Volkswagen plant tile

polls here 2736

An anti-union group said today that Volkswagen is considering disregarding the February election results over United Auto Workers representation at the Chattanooga plant and accepting authorization cards the union claims to have collected last year.

Matt Patterson of the Center for Worker Freedom said that such a course of action "would hand over its Chattanooga assembly plant to the UAW in spite of that union's failure to win a February secret ballot election."

VW workers rejected the union in a 712 to 626 vote after a three-day election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board.

Patterson, citing unidentified sources, said VW is considering recognizing the cards even though they've never been examined by a third party and a number of VW workers have complained to labor authorities that they had been tricked or coerced into signing such cards.

"Such a suppression of the democratically expressed wishes of its employees would constitute a betrayal without precedent in the history of American labor relations," said Patterson on the website of the Americans for Tax Reform, the group that supports the Center for Worker Freedom.

Patterson said that a spokesman for the NLRB refused to comment on whether previously collected union authorization cards could be legally accepted by a company after the results of a secret ballot election have been announced.

See Tuesday's Times Free Press for more.