Interview by Chris Brooks

The United Auto Workers just suffered its second major defeat at Volkswagen.

It’s a strong reminder of how far this once-mighty union has fallen. At one time, the UAW was in a position to set and enforce standards across the entire auto industry. Under these conditions, not one of the Big Three automakers could lower wages or cut benefits in an attempt to gain an advantage over their competitors.

Today, standards for unionized autoworkers have sharply declined following decades of concessionary bargaining and steep competition from the surge of foreign-owned nonunion automakers that set up shop below the Mason-Dixon line.

It’s a vicious cycle: the Big Three demand concessions to remain competitive with foreign automakers and those same foreign automakers weaponize those concessions to convince nonunion workers of the union’s weakness.

So if the union hopes to protect what remains of its membership and contracts, much less seize new ground, it is imperative that it organizes the South.

UAW leaders assumed they had the best shot at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee — the company’s sole US manufacturing plant. Their reasoning was that German employees have perceived structural power within the highest reaches of German corporations.

Under German laws, employees have a right to “co-determine” the companies they work in through the election of employee representatives to works councils and the company’s board. Works councils act a vehicle for white- and blue-collar non-managerial workers to have non-confrontational meetings with management where they make collective decisions regarding their immediate workplace. Workers representatives also constitute 50 percent of the employer’s board, even of massive global corporations like the Volkswagen Group, which comprises twelve distinct brands (such as Bentley, Lamborghini, Ducati, and Scania) and is the world’s largest automaker.

The UAW leaned heavily on their German allies in the Global Works Council and IG Metall, the largest union in Germany, in the hopes of importing the German model of “social partnership” to the United States.

That didn’t happen. The UAW has run two plant-wide elections, one in 2014 and another in 2019. Both failed.

In 2014, German unions and works council representatives were successful in helping the UAW reach an election agreement that kept the company ostensibly neutral in the lead-up to the vote. Tennessee politicians and business-funded astro-turf groups were happy to pick up the fight and launched an intensive aerial war against the union’s efforts.

In 2019, the union had to face down not only the politicians and corporate front groups, but Volkswagen as well.

Rather than being an independent, militant force against corporate power, the UAW has spent decades fostering a deep organizational commitment to labor-management partnership schemes. These schemes not only reduced the union to playing a junior partner in management’s strategies for increasing productivity and efficiency, but opened the door to corruption. It was this commitment to “jointness” that led to the creation of Big Three training centers, where production and maintenance workers improve their job skills to “enhance competitiveness.”

And it was the UAW’s ideological commitment to partnership that led it to fully embrace the German model of social partnership.

Labor journalist Chris Brooks interviewed Stephan Krull, a retired autoworker and IG Metall activist from Volkswagen’s flagship plant in Wolfsburg, Germany where he served for many years on the plant’s works council, to discuss why the UAW’s German allies were unsuccessful in reining in American management and what the anti-union turn in the US factory means for the German social model.