BREAKING: Mercedes Workers In Alabama Stand Up to Vote on a Union

For the second time in three weeks, workers at a major auto plant in the South have called for a union election amid UAW's historic organizing drive.

By Paul Blest, More Perfect Union

Workers at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama have officially filed for a National Labor Relations Board election to join the United Auto Workers, the latest plant to do so since the UAW began an unprecedented $40 million drive to organize non-union auto and battery plants.  

The more than 5,000 employees who will vote at the company’s only U.S. plant build several models in Mercedes’ SUV line, including its best-selling GLE luxury SUV and the electric EQE SUV. It is the second auto plant in the past month where workers have filed to join the UAW. More than 4,000 employees at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., will hold their union election later this month.

“They had the time to change and do right by us. And now it's gone,” Mercedes-Benz worker Moesha Chandler told More Perfect Union. “We're looking forward to UAW representing us. We don't want anything else from them.”

Under President Shawn Fain, the UAW launched the campaign in November to organize 150,000 non-union workers following historic simultaneous “stand up” strikes at the Detroit Three of Stellantis, GM, and Ford that resulted in record wage gains. Over 10,000 autoworkers have signed cards in recent months, the union said.

The non-union plants are operated by manufacturers based in Europe, Japan, and South Korea and by U.S. electric vehicle manufacturers such as Tesla and Rivian, and the facilities are largely located in states hostile to labor rights, including in the South. (See our new interactive map of the plants.)

In Alabama, the UAW is being opposed by Alabama’s political and business leaders including Gov. Kay Ivey, who has written op-eds denouncing their campaign and calling the union a “looming threat” to the Alabama economy. A report last year by the left-leaning think tank Alabama Arise found that Alabama autoworkers in 2019 were earning on average nearly $8,000 less than they did in 2002, when adjusted for inflation; Mercedes-Benz turned a profit of nearly $16 billion in 2023. 

Alabama Republicans are also pushing a bill in the state legislature to ban economic subsidies for companies that voluntarily recognize unions; the union said in February that a majority of workers at the Vance plant had signed cards authorizing representation by the UAW. (Between 1993 and 2018, the same Alabama Arise report found, Mercedes-Benz received $372 million in state and local incentives.)

Mercedes’ corporate principles state that “the company and its executives shall remain neutral” during union organizing campaigns. But executives and managers are aggressively trying to crush the effort, holding captive audience meetings attacking the UAW in an attempt to persuade workers to vote against the union, leaked recordings of the meetings show. 

Watch the union-busting footage, which we obtained exclusively:

During one meeting, Mercedes-Benz U.S. International CEO Michael Göbel told workers that they “shouldn’t have to pay union dues and generate billions of dollars per year for an organization where you have no transparency where that money is used.”

Kizmat Finklea, who has worked at the plant for 23 years, recalled in an interview that Mercedes group leaders argued that “we are a family and that would all change” if the workers vote to join the UAW. “This is definitely not how I treat my family,” Finklea told More Perfect Union. 

“Of course, the company won’t take it lying down, and neither will the wealthy, so they’re pushing back,” Fain said at a Wednesday rally in North Carolina for workers in contract negotiations with Daimler Truck.

As for Ivey’s assertion that the “Alabama economic model for success is under attack,” Fain responded: “She’s damn right it is! It's under attack because workers are fed up with getting screwed."

Among the other plants with active organizing drives are a Toyota facility in Georgetown, Kentucky, and a Hyundai facility in Montgomery, where workers filed an unfair labor practice charge in December. The UAW also filed a lawsuit against Mercedes-Benz this week in Germany, its headquarters, alleging that the company’s union-busting campaign violates human rights provisions in a recently passed corporate due diligence law. 

Finklea views the union vote at Vance as a pivotal moment for Mercedes workers like herself. “Right now we're being pushed against the wall,” she said. “And if we don't do something, it's just going to get ten times worse."