Majority of Alabama Mercedes workers join UAW as Southeast’s union battle heats up

A majority of workers at the largest Mercedes-Benz factory in the United States have voted to join the United Auto Workers (UAW).

The announcement marks another important milestone for the union in its campaign to organize auto plants in the Southeast, where labor rights have traditionally been recognized.

“There comes a time when enough is enough,” factory worker Jeremy Kimbrel said in a statement. “The time is now.”

The workers cited a list of complaints similar to those from other factories where the UAW has a stronghold. They said in a statement that despite the company’s record profits, salaries have stagnated and management is replacing full-time jobs with temporary workers.

“These same temporary workers worked for up to eight years before landing a full-time job. [and] Our management team has given us 42 cent raises over six years while making record profits,” the factory workers wrote.

“And these same record profits were not enough to prevent Mercedes from imposing an unfair two-tier pay structure just as our children were beginning to enter the workforce.” they added.

The news that more than half of the workers at the Vance, Alabama, plant have signed union cards comes on the heels of a similar announcement by workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, earlier this month.

This also follows a public coming out from the union movement at the Hyundai plant in Montgomery, Alabama, where 10,000 autoworkers from 14 other non-union auto companies signed union cards. Was. And last week, the UAW itself announced $40 million to organize workers at auto and battery factories.

If at least 70% of workers at the Vance and Montgomery plants sign, the UAW will ask management to voluntarily recognize the union, and if not, hold an election under the supervision of the National Labor Relations Board. It’s planned.

In Alabama, the campaign is proceeding against a backdrop of fierce opposition from the state’s political and business leaders.

State Commerce Secretary Ellen McNair said if the union campaign is successful, “the days of Alabama being a premier destination for industrial investment may be over.” Said said in a January statement obtained by The Birmingham News.

McNair added that the UAW’s efforts are “targeting key economic drivers for our state.” echo It was created by Alabama Governor Kay Ivey (R) earlier this year.

Perhaps the most vocal opponent of unionization efforts is the Business Council of Alabama, the state’s chamber of commerce.

In January, the business council launched a website and advertising campaign with Council President Helena Duncan warning Alabamians of the “economic dangers of unionizing.” I have written In an editorial in the Birmingham News.

that WebsiteAlabama Strong “all of us stand up and propose ways to deter the UAW from making our state its primary battleground,” Duncan said.

The anti-union site has a list of warnings against unions, including that “unions can and do make many promises about what they will give workers, but these claims “In many cases, they are empty promises designed to get workers to join.”

The UAW’s move south follows successful fights for wage and workplace reforms at Detroit’s Big Three auto plants (Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis).

In his op-ed, Duncan argued that union militancy in the upper Midwest led to “Detroit’s decline.”

“Much of the decline that exists in today’s ‘car cities’ can be traced to the unbearable demands the UAW placed on automakers,” Duncan wrote.

“We’re not going to let the UAW do to Alabama what they did to Detroit,” she added.

However, a 2018 book by two sociologists argues that this is the opposite story.

Sociologists Joshua Murray and Michael Schwartz write in “Wrecked: How America’s Auto Industry Destroyed its Ability to Compete.” write The decline of Detroit’s auto companies in the second half of the 20th century had much more to do with the expensive measures taken by the Big Three to fight unions.

Murray, who teaches at Vanderbilt University, writes that major automakers are building parallel and redundant supply chains to weaken unions’ ability to shut down production lines as a bargaining tool.

“If workers at one supplier go on strike, two or three other companies will be making the same parts, so the factory won’t sit idle,” he said in 2018.

This redundancy came at the cost of higher costs and inefficiencies, Murray explained, making it difficult for the Big Three to compete as foreign automakers entered the U.S. market in the late 20th century.

That came at a higher cost to American democracy, according to a 2012 study by the Economic Policy Institute.

Researchers believe that with the decline of labor unions in the second half of the 20th century, Rising economic inequality It reached levels not seen since before the New Deal.

Murray argued that improving relations with workers is as essential to American automakers as new plants and equipment.

“We need to mend our broken relationships with unions so that factories can continue to operate as the industry recovers,” he said.

Recent UAW victories at a transmission plant in Indiana and a Ford plant in Kentucky suggest the potential impact of successful union campaigns.

In February, 9,000 auto workers at the Ford plant in Louisville, Kentucky, threatened to attack Citing concerns that the company was operating its factories with too few employees to operate safely.Within five days of his threat to strike, Ford agreed to make a deal.

In a January agreement that averted a strike at the Allison Transmission Plant in Indianapolis, workers I won a 150% raise. and the abolition of wage hierarchies.

Before the agreement, staff complained that they were struggling to make ends meet.

“I live in a studio downtown and I don’t even have a kitchen,” said Allison employee Monique Morrison.

“Something could happen to my car and I wouldn’t be able to pay the rent. I haven’t gone to the eye doctor because I don’t have money, and I haven’t found a primary care doctor,” she added. “It was tough.”

Allison’s strike threat turned the industry against decentralization. A stoppage at the facility could have disrupted production further down the supply chain at Ford and General Motors plants that install Allison transmissions in their trucks.

“We never would have gotten what we got without the threat of a strike,” Zachary Boyd, another worker, said in a statement.