The UAW's Southern Gamble: Organizing Workers at Foreign-Owned Vehicle Plants

At the heart of Stephen Silvia's careful new book lies a stunning transformation: in 1980, automotive production was one of the most thoroughly unionized sectors of the American economy, and then a hardening of national trade policy forced foreign automakers to build production facilities in the United States. Up went gleaming new plants, many of them in southern states. And down came organized labor's hold on the shop floor, so much so that today union workers make fewer than half of the cars and trucks produced in American factories.The United Automobile Workers (UAW) has long been criticized for its sclerotic response to the foreign firms’ challenge. In fact, says Silvia, almost as soon as the new plants opened the union launched what would become a series of extensive, increasingly innovative organizing drives. In the course of those campaigns, the UAW leadership made its share of mistakes, some of them egregious. But the union didn't defeat itself. It was beaten back by fearsome forces arrayed against it.Silvia explores those forces through four case studies that together cover the sixteen campaigns the UAW waged at foreign-owned facilities in the South between 1984 and 2019. He centers each case on a different automaker—Daimler first, then Mercedes Benz, Volkswagen, and Nissan. This approach has the unfortunate consequence of fracturing the narrative: only in his final chapter does he detail Nissan's foundational role in shaping the companies’ anti-union strategies, though it's there that the story ought to start.Foreign automakers came to the United States in the 1980s with opposing expectations for their new plants’ labor relations, Silvia shows. The German firms wanted to re-create the system they had at home, which combined unionized collective bargaining and factory-level works councils, while Nissan's management wanted to keep its American factories union-free. In the early going those expectations produced dramatically different results. It took the UAW just ten months, from June 1989 to April 1990, to organize its first Daimler plant, in Mount Holly, North Carolina. Its first Nissan campaign, in Smyrna, Tennessee, lasted eight years. In that time, the company unveiled the now standard tactics of corporate anti-unionism, with its promise of reliable work at wages set just below union rates, its careful screening of job applicants, its slick videos extolling the plant's team spirit, and its mandatory meetings threatening ruin should the labor bosses breach the factory's gates. Nissan's workers finally voted on representation in July 1989. Seventy percent of them rejected the UAW.All things being equal, Nissan's approach shouldn't have eclipsed Daimler's. But all things weren't equal. In his book's most revealing turn, Silvia shows how the German automakers’ acceptance of massive subsidies opened them to political pressures they hadn't anticipated. The most telling case came out of Tennessee. In 2008 state and local officials gave Volkswagen a $577 million incentive package to build its new assembly plant in Chattanooga. It took three years to bring the plant online. As soon as it opened, VW started to set up its works council, in the German fashion. But it quickly learned that under American labor law the factory had to be unionized first. So in early 2013 Volkswagen's management sat down with the UAW leadership to discuss the easiest way to proceed—a step that, when it hit the news, triggered a fierce backlash from those Tennessee pols who had lavished VW with the public's largesse.Tennessee's Republican governor, Bill Haslam, and its US senators, Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander, set the tone by denouncing the discussions as a betrayal of the promises Volkswagen had made when it accepted the incentives. The Speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives threatened to withhold the additional $300 million subsidy the state had pledged to underwrite the plant's expansion. Activists from the Tea Party, business groups, and various right-to-work organizations rushed to condemn the “backroom deals” that VW and the UAW had never reached (119). Stunned by the attacks’ ferocity, Volkswagen's management backed away from the possibility of recognizing the union through any process but a shop-floor referendum, to be conducted amid the intense opposition that Tennessee politicians had created. The election took place in February 2014. The UAW lost by eighty-six votes.The union asked for another vote five years later. Apparently Volkswagen's management had come to a better understanding of American power politics by then, because this time there were no quiet conversations with the UAW. Instead, VW's managers embraced an updated version of the tactics Nissan had deployed thirty years earlier, with help from the prominent anti-union law firm they had put on retainer, while some of Tennessee's most powerful politicians slashed away at the UAW as a danger to the state. “Our employees have spoken,” the plant's chief executive officer said on the night of the recognition election. “We look forward to continuing our close cooperation with elected officials and business leaders in Tennessee,” now that VW had committed itself to a coalition of interests powerful enough to keep the UAW down (169).Silvia follows his account of Volkswagen's experience with a seventy-page chapter on Nissan that stretches from the company's defeat of the UAW in the 1980s to a bitter clash with the union at its Canton, Mississippi, plant in the 2010s. But with VW's second referendum, he reaches the culminating point of his story. It's tempting to see in Volkswagen's turn to anti-unionism the triumph of the Nissan way over the system that the German automakers had hoped to import into their plants. The truth is that with its bare-knuckled approach to the 2019 vote, VW marked its emergence as a modern American corporation, its transformation driven by a political economy that for far too long has treated workers’ rights as anathema and democracy as a danger.