Electric vehicle factories are booming in the Southeast. Soon, unions could be too.
Chattanooga, Tennessee’s Volkswagen plant made history last week when 73% of its workers voted to join the United Auto Workers. It’s a big victory for the UAW in the historically hard-to-organize Southeast, and a win for two top Biden administration priorities: increasing union labor and domestic EV manufacturing.
“The union has broken the glass ceiling that unions could not organize in the South,” Harley Shaiken, a professor emeritus who studies labor issues at the University of California, Berkeley, told E&E News. “This could become a forerunner for the role that the UAW and unions will play in the transition to EVs.”
The UAW last year secured higher wages and other worker benefits from the Big Three automakers, and after that set its sights on EV makers that have started popping up in the South. Next up, the UAW will push for a union at an Alabama Mercedes-Benz factory that recently started making EVs, as well as a nearby EV battery plant. The UAW says so far, a “supermajority” of workers at those plants back a union.
John Logan, labor professor at San Francisco State University, told Reuters that Mercedes is fighting the union effort far more aggressively than VW did. But if the UAW succeeds at unionizing Mercedes, “I wouldn’t be surprised to see elections at Hyundai, Honda and Toyota over the next several months,” he said.
Tesla, BMW, and Nissan plants are also targeted as part of the union’s $40 million organizing campaign. And while E&E News notes the UAW doesn’t have plans to unionize any standalone battery plants yet, they could be next.
— Kathryn Krawczyk
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