Can the UAW Organize the South?

The UAW’s much-vaunted drive to organize the South came to screeching halt in Alabama and we’ve heard nothing about it since. Nelson Lichtenstein considers the issue in a lengthy New Labor Forum article.

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

Alas….

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

If there was an easy answer on how to organize the South, we’d know it by now. The Labor Notes folks with their Cult of Jane McAlevey like to blame the UAW for everything, but Shawn Fain pretty much used their playbook and it failed just like every other playbook has failed. That doesn’t mean you give up. The Chattanooga victory was indeed very big. But as it turns out, we aren’t in a historically transformative moment for labor, or at least no one has figured out how to tap it yet. I don’t blame Fain at all, he’s done a great job since taking over the UAW. But it’s just bloody hard.