UAW UPDATE: Tennessee & Alabama

Posted by Samantha Zinnen on Monday, May 11th, 2015 at 2:51 pm - Permalink

Volkswagen reported Thursday that the German auto company will summarily deny the request by the United Auto Workers (UAW) union to be the only recognized representative of the factory workers at the Chattanooga, TN plant.

On Wednesday, the UAW submitted a twenty-four page document which detailed a plan that would make them the exclusive bargaining agent for the workers at the facility.

The plan, if it had been accepted by Volkswagen management, would have created the first German style Works Council in the United States.

The Chattanooga plant management said that they have enjoyed great progress by meeting with both the UAW and the American Council of Employees (ACE), the two unions vying for a majority membership, and will continue with those meetings. They were not willing at this time to recognize one union over the other.

The UAW’s plan would call for recognizing the union without another certification election. The last certification election held at the facility failed in February of last year, a huge embarrassment for the UAW.

No other parties involved besides UAW leadership discussed the plan as an action that should be taken. Quite to the contrary, the president of ACE, Sean Moss, referred to the twenty-four page document as a “Trojan Horse.”

He explained that, "This proposal outlines the UAW's plan to gain exclusive representation, and then merely segregate and rename certain functions carried out by its Local, so that a 'works council' would exist in name only and all power would remain with the UAW bosses in Detroit."

Volkswagen management recognizing the UAW without a certification vote would have been a gross injustice to the rights of the individual factory worker.

While the UAW claims to now have 816, or 55 percent, of members signed up, card check programs have notoriously been known for worker coercion and general transgressions against worker rights.

It is fortunate then for the workers at the Chattanooga plant that management denied the request of the UAW and protected their workers’ rights.

Meanwhile in Alabama more than 80 percent of workers at the Renosol Seating plant in Selma, owned by Lear Corporation signed a petition to get rid of the union. The petition which was signed by the workers was released by Lear Corporation to inform the UAW of their unwelcome status.  

It read: “We are requesting UAW Union to leave this business and us, its employees, alone,” the petition read. “We do not need this union or any union here. UAW is not needed or wanted at Lear. Thank you.”

The UAW has been trying to unionize at the facility repeatedly, and has been levelling many accusations against Lear, including one prompting a trial surrounding worker safety, but employees remain unconvinced that they require unionization.

One employee, Jacqueline Atkins, said in an interview with the Montgomery Advertiser, “We don’t need a union to speak for us. We can speak for ourselves. I feel like we are all grown and can make our own decisions. A lot of stuff that we were hearing is not true about what was going on at the plant, and we felt like we would take it up on our own,”

The overwhelming majoring of signatures has not dissuaded the union from presenting accusations that employees were tricked or coerced into signing the petition.

Atkins responded to this attack by saying, “No one tricked us, threatened us or anything else. We felt like everyone had their own voice,”

Last year in Chattanooga, TN workers rejected the union in a secret ballot. Now workers in Selma, AL have rejected the UAW as well.

With the tide turning against unions and their parasitic ways, just one question remains. How long will it be before the UAW takes the hint that their days of stealing from workers’ wallets is over and go crawling defeated back to Detroit?