UAW Loses VW Vote

Reuters:

In a stinging defeat that could accelerate the decades-long decline of the United Auto Workers, Volkswagen AG workers voted against union representation at a Chattanooga, Tennessee plant, which had been seen as organized labor's best chance to expand in the U.S. South.
The loss, 712 to 626, capped a sprint finish to a long race and was particularly surprising for UAW supporters, because Volkswagen had allowed the union access to the factory and officially stayed neutral on the vote, while other manufacturers have been hostile to organized labor.
UAW spent more than two years organizing and then called a snap election in an agreement with VW. German union IG Metall worked with the UAW to pressure VW to open its doors to organizers, but anti-union forces dropped a bombshell after the first of three days of voting.
Republican U.S. Senator Bob Corker, the former mayor of Chattanooga who helped win the VW plant, said on Wednesday after the first day of voting that VW would expand the factory if the union was rejected.
"Needless to say, I am thrilled," Corker said in a statement after the results were disclosed.
National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix hailed the outcome: "If UAW union officials cannot win when the odds are so stacked in their favor, perhaps they should re-evaluate the product they are selling to workers."

 Personally, I was pulling for the UAW mainly because I wanted them to stick it to the Republicans who were working so hard to try to prevent the union from gaining a foothold in the plant.  I'm not necessarily in the same camp as Mark Mix, but I think part of his quote is correct.  I think he's right that the UAW should re-evaluate the product they are selling to workers, but I don't think the odds were necessarily stacked in their favor in this vote. 

These workers, though non-union, have a pretty damn good wage and benefit package (one that is in part due to UAW negotiating at the Big Three), and they work for a company that is used to working cohesively with workers.  That's not exactly the best place for the union to come in and try to sign folks up for the union.  What benefits will the workers get by joining the union and paying the dues?  If the workers had significant grievances with the company, I'd think the union would be in a better place than they were in this one.  I got the impression that many of the union supporters were supporting it out of a sense of nostalgia for the "good ol' days" of the 1946-mid '70s era, when unions managed to force companies to share the fruits of their members' labor more equitably amongst the investors, the corporate chieftains and the laborers themselves.

I think this indicates a challenging strategic situation for the UAW and other old industrial unions.  The Autoworkers know an industry that has relatively high wages due to the legacy of their previous organizing victories, but the influx of foreign companies brought in a new paradigm in which companies work with workers, and don't fight them continuously, in the way the Big Three had interacted with the UAW.  Because of the labor structure in the industry, the foreign assembly plants pay competitive wages, making it hard to justify union involvement in those new plants.  The UAW needs to be organizing workers at the lower end of the manufacturing pay scale, and even more so, unions need to be working on the service side of the economy.  The problem is that the work is extremely difficult, and at the current pay scales in those segments of the economy won't support the dues needed to wage the campaigns and pay the union overhead.  A new labor strategy and structure will be necessary.

I think the current labor market is at a challenging place for unions to be organizing workers.  The main challenge is that the unions appear to be more interested in their own interests than in their members' interests.  I think there are plenty of abuses of workers which could be capitalized on in order to organize them and pressure employers, but I think our society is locked too strongly in an every-man-for-himself mindset to bring it about.  Those who possess capital have been very successful in their efforts to make government and unions into the bogeymen to be blamed for the struggles of the middle class.  I think that is grossly inaccurate, but I think it is perfectly exemplified in the political actions of the Tea Party.  It will only be with the disillusionment of  that mass mindset that we can move back toward the "good ol' days."