile strike of 1934 and on to “Operation Dixie” in the immediate post-World War II era. With the New Deal still in power and the newly powerful Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) taking the lead, a surge of postwar unionism seemed a real possibility in the region. During the war, the federal government had literally imposed union contracts on resistant employers in tobacco, textiles, shipbuilding, construction, and rubber. Alabama had a higher level of union density in the late 1940s than Michigan does today. 1
Operation Dixie, as the CIO labeled its Southern organizing drive in 1946, had a two-fold purpose: It would not only raise wages in the region, and thereby end the competitive threat to unionized Northern industry, but it held out the possibility of politically transforming the old Confederacy. As one CIO official predicted, “When Georgia is organized, you will find our old friend Gene Talmadge [a vicious racist and anti-union politician] trying to break into the doors of the CIO conventions and tell our people that he has always been misunderstood.” 2
In the 1940s, textiles and apparel were the key industries trade unionists sought to organize; today the auto assembly, parts, and battery plants are at the center of the effort. Opportunity beckons for reasons not unlike those that made labor hopeful eighty years ago. Like the CIO of old, a revitalized United Auto Workers (UAW) is once again recapturing and mobilizing the aspirations of industrial workers, in unions and outside unions. Moreover, the Biden administration’s multi-billion-dollar support for a transition to electrical vehicle (EV) manufacture, as well as its relatively pro-labor stance, created economic and political incentives that have moved the entire automotive supply chain toward more union-friendly terrain. The federal funds put forward to make the EV transition a reality overshadow the state and local monetary incentives that conservative Southern politicians have long used to link anti-unionism and low wages with economic development. Even under the new Trump administration, it is unlikely that this lucrative pipeline will be shut down. And of course, the impact of the 2023 UAW Stand Up Strike victory against the Detroit Big Three automakers cannot be underestimated, as the ninety-year-old UAW once again becomes, in the words of Walter Reuther, “the vanguard in America.”
But the history of the UAW effort to organize in the South demonstrates that the obstacles remain immense. When UAW President Douglas Fraser flew to Japan in February 1980, to convince both the government and automakers there that Toyota and Nissan should put “transplant” factories in the United States, he assumed that they could be easily unionized. At the time, the UAW represented workers in virtually 100 percent of all North American automobile manufacturing and assembly plants. Volkswagen, headquartered in Wolfsburg, Germany, operated a Pennsylvania factory that the UAW had easily organized in the late 1970s, and it would later take the union just ten months, in 1989 and 1990, to organize its first Daimler-Benz truck plant, in Mount Holly, North Carolina. But the Japanese were not about to play union ball. Under pressure from the Reagan Administration, Japanese auto companies restrained their export drive and instead built a series of assembly plants, almost all in the American South. With Nissan taking a 1980s lead in Tennessee, the Japanese, Koreans, and Germans came to follow a diabolical “union avoidance playbook” that stymied UAW organizers for decades. By the third decade of the twenty-first century, more than half of all auto production in the United States came out of nonunion factories. 3 The UAW’s victory in its 2023 Stand Up Strike opened a new and hopeful chapter in its drive to organize the Southern auto industry, but alone it would not be enough.
The Anti-Union Playbook
In his 2023 book, The UAW’s Southern Gamble: Organizing Workers at Foreign-Owned Vehicle Plants, Stephen Silvia offers an indispensable guide to Southern auto’s playbook. Among Silvia’s catalog of anti-union tactics: put the new facilities in rural towns where wages are low and commutes to work are long; use the hiring process to screen out pro-union employees; hire plenty of temps via outside contractors to divide the workforce; barrage employees with a constant stream of anti-union propaganda; cultivate churches and charities, as well as politicians, to undercut local support for unionization; and offer compensation that exceeds the local average but remains below that negotiated by the UAW in Detroit, especially when total labor costs, involving pensions and health care, are factored in to the pay package. And of course, should a union drive actually get started in the plant, local management quickly hires an anti-union law firm; holds a series of captive audience meetings, mobilizes the local business community and civic leaders against the Yankee incursion; and floods the media with anti-union messages, some of which are generated by groups of loyal workers, covertly funded and supported by plant management or other local businesses. 4
This anti-union ground game was backstopped by leverage, amounting to a kind of blackmail, that most Southern states deployed when they enticed foreign automakers with a package of tax and loan incentives. For example, in 2008 Tennessee officials gave Volkswagen (VW) a $577 million incentive package to build a factory complex in Chattanooga. Republican Senator Bob Crocker, formerly Chattanooga’s mayor, had gotten at least one top VW executive to agree that the company “would have nothing to do with the UAW” as part of the incentive deal. Three years later, however, when the plant opened, the company sought to set up a German-style “works council.” But without a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) certified union, such a collaborative worker-management institution would be illegal in the U.S. So, in early 2013, VW’s management sat down with the UAW top leadership to discuss the easiest way to install a union—a step that, when it hit the news, triggered a fierce backlash from those Tennessee politicians who had lavished VW with public money. Crocker denounced any accommodation with the union, arguing that UAW success in Chattanooga would damage the area “for generations to come.” 5
The political implications of a UAW victory in Tennessee were clearly paramount. Then Governor Bill Haslam said that organizing VW in Chattanooga would create a “beachhead that would grow from there.” Rightwing forces put up billboards with culture-war themes, including “The UAW wants your Guns,” and “The UAW spends millions to elect liberal politicians including BARACK OBAMA.” This anti-union animus had real bite, because in Tennessee and elsewhere, politicians threatened to withhold any additional state and local tax incentives should workers vote in the UAW. Crocker made it all perfectly clear: The VW plant would get money for a new SUV production line, but only if workers rejected the UAW. 6
In Germany, VW had bargained for decades with IG Metall, a large and powerful industrial union. And, in every factory, a separate works council represented employees and resolved shop-floor grievances. But, in the U.S., once VW managers in Chattanooga came under economic and political pressure from Southern conservatives, the company took an increasingly hard line in opposition to the UAW, which lost NLRB elections in 2014 and 2019. The elections were close, but still the losses were demoralizing.
The UAW itself also contributed to the defeats. Workers on the scene complained of a top-down organizing strategy, of a lack of civil rights and community involvement, and of too great a reliance on IG Metall and the German works councils, whose effort to influence VW management was often tepid. But the most important problem was that a union victory would have done little to eliminate the wage gap between VW, where labor costs were about $38 an hour, and GM and Ford, where total compensation was about $20 an hour more. Early in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the UAW was still adhering to a strategy that, in the union’s own words, embraced management “as partners in innovation and quality” so as “to promote the success of our employers.” Foreign-owned plants in the South, the union claimed, were “on a path that no longer presumes an adversarial work environment.” When it came to VW, the UAW pledged to maintain the “cost advantage and other competitive advantages” held by the company in the American South. This meant that regardless of the outcome of an NLRB election, VW workers would see no substantial wage increase or any other change in working conditions that might cost the company real money. 7
By 2024, things were very different. Southern politicians were still hostile to unionism, with six governors—from Alabama, Texas, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina—putting out a joint statement, denouncing the UAW as a socialist organization more interested in President Biden’s re-election than the welfare of its members. “We want to keep good paying jobs and continue to grow the American auto manufacturing sector here,” asserted the Southern governors. “A successful unionization drive will stop this growth in its tracks.” 8
But such threats now contained more bark than bite. With massive federal loans and other incentives encouraging a factory-building boom at VW and other transplants, neither auto industry managers nor workers paid much attention to state-level warnings of economic retaliation should workers choose to go union. In just two years after the 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, companies announced more than $17 billion in Tennessee-based EV manufacturing investment, with nearby Georgia and North Carolina winning still more. 9
But even more important, the UAW’s successful strike against the Detroit Big Three had for the first time in nearly half-a-century reversed the dynamic that had long put the nonunion South in the driver’s seat, when it came to a nationwide wage pattern in the auto industry. In the years before the 2023 Stand-Up Strike, UAW President Shawn Fain recalled, “We’d been told going into bargaining that we couldn’t ask for more because of the competition from [non-union] plants in the South.” 10 But now that problem was turned on its head. Within days of the UAW contract settlement, virtually every nonunion foreign “transplant” announced wage increases, designed to match the union’s new standard. Volkswagen raised pay by 11 percent for 4,000 workers in Chattanooga; Nissan announced a 10 percent increase for 9,000 workers; Toyota declared a 9 percent wage hike covering upward of 12,000; Honda 11 % and Hyundai matched the entire UAW contract, announcing a 25 percent wage increase by 2028, impacting 4,000 hourly workers. Almost as important, most of these nonunion companies declared that they would eliminate wage tiers outright or slash years from the time it took a second-tier worker to earn a top-tier wage. Fain called this management rush to adopt the new Big Three wage standard, the “UAW bump,” a tangible demonstration of union power and a clear indication that a newly empowered union had begun to restore its capacity to set a “pattern” for the entire auto industry. 11 “When they went on strike,” said Yolanda Peoples, an engine-line assembly worker and member of the VW organizing committee, “we paid close attention just to see what happened. Once they won their contract, it changed a lot of people from anti-union to pro-union members.” 12 The UAW contract win “sparked an insane amount of discussion around unions all around the plant,” agreed Zach Costello, who first took a job at VW in 2016. 13
Organizing Models in Play: “Momentum” vs. “Structure”
But nothing was automatic about organizing the South. Given the intense hostility of most employers, unions have long stressed the importance of a careful, methodical approach to organizing, where union staff and pro-union workers collaborate over months—even years to build up an organizing committee and map out the workplace to pinpoint departments where the union is strong and where it is weak. They do all this before going public, a series of “structure tests” that demonstrate greater and greater degrees of union commitment: wearing a union pin or tee shirt; signing a petition; even marching on the boss. The late Jane McAlevey, author of No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, was a resourceful, charismatic advocate of such a carefully crafted approach. 14
In the euphoria that followed the conclusion of the Big Three strike, Shawn Fain’s UAW did not throw that rigorous organizing model out the window. But the new leadership wagered that a rare historical moment was upon us, ushering in a surge of enthusiasm not unlike the months immediately following the 1937 Sit-Down Strikes, when UAW leaders could barely keep up with the wave of new members pouring into the union and self-organizing their own workplaces. That phenomenon was replicated at the height of the civil rights movement and to a lesser degree during the red-state educational mobilizations of 2018. This was “momentum” organizing, a model that eschewed picking a single factory and then patiently building a campaign there. Instead, the UAW would broadcast its intention to organize the entire industry and concentrate organizing resources and personnel on those factories where an upsurge of worker interest suggested that a union majority was virtually in hand and that—with successive victories—additional momentum would put employers on the defensive, banish worker fearfulness, and create a new cohort of factory militants.
There was much to commend the idea. Beginning in the summer of 2023, scores and then hundreds of unaffiliated autoworkers had discovered a set of defunct UAW websites, filled out union authorization cards, and then mailed them north to Solidarity House in Detroit, all on their own, with no UAW guidance or prodding. Those numbers accelerated after the conclusion of the Stand Up Strike, when the UAW officially announced that it would seek to organize not just one or two Southern factories but commit $40 million to a campaign to unionize the entire industry, all at once. By the end of January 2024, nearly 10,000 auto workers had signed union cards across thirteen nonunion companies. At Volkswagen, more than 50 percent had signed by February; at Mercedes in Vance, Alabama more than 40 % at Hyundai 30 % and at Toyota in Missouri, 30 percent by early March 2024. And the very fact that virtually every foreign automaker had rushed to raise wages and slash the time it took for new hires to earn top dollar, seemed proof that even anti-union managers could recognize that an expectant, rebellious consciousness among their employees had been unleashed.
In practice, the organizing model deployed by the UAW—successfully at Volkswagen in April 2024, disappointing at Mercedes a month later—had elements of both “structure” and “momentum” at play. By 2024 the UAW had had a presence at Volkswagen for more than a decade, with union activists in many departments. UAW Local 42, representing a minority of all employees, met on occasion with plant management. But the UAW organizers in Chattanooga were largely “old guard,” hired by the regime Shawn Fain and his new team had deposed. Critics charged they had too often eschewed community engagement; micro-managed worker contacts; and shrouded far too much of their effort in a cloak of secrecy. Many saw the organizing department as a “dumping ground” for inefficient staff.
Fain replaced the old crowd with a dozen staffers fresh from the UAW’s 2022 strike victory at the University of California, the nation’s largest system of higher education. That effective and militant strike had been led largely by current and former grad students, including Carla Villanueva, a PhD in Latin American History. According to Villanueva, the California team deployed a “higher education organizing model” that emphasized a high degree of publicity, creation of an activist set of voluntary organizing committees, and reliance upon the creativity and initiative of “a wide, deep network of worker leaders across every area of the workplace.” Momentum is helpful,” Villanueva concluded, “but it can’t replace structure,” i.e. mapping the factory and developing leadership in every department and on every shift. 15
When the CIO launched Operation Dixie in the 1940s, it would have been unthinkable to send a bunch of grad school Yankees, from California or any other non-Southern state, into the fray. The shock troops then were former coal miners and textile workers with an Appalachian twang or a Southern drawl. But the UAW outsiders today encountered little in the way of regional resentment, certainly not in a German-owned and managed factory where African-Americans represented 13 percent of the workforce, Latinx 11 percent, and white men an actual minority. However, when it came to partisan politics, the outside organizers chose to tread lightly. Most observers saw the factory as half Trump, half Democrat, with anti-union opponents quick to label the UAW as Biden’s emissary. Union advocates could do nothing to shift that political landscape, but they did blunt the divisiveness by issuing a widely-circulated statement, asserting that, while the organizing effort was composed of Republicans, Democrats, libertarians, and independents, they were all united as trade unionists in a fight against the boss. “This vote is not about politics,” Volkswagen worker Isaac Meadows told a journalist, “This vote is about the workers . . . standing up for themselves.” 16
The transformation of rank-and-file consciousness is crucial, the tactical effectiveness of a dedicated set of union organizers essential; but the degree of managerial opposition in any workplace can also be decisive. At Volkswagen in 2024, the corporation’s posture was close to neutral, in part because the UAW had finally built a strong relationship to IG Metall, as well as with the VW works councils, both of which intervened to constrain the more overt forms of U.S. style anti-unionism. Add to that VW’s domestic American expansion plans, dependent in part on support from the U.S. government, and one could note a decided shift in the managerial approach: VW did not hire an anti-union consultant; did not hold captive audience meetings; and did not invite Tennessee politicians into the plant, a notable contrast with 2019, when Governor Bill Lee, owner of a large nonunion construction supply company, delivered a forceful attack on the UAW right inside the factory complex. 17
All this made possible the three-to-one union victory at VW in an April 2024 NLRB election. It was the first instance in which workers at any Southern transplant had voted for a union. The vote cheered unionists everywhere, adding weight to the idea that the UAW’s organizing drive had acquired enough momentum to sweep into labor’s embrace factory after Southern factory. “Could the Union Victory at VW Set Off a Wave?” headlined The New York Times. 18 The victory, President Fain proclaimed, “gives workers everywhere else the indication that it’s OK and it can be done. All we heard for years is that we can’t do this in the South. And you can. Workers can do it.” 19
But less than a month later, the UAW would fall short at the next domino, a set of big Mercedes plants near Vance, Alabama where only 44 percent of the 5,000 plus workforce voted for the union. There, Mercedes managers—backstopped by the Alabama political class—rolled out the entire anti-union playbook: anti-union consultants, daily captive audience meetings, small-group sessions between supervisors and on-the-fence workers. They even recruited a locally prominent African-American minister, who walked the shop floor, not ineffective in a workforce more than half Black. Of course, much of the Alabama political class mobilized against the UAW. Speaking at a Chamber of Commerce event, Governor Kay Ivey said, “We want to ensure that Alabama values, not Detroit values, continue to define the future of this great state.” The Business Council of Alabama launched “Alabama Strong,” a multimedia campaign against the union. Back in Germany, the Mercedes works council made its voice heard only after the anti-union campaign was well underway, and in the meantime Mercedes management in the U.S. proved effectively clever when, in the weeks leading up to the election, they replaced an unpopular plant CEO with Federico Kochlowski, who pleaded with workers to give his new team a chance to address long-standing employee grievances.
The Mercedes carrot-and-stick approach demonstrated vulnerabilities inherent in a decentralized, worker-centered organizing approach, which relied somewhat less on sign-up metrics and more on the momentum generated by recent victories: the Stand-Up Strike, the UAW Bump, and the Volkswagen NLRB success. In practice, UAW organizers relied on scores of in-plant team leaders, the men and women to which Mercedes gave a modicum of production responsibility. They were influential among the small number of workers in their sub-departments, but they were also in closer contact with plant management who could influence them. According to Jeremy Kimbrell, a twenty-five-year Mercedes veteran and union partisan, many of these team leaders flipped from pro- to anti-union as the Mercedes anti-union campaign reached high intensity in the weeks just before the mid-May NLRB vote. From the union’s point of view, the most valuable leaders were mobile equipment drivers and off-the-line walkers who could roam the plant nearly at will. They were invaluable when it came to keeping the union idea alive. Unfortunately, they were also vulnerable to fears about losing plum jobs in the plant, even if the union won. They got “cold feet,” Kimbrell said. 20
Neutralizing Employer Opposition
What’s clear from the UAW experience at Chattanooga and Vance is that no form of union organizing, based on momentum or structure (or some combination thereof), can be assured of success when a corporation and its political allies deploy the anti-union playbook, chapter and verse. Some form of neutrality, on the other hand, gives workers—North and South—a realistic chance to form a union. In this instance, neutrality, means a return to what the framers of the Wagner Act envisioned 90 years ago: workers having the right to “unions of their own choosing,” free from outside interference. While Congress has failed to pass legislation that would curb the worst of management’s anti-union practices, a variety of other stratagems have emerged, even in the South, that hold out a promise to recreate something close to Wagner Act conditions.
In the contracts that came out of the 2023 auto strike, Ford, GM, and Stellantis pledged that the new battery plants they were establishing—often as joint ventures with Korean companies—would guarantee corporate neutrality and then union recognition once a majority of all workers had signed union authorization cards. An early fruit of that agreement came in the summer of 2024 when a thousand workers at Ultium Cells battery plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee won conflict-free recognition from GM after signing cards to join the UAW. The fact that the U.S. Department of Energy gave Ultium a $2.5 billion loan to build plants in Ohio, Michigan, and Tennessee undoubtedly smoothed the way. Meanwhile, the UAW has a neutrality card check agreement with Ford, covering another joint venture, the $5.6 billion BlueOval City EV complex outside of Memphis, which will employ 6,000 workers in the next few years. 21
Yet another path toward Southern unionism has been taken in the last year by workers at two electric bus manufacturing plants: the 600 New Flyer employees who formed a Communications Workers of America local in Anniston, Alabama and the 1,500 production workers at Blue Bird, a maker of school buses, in Fort Valley, Georgia, who voted in the United Steelworkers. Both companies were multi-million-dollar beneficiaries of federal government grants and loans designed to advance the EV transition. At both production facilities, a history of traditional Southern anti-unionism was blunted by unions that were able to leverage their employers’ government contracts to limit managerial hostility. At Blue Bird, a billion-dollar grant from the Environmental Protection Agency came with something close to a union neutrality provision. And at New Flyer, top management eventually came to see union-friendly cooperation as a good business practice because the factory’s entire output was destined for public transit systems in labor-friendly cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Boston. In Los Angeles, a resourceful, multiyear campaign by unions and labor advocacy organizations bore legislative fruit when the metro transit authority there required that any buses purchased with tax-payer money had to come with a guarantee that the manufacturer respected the right of its employees to self-organization and other labor protections. 22
And then from Germany has come another kind of political and economic pressure, embodied in that nation’s 2023 Supply Chain Act, aimed to prevent the offshoring of production to low-wage, anti-union countries and enterprises. From the perspective of IG Metall and other German unions, the many German companies that have production facilities in the American South constitute a low-wage threat to domestic employment and labor standards. The law empowers a German federal agency to monitor, and if necessary fine, businesses with at least 1,000 employees to ensure that their foreign plants and supply-chain operations are not violating a set of labor and human rights provisions based on the International Labor Organization’s core labor standards. Among these are the right to form trade unions, free of state or employer opposition. The new law remains largely untested, although the UAW made a formal complaint, just before the NLRB election at Vance, against the Mercedes-Benz Group for its heavy-handed hostility. Equally important, the UAW’s ties with the Biden-Harris administration may well have been instrumental in getting U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to prod German officials to use the new law to investigate the UAW’s complaints. “The bottom line is this, Germany’s law is a big deal, and the fact that the UAW is using this is a really big deal,” remarked Stefan Marculewicz, an international labor law attorney for Littler Mendelson, the notorious union-busting law firm. 23
The path ahead will be rocky but seems clearly marked. First, the UAW will go after the joint venture battery plants, supplying the Detroit Big Three automakers, whose cooperation is embedded in the 2023 union contracts they signed. Next, or perhaps simultaneously, the union will seek to organize the German transplant facilities. With collective bargaining now taking place in Chattanooga, a signed and sealed VW contract will send a strong message to workers at Mercedes, where the UAW has pledged to return for another NLRB vote. And beyond those two production facilities, there is a huge concentration of German industry in South Carolina, where Interstate 85, connecting Charlotte and Atlanta, is often called the autobahn. BMW has its largest factory in the world in Spartanburg; Mercedes is putting another factory in Ladson; and VW will build two new plants in the state. South Carolina politicians will scream, but if the German supply chain act has any teeth, unions may find organizing opportunities among the 40,000 workers employed by scores of German-owned businesses in the Palmetto state. 24
Far more difficult will be the Japanese and Korean auto and battery factories, where no transnational assistance can be expected to moderate managerial behavior in the U.S. And then there is Tesla, run by a reactionary billionaire. Tesla has its largest factory in Fremont, California, where West Coast UAW organizers have begun mapping a union campaign in a region normally far more amenable to unionism than Tennessee and Alabama.
In November 1863, when the Union Army captured Chattanooga, President Abraham Lincoln called the city “The Gateway to the Confederacy,” opening the door to the capture of Atlanta, the rest of Georgia and the Carolinas. It still is.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
