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 About 71 percent of skilled trades workers who cast ballots at
Volkswagen AG's <VOWG_p.DE> factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted
to join the UAW, according to the company and the union.
The skilled trades workers account for about 11 percent of the 1,450
hourly employees at the plant.
If the UAW victory, as expected, survives an appeal by Volkswagen to
the National Labor Relations Board, the 164 skilled trades workers
will be the first foreign-owned auto assembly plant workers to gain
collective bargaining rights in the southern United States.
While the unit of skilled trades workers who maintain the assembly
machinery are a fraction of the hourly work force, observers said
the victory was significant and could serve as a launching pad for
the union’s efforts to organize other foreign-owned plants in the
south.
 “It gives the UAW a significant new tool in trying to organize the
foreign automakers in the south. Symbolically, it’s going to be
huge,” said Dennis Cuneo, a former automotive executive who has
dealt with the UAW in past organizing campaigns.
Gary Casteel, UAW secretary-treasurer and head of the union's
organizing efforts, downplayed the significance of the vote and its
influence on the UAW's attempts to organize workers at southern
plants including those owned by Nissan Motor Co <7201.T> and Daimler
AG's <DAIGn.DE> Mercedes-Benz.
“To the overall grand plan of the UAW it’s probably not monumental,
but to those workers, it’s a big deal,” Casteel said in an interview
on Friday.
Casteel, and Chattanooga UAW Local 42 President Mike Cantrell, in a
separate interview on Thursday, said the election was a result of
the "frustration" of skilled trades workers not having collective
bargaining rights for wages and benefits.
"Every case has to be built on the circumstances" at each plant,
Casteel said. "We are not filing on Nissan or Mercedes tomorrow, but
if our evaluation proved that there was a unit that was ready and
strong enough to have an election, certainly we would explore it."
The union narrowly lost a February 2014 ballot in which all of the
Chattanooga plant’s hourly workers were eligible to vote.
During that vote, Republican U.S. Senator Bob Corker, whose hometown
is Chattanooga, said, “I’ve had conversations today and based on
those am assured that should the workers vote against the UAW,
Volkswagen will announce in the coming weeks that it will
manufacture its new mid-size SUV here in Chattanooga."
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The UAW’s current president, Dennis Williams, and its president in
2014, Bob King, said Corker's comment as well as “interference” from
anti-union groups, including one led by small government advocate
Grover Norquist, tainted the earlier election.
VW has since announced plans to build the midsized SUV at
Chattanooga, and it plans to gradually add as many as 2,000 plant
workers for production that will ramp up from its December 2016
start.
Casteel said the UAW maintains a narrow majority of support among VW
Chattanooga hourly workers, but did not pursue a vote by all hourly
workers now because of concern of “facing the same outside pressure
that we faced last time.”
"We have said from the beginning of Local 42 that there are multiple
paths to reach collective bargaining. And we believe these paths
will give all of us a voice at Volkswagen in due time," Cantrell
said after Friday's vote.
Officials at VW have publicly declined to say whether its
relationship with the UAW has soured since 2014, when it was clearly
the most open to the union among foreign automakers in the south.
But it has appealed the decision by an NLRB regional official to
allow election in Chattanooga on grounds that all of the plant’s
hourly workers should be included in any labor representation vote.
VW also said the timing of the vote was bad, considering its ongoing
scandal over diesel emissions.
Casteel and Cantrell pointed out that the UAW filed for the vote in
August, more than a month before VW's emissions scandal came to
light in mid-September.
(Reporting by Bernie Woodall; Editing by Bernard Orr and Tom Brown)
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