Volkswagen employees at a plant in Chattanooga have filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to hold a vote on whether workers will join the United Auto Workers (UAW) union.
“The milestone marks the first non-union auto plant to file for a union election among the dozens of auto plants where workers have been organizing in recent months,” UAW said in a press release. “The grassroots effort sprang up in the wake of the record victories for Big Three autoworkers in the UAW’s historic Stand Up Strike win.”
In February, the UAW said that a majority of the plant’s employees had signed pledge cards to vote for unionization.
“A majority of workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tennessee plant have signed cards to join the UAW, less than sixty days after the workers announced their campaign to form a union at the German automaker’s only US assembly plant,” UAW said, as reported by The Tennessee Star.
For the past several years, plans to unionize at the plant have failed.
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, told The Star News Network’s CEO and Editor-in-Chief Michael Patrick Leahy on The Michael Patrick Leahy Show in February that the plan to unionize is failing.
“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. “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.”
News of the latest step in the effort to unionize made its way to the White House.
“I congratulate the Volkswagen autoworkers in Chattanooga who filed for a union election with the UAW,” President Joe Biden said in a statement. “As one of the world’s largest automakers, many Volkswagen plants internationally are unionized. As the most pro-union president in American history, I believe American workers, too, should have a voice at work. The decision whether to join a union belongs to the workers.”
The UAW did not return a Thursday comment request.
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Pete D’Abrosca is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on Twitter/X.
Photo “Volkswagen Chattanooga Building” by Volkswagen Chattanooga.
Be careful what you wish for. If it doesn’t work out well for these employees, don’t expect any empathy from the public.