Workers at a battery plant in Tennessee have voted to join the United Auto Workers union, marking a major victory in the union's ongoing campaign to organize both the Southeast and the electric vehicle (EV) industry.
“Workers across the South are ready to stand up and win their fair rights through a union. If we have a free and fair choice, we can win,” Trudy Lindahl, a worker at the Altium plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, said in a statement.
Detroit-based automaker General Motors, which operates the plant as a joint venture with South Korea's LG Energy Solutions, voluntarily recognized the union, the second at an Altium plant.
The Spring Hill plant is the second in the country dedicated to making the Ultium “skateboard,” a modular battery and drivetrain system that allows GM to mass-produce trucks and SUVs and forms the basis of vehicles such as the GMC Hummer electric car, the Cadillac Lyriq and a new electric Acura, a joint project with Honda.
The Spring Hill plant is also the second Altium plant to vote to join a union, after a plant in Lordstown, Ohio, voted to join the UAW in 2022 and reached an agreement with GM in June.
The contract provided Lordstown workers with increased safety measures and a nearly doubled wage increase. Wages and safety are both particular concerns for workers in the area, where GM's conventional car plant was replaced by the Altium plant in 2019, but workers told The Hill that they were now being paid half the wages they received when they were making internal combustion engines and still had to handle corrosive chemicals labeled in Korean.
UAW President Sean Fain blasted the possibility of a “race to the bottom” for EV manufacturing jobs, which involve assembling less mechanically complex vehicles.
“The big three automakers – Ford, General Motors and Stellantis – are receiving billions of dollars in government subsidies to go electric,” Fain said.saidLast year, UAW members went on strike at three companies.
“But those benefits are not reaching UAW members.”
As part of the pivotal UAW strike in 2023, the union won the right for Altium workers in Lordstown to be treated as GM employees rather than Altium employees, paving the way for broader unionization of the company.
The victory came before a $40 million UAW organizing effort in the Southeast, which has the nation's lowest union membership rates and where companies like Tesla and Toyota are making a push to build EVs.
In April, workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga voted to join the UAW, marking a major victory for the unionization drive.
However, in MayVoteThe union failed at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama, even though a majority of workers signed membership cards. The UAW said in a complaint to the National Labor Review Board that the result wasThe Movement to Destroy Labor UnionsMercedes said in May that it “sincerely hopes that the UAW will respect the decision of our team members.”
UAW activists leading the push into the Southeast on Wednesday argued that unionized Spring Hill is a model for the region's manufacturing future.
“UAW members at Altium and VW are proving that new jobs in the South will be union jobs,” Tim Smith, director of UAW Region 8, which stretches from Georgia to New Mexico, said in a statement.
“In battery and EV factories being built from Georgia to Kentucky to Texas, workers know they deserve the same great wages and benefits that our union members have won for them, and we will make sure they have the support they need to win their union and get their fair share.”
