Workers at Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga will vote this week on UAW affiliation. UAW's Tenn. surge brings backlash

The United Auto Workers may be on the verge of its first unionization victory at a car plant in the South — and conservatives are rebelling.

More than 1,500 hourly workers at Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., will vote this week on whether to form a UAW-affiliated union, a move that would give the labor giant a foothold in the foreign-owned car industry that has spread across Southern states since Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Labor organizers are optimistic, partly because the vote has gotten no resistance from Volkswagen, a company that’s accustomed to dealing with unions at its plants in Germany.


But one of Washington’s most powerful conservative groups, the Grover Norquist-led Americans for Tax Reform, is spending money to warn Chattanoogans that a vote for the UAW would help Barack Obama — and maybe take away their guns.

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“We believe the citizens of Chattanooga and of Hamilton County deserve to know what kind of organization is coming to their town,” said Matt Patterson, executive director of the Center for Worker Freedom, a 6-month-old division of Norquist’s group.

The union vote also has Tennessee Republicans bemoaning the actions of Volkswagen, a company they spent hundreds of millions wooing to their state.

But UAW is undeterred, seeing the Volkswagen vote as a prelude to unionization efforts at plants owned by companies like BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Nissan.

“I think we’re going to win,” said Jonathan Walden, a 39-year-old paint technician at the Chattanooga plant. “I think we’re going to join the union.”

Walden doubted that Norquist’s group will see much return from its anti-UAW efforts, including 13 billboards the group has erected around Chattanooga.

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“These are people from outside the area. They don’t really have a dog in the fight except trying to keep unions [out] of anywhere,” Walden said. “It’s not up to the governor, it’s not up to the mayor, it’s certainly not to anybody up in Washington. Thanks for spending the money on the billboards here, but I don’t think you’re going to change any minds.”

Both sides say the vote will have an impact far beyond Chattanooga.

UAW President Bob King has made no secret of his desire to unionize the South’s foreign-owned auto and supplier plants, though he declined to tell POLITICO where exactly the union would go next. Some speculation has focused on BMW and Mercedes-Benz, which like Volkswagen include members of a powerful German union on their boards.

“We’re going to continue an organized and strategic campaign to organize all the transnationals,” he said Tuesday. “As for which one will be next, I don’t know.”

The effort is crucial to saving UAW’s bargaining power, said Sean McAlinden, chief economist at the Center for Automotive Research in Michigan. Membership has declined from 1.5 million in the late 1970s to just under 400,000.

“That’s Bob’s approach, a top-down approach, sort of a global approach, and he thinks he’s found the right place to do it,” McAlinden told POLITICO. “They really see this as a do-or-die battlefield.”

Republicans, meanwhile, have held up the South’s non-unionized auto companies as a thriving alternative to what they see as sclerotic, union-ridden Detroit. But Patterson said conservatives have become preoccupied with battling public-sector unions, believing prematurely that they’d won the fight against unions in private industry.

“Private-sector unions are still very powerful, and they’re still a threat to industry,” Patterson said, adding that unionization rates have quietly ticked up in the South. In Tennessee alone, Patterson said, unions added 30,000 members in 2013.

But the UAW has had little luck in the region, until now.

Starting with Toyota’s decision to build a Kentucky plant in 1986, foreign automakers have aggressively moved into the U.S., opening more than a dozen plants from Texas to South Carolina. Those non-union plants now produce about half of the cars and light trucks in the United States. The UAW’s most recent attempt to organize plants in the region ended in defeat in 2001, when Nissan workers in Tennessee rejected the union by a 2-to-1 ratio.

The Chattanooga plant, which assembles VW’s Passat sedan, opened in 2011 with help from more than $500 million in federal, state and local subsidies. From the beginning, workers talked about unionizing. And unlike many big manufacturers that have actively deterred attempts to organize their workers, Volkswagen isn’t fighting the union.

“Volkswagen is committed to neutrality and calls upon all third parties to honor the principle of neutrality,” plant CEO Frank Fischer told reporters last week.

Norquist’s group isn’t holding back, though. It has rented 13 billboards throughout the city and has plastered them with messages tying the union to Detroit, job losses and Obama.

One billboard labels the union the “United Obama Workers” and says the UAW “spends millions to elect liberal politicians including BARACK OBAMA.” A second quotes a Reuters article as saying that “almost every job lost at U.S. car factories in the last 30 years has occurred at a unionized company.”

The group has also blasted out news releases warning that the “UAW Wants Your Guns,” pointing out the union’s donations to politicians who support gun control.

Patterson wouldn’t rule out airing radio or television ads before this week’s vote. “We’ve got a few other surprises up our sleeve,” he said.

The ads seem to have changed at least one mind. “We’re in the South. We have a lot of religion. I don’t want my money going to those causes,” Travis Finnell, a 39-year-old maintenance worker at the plant, told The Wall Street Journal.

Other locals opposed to the union seemed to wish the Center wasn’t alone in the fight. Republican politicians have criticized Volkswagen for essentially allowing the union to walk into the plant.

On Monday, a group of Republican state legislators said they would withhold tax incentives for future expansion of the plant if workers voted to join the UAW. Volkswagen is considering building a new SUV at the plant.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), a former Chattanooga mayor, said he’s “disappointed” that Volkswagen allowed labor organizers into its plant.

“Obviously, I think the UAW is a very negative influence in the auto industry. It’s already impacted our ability to recruit other businesses,” Corker told POLITICO last week. “Our concerns are really … about the UAW having a greater foothold in our state and especially in our hometown, and the effect it’s going to have on our ability to recruit other businesses.”

Corker initially said he would keep quiet about the vote, but on Tuesday he held a news conference in Chattanooga to warn that the UAW’s presence would be “damaging” to the state.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam sounded a similar note in an interview with The Tennessean’s editorial board last week.

“You have this unique situation where the UAW is being able to come in and say here’s why you should do it, and the company saying we’re going to be completely neutral, and there’s really nobody making the other side,” he said.

Patterson, noting that Volkswagen sales in the U.S. fell nearly 7 percent last year, claimed that the union is already harming the company.

“I think they should’ve spent more energy selling cars to the American public and less time trying to think on how they should let the union walk into that facility. That’s incredibly foolish,” he said.

But Volkswagen and the UAW both say they aren’t seeking to set up a traditional union. Instead, the goal is to form a “works council” — a concept that’s virtually ubiquitous in Germany but untested in the United States. Works councils consist of both workers and middle management and give executives advice on how to best run the plant.

“It’s the way they’ve become the most profitable automaker in the world. We want to continue that,” Walden said. “We’re ready to move forward. We’re ready to have a voice in the Volkswagen system just like every other Volkswagen factory in the world.”

King said in a statement last week that a council would “set a new standard in the U.S. for innovative labor-management relations that benefits the company, the entire workforce, shareholders and the community.”

It could also point a way forward for the UAW. Volkswagen’s decision not to resist the union was heavily influenced by the powerful German steelworkers union, IG Metall, which holds seats on the company’s board of directors. The German union also has seats on the boards of Mercedes-Benz and BMW, which own plants in Alabama and South Carolina.

But McAlinden warned that unionizing those plants may prove difficult. Unlike Volkswagen, where wages top out at under $20 an hour, BMW and Mercedes both pay employees above the industry average of around $25 an hour.

King denounced the efforts of groups like Norquist’s organization to squelch the union drive.

“I think there are very wealthy right-wing people out there who don’t want workers to have better wages, who don’t want workers to have health care,” he said. “Anything that helps workers, they’re against.”

Scott Wong contributed to this report.