UAW seeks breakthrough as it files union vote at Volkswagen’s Tennessee plant

The United Auto Workers union’s effort to organize the American plants of foreign automakers just took a major step forward as it filed for a representation election for the more than 4,000 hourly workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The United Auto Workers union’s effort to organize the American plants of foreign automakers just took a major step forward as it filed for a representation election for the more than 4,000 hourly workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. If the union were to win the vote, those workers would be the first current employees of a foreign automaker to be represented by a union. The union has announced a broad-based campaign to win representation at the American plants of 13 nonunion automakers. The UAW has faced declining membership over the decades partly because the traditional Big Three automakers lost more than half of the US market to foreign brands. While unionized Stellantis is based in Europe, its plants that the UAW represents – those that make Jeeps, Ram trucks, Dodge and Chrysler vehicles – were organized by the union when they were part of Chrysler Corp. While the union represented some foreign automakers’ plants in the past – including a Volkswagen plant in Pennsylvania and a Mitsubishi plant in Illinois, and a joint venture in California operated by Toyota and General Motors – those plants have long since closed. So winning the right to represent workers at the current foreign plants is a key to the UAW’s efforts to reverse its decline in memberhip. The current campaign includes 10 foreign automakers with American plants – BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Mazda, Mercedes, Nissan, Subaru, Toyota, Volvo as well as Volkswagen – and three electric vehicle makers that have US plants that are not unionized – Tesla, Rivian and Lucid. The union said about 150,000 hourly employees work at 36 nonunion auto plants operated by the companies it is targeting in this campaign. That is slightly more than the union’s representation at the three unionized automakers, which have about 145,000 UAW members between them.