Amid a nationwide surge in worker momentum and public support for unions, the United Auto Workers is making a renewed push to build on-the-ground interest in organizing non-unionized auto plants.
More than 60 workers at 10 automakers that don't have contracts with the UAW met late last month in Birmingham, Alabama, to discuss how to organize plants across the country, UAW Vice President Cindy Estrada told The Detroit News.
"They decided this is a moment right now in the country for them, too, as non-union workers, for them to be able to form their unions and make sure that there's a sectoral standard in the industry," she said. "They've all come together to say 'we're going to do this together.'"
The UAW-organized meeting included employees from Tesla Inc., Honda Motor Co., Volkswagen AG, Toyota Motor Corp., Mercedes-Benz Group AG, Nissan Motor Co., Rivian Automotive Inc., Lucid Motors Inc. and others, according to a recording of a post-meeting roundtable shared with The News. The group included workers in nine states, Estrada said.
The only auto companies in the U.S. with unionized workforces are Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co. and Stellantis NV, maker of Jeep SUVs and Ram trucks. The meeting comes in the midst of a seismic shift in the auto industry, which is transitioning from producing primarily gas-powered vehicles to electrified ones powered by batteries.
"It really has to come from the rank-and-file," said Art Wheaton, director of Labor Studies at Cornell University. "It's not coming from an organizer."
Electric vehicles take fewer parts and people to assemble, creating uncertainty for next-generation jobs. Meanwhile, automakers are striking new joint agreements with foreign partners to produce batteries, chips and minerals — companies without union workforces. And the UAW still hasn't had any success organizing foreign plants in the southern United States.
That's coincided with a wave of good news for unions. It began last year with so-called "Striketober," a series of strikes that picked up across the country after the COVID-19 pandemic reframed employees' relationship to work amid a tight labor market that has given workers more leverage.
Public support for organized labor is higher than it has been since the mid-1960s and unions are enjoying the backing of one of the most labor-friendly presidential administrations in recent history.
And now high-profile wins at Amazon and Starbucks are renewing conversations about what works in union organizing. That's prompted frequent comparisons between those workplaces' youth-led, ground-up efforts with more centralized, experienced unions like the UAW that have weathered the steady decline of membership over decades.
That kind of grassroots momentum and consistent pushback on companies' efforts to quash unions is what's needed to expand unions' reach, workers from multiple companies said during the UAW roundtable, especially in new parts of the EV supply chain and in the South. Workers at an Alabama Starbucks store and at the Bessemer Amazon plant joined the roundtable to share their strategies.
"It's going to be good, on-the-ground organizing with workers in those (non-union auto) facilities, and that's what they started to do" at the Birmingham meeting, Estrada said. "It's a commitment to each other: They're going to organize across the industry and within their own plants."
Uphill climb
United Auto Workers' membership was cut nearly in half after the Great Recession, when auto industry employment fell by 45% and the U.S. government bailed out GM and Chrysler following their historic bankruptcies. More than 671,000 members in 2000 were reduced to just over 355,000 in 2009.
The union has been rebuilding slowly in the years since. But it has been a rocky path marked by supply chain disruptions and a years-long corruption investigation that put two former UAW presidents, among others, in federal prison.
At the end of 2021, the most recent year for which data are available, the UAW had 372,254 members. It's a far cry from the more than 1.5 million members it employed in the late 1970s, mirroring the decline of union membership nationwide in the same time period.
Now, UAW leadership is looking out upon a new landscape. Ford, GM and Stellantis no longer have total supremacy of auto production in the U.S. Instead, foreign-based automakers that have no relationship with the UAW have proliferated, opening 23 non-union plants across the country since 1982, Estrada said, and commanding more than half of the U.S. market for new vehicles.
Those automakers and the Detroit Three are vertically expanding to build their own batteries and source their own next-generation components through joint ventures that also throw unionization into question.
And auto investments are increasingly moving toward the South, where workers are more skeptical of the Detroit-based UAW, and Republican-dominated state governments openly support efforts to stop unions. The UAW has never successfully organized a plant owned by a foreign automaker.
Yet, UAW leaders have acknowledged their survival depends on their ability to unionize in these new sectors.
"The UAW is committed to an industry-wide campaign across this great nation," UAW President Ray Curry told attendees at the Birmingham meeting. "We see this as critical for both the union and non-union. It's a chance to make sure we're doing this together. It's a chance to make sure that no worker is exploited during this transformation."
In a roundtable following the meeting, workers at Volkswagen in Tennessee and Mercedes-Benz plants in Alabama said there are plenty of things they'd like to improve about their workplaces — from having a say in abruptly-changing, long shifts to defending colleagues in disciplinary meetings. But their colleagues are hesitant to align with a union.
"They've weaponized it, the companies and the anti-union outsiders. They've weaponized unionism," said Steve Cochran, an employee at the Volkswagen assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
"If you're for a union, you're labeled as a political party: a Democrat. It's gaslighting people. We try to explain to people, to talk to them, but it happens often."
Tennessee voters have elected the Republican candidate for president in every election since 2000, and Republicans have controlled both the state Legislature and governor's office since 2011.
Cochran said he has worked at the VW plant for 11 years and has been involved in multiple attempts at forming a union there: "Even some of the churches and religion down here get involved and tell you (a union is) like a cult."
It's a major cultural and political challenge for organizers like Cochran to overcome. But to make gains, experts say, workers inside plants must decide that labor conditions could be better and see the union as a solution.
That was the key for Lindsay Calka, one of the organizers of a recent successful union drive at a Starbucks in Ann Arbor. She and a few of her colleagues heard about other Starbucks stores unionizing around the country and felt inspired to talk with the 50-60 other baristas at their store about how a union contract could improve their work lives.
Compared with VW's Cochran, one advantage they enjoyed was a mostly clean slate: Calka started by feeling out whether her predominantly young colleagues had pre-dispositions toward unions, and found many of the workers in their teens to late 20s hadn't heard much anti-union sentiment or yet been exposed to how unions could help them.
"It's just fresh, it's new, and it's doing good things," she said. "And that's what people are excited about."
Susan Schurman, a labor professor at Rutgers University, agreed that Starbucks workers' success comes from individual stores deciding they want a union, persuading their colleagues, and then partnering with more established organizers who can help.
The UAW's Estrada echoed that: Starbucks' wins are "just a reminder that the basics always work," she said. "No one knows their workplace better than most workers."
But both Schurman and Wheaton said any organizers' best efforts are likely to come up against a consistent problem: U.S. labor law is tilted heavily against unions, making it easy for companies to intimidate workers out of voting for representation.
