Vinnie Vernuccio, president of the Institute for the American Worker and a senior fellow at The Workers for Opportunity Initiative at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, said workers’ latest attempts to unionize the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga appear to be “failing.”
On Monday, the United Auto Workers (UAW) announced that a group of Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board for a vote to join the labor union.
The UAW claimed a “supermajority of Volkswagen workers” at the Tennessee plant have signed union cards in “just 100 days” expressing interest in holding an election to unionize.
Following the announcement, President Joe Biden, who called himself the “most pro-union president in American history,” congratulated the workers on filing the petition.
“I believe American workers, too, should have a voice at work. The decision whether to join a union belongs to the workers,” Biden said.
The Chattanooga Volkswagen plant employs over 4,000 auto workers and is the only Volkswagen plant globally with no form of employee representation.
The plant attempted to unionize in 2014 and 2019, however, failed to do so.
“I guess it’s pretty obvious that here they go again because they have tried and they have failed and they have tried and they have failed. And they’re trying again, and you know what? It sounds like they’re failing again,” Vernuccio said on Tuesday’s episode of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Vernuccio pointed to the past failed attempts at unionizing the plant because Tennessee workers “don’t want what the UAW is offering.”
“The good news is if there’s an election and workers get that secret ballot vote, I really hope that is what happens. Usually that is not what the UAW is pushing for, so it was actually surprising that they said they wanted to vote,” Vernuccio said.
Regarding workers pushing for an election, Vernuccio warned that the UAW is actively trying to push “card-check recognition,” which is an open petition process bypassing the protection of a secret ballot election, which, as noted by Vernuccio, can lead to “intimidation and coercion of workers.”
“Unions can actually put a lot of pressure on those employers to take away the secret ballot for workers. So once again, that’s why the secret ballot is incredibly important. Protecting worker privacy, protecting their choice, making sure they get both sides of the story on unionization. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen,” Vernuccio explained.
Vernuccio noted that state lawmakers passed a bill last year protecting the secret ballot for companies that receive economic incentives from the state. However, he was unsure whether the law would apply to the plant as the incentives were taken prior to the bill passing.
“There was a grandfather clause, so if they got economic incentives before the law went into effect, I don’t think it would count…but it would apply to any new companies or any new incentives, so if they did get new incentives, [the law] would probably kick in,” Vernuccio said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Chattanooga Volkswagen” by Chattanooga Volkswagen.
