BREAKING: Volkswagen Workers in Tennessee Win a Union, Making History

In a landslide vote, workers in Chattanooga have won the first U.S. union at a non-union car company in decades. The VW election could alter the auto industry and the future of American labor.

By Paul Blest, More Perfect Union

Thousands of workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee have voted to join the United Auto Workers, defying an all-out union-busting effort from the state’s political leaders and marking a key victory for the United Auto Workers in their renewed effort to organize the South and non-union plants.

Unofficial results tallied Friday showed that after three days of voting, more than two-thirds of workers voted to join the UAW. The win in Chattanooga is the first successful attempt to organize a non-union automaker in decades and comes after multiple failed attempts to organize the plant, including in 2014 and 2019. More than 4,300 workers were eligible to vote this week. 

“I can't explain it. It's not like the first times,” Renee Berry, who has worked at the Chattanooga plant for 14 years and through two prior facility-wide votes, told us in the lead-up to the election. “The first few times was hell…now it's like we can roll our shoulders back, because we got it.” 

Volkswagen is the world’s largest auto company by revenue, and until today, every one of its plants around the globe has been unionized except for one.

"This is going to be in history books down the road. This is huge—forever huge,” Robert Soderstrom, a worker at the plant, told More Perfect Union. “People recognize for the first time in a long time, on a mass scale, that there's got to be some changes. And some of the power and stuff that's gone to the corporate world needs to come back to us little guys.”

The victory in Tennessee continues a winning streak for the UAW, which negotiated record contracts at the Detroit Three of Ford, GM, and Stellantis last year following a lengthy “stand-up” strike. After passing the contracts, UAW President Shawn Fain announced a $40 million effort to organize non-union U.S. plants, largely based in right-to-work states like Tennessee and owned by auto companies based in Europe, Japan, and South Korea, as well as EV manufacturers like Tesla and Rivian. 

We’ve been talking to workers on the ground in Tennessee for weeks—watch our new video about the historic election at Volkswagen here:

Since launching that new effort, more than 10,000 autoworkers around the country have signed union cards, according to the UAW. Earlier this month, workers at a Mercedes plant in Vance, Alabama became the second group to file for an election, which will be held from May 13 to 17. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey and the state Chamber of Commerce have forcefully opposed the unionization effort, claiming it would hurt Alabama autoworkers—who, even before the pandemic, were making less than they did in 2002 when adjusted for inflation.

The same dynamic has played out in Tennessee. Gov. Bill Lee, who denounced the last unsuccessful union campaign in 2019, said it would be a “mistake” for workers at the Chattanooga plant to unionize and boasted about the state’s “right-to-work” law. 

“We’ve seen plants close that made the decision to go union so I hope that’s not what happens here,” Lee told reporters in Chattanooga last week. Just weeks before the vote to join the UAW, the highest-elected county official in Chattanooga, Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp, called the union a “sinking ship.”

But the surge in organizing has followed the record wage gains won during last year’s strike, as well as other key concessions from the Detroit Three such as scrapping the two-tiered wage system. In the aftermath of the strike, South Korean automaker Hyundai immediately announced a 25 percent raise for workers at its Alabama plant, while VW announced an 11 percent wage increase; last week, Mercedes officials announced new “quarterly performance bonuses” for employees.

At Volkswagen, neither the carrot nor the stick were enough to delay the union one more time. 

VW worker Kelcey Smith told More Perfect Union, “I want to be able to tell my children and my grandchildren and great-grandchildren: ‘Hey, I had a hand in changing things around here and throughout the South for you and everyone else.’”