Poll: Alabama Strongly Supports Unionizing Mercedes Workers

We surveyed Alabama voters. The anti-union campaign by Gov. Kay Ivey and Mercedes-Benz is falling flat.

By Jordan Zakarin, More Perfect Union

In deeply conservative Alabama, residents support the union campaign at their state’s Mercedes-Benz plant by more than a two-to-one margin, according to a new poll conducted for More Perfect Union. 

The survey found broad support for the United Auto Workers’ effort to organize Mercedes’s largest U.S. manufacturing facility in Vance, Alabama. The plant’s 5,200 autoworkers will vote on whether to join the union during a mid-May election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board. Another organizing drive is underway at a Hyundai factory in Montgomery, where more than 30 percent of workers have signed cards supporting the UAW. 

Fifty-two percent of Alabamians said they supported the unionizing autoworkers while just 21 percent were opposed, with the rest of the respondents not sure or undecided. Respondents voted for Donald Trump by similar margins in 2020—53 percent to 27 percent—and generally approved of Republican Gov. Kay Ivey. Yet their support for unions spanned partisan divides, education levels, age, and race.

(The poll, by FM3 Research, surveyed 500 registered voters in Alabama between April 12 and 16.)

Though Ivey has repeatedly and prominently criticized labor unions, voters in her state overwhelmingly acknowledged their benefits: 72 percent of Alabamians said they believe UAW representation will deliver higher wages and salaries to workers, 71 percent thought the union will lead to better healthcare and retirement benefits, and 69 percent predicted safer conditions for unionized autoworkers.

The UAW itself enjoyed bipartisan support. Democrats backed the union by a 58 to 15 percent margin, and even Republicans, by a thin 35 to 32 percent margin, were pro-UAW.

White respondents supported the union drive nearly two-to-one, 49 to 27 percent, but support from Black Alabamians was far stronger, a 73 percent to 5 percent margin. Among Black men, the group most in favor of the UAW’s campaign, 82 percent said they backed the effort. Black women were also strongly in favor, with a 66 to 8 percent margin. White men split at 42 to 35 percent, which trailed the 45 to 19 percent margin amongst white women.

Both non-college-educated men and college-educated women gave the union drive 58 percent support, whereas non-college-educated women were more modestly in favor, at 47 to 19 percent, and college-educated men were split at 41 percent. 

More than 70 percent of workers at the Mercedes plant have signed NLRB cards indicating initial support for the union. Plant employees have already been subjected to aggressive union-busting tactics, including in-person anti-union presentations by Mercedes-Benz’s U.S. CEO. (Footage of those meetings was leaked to More Perfect Union, you can watch them in the video below.)

The vote in May will be the second election in the UAW’s campaign to unionize non-union auto plants largely based in the South, after the $40 million effort got off to a roaring start with a resounding victory at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee on Friday. The UAW had previously lost two elections at the Chattanooga plant; this time, despite vocal opposition from Gov. Bill Lee and other state leaders, the union won in a landslide with 73 percent support. Just days before the election, Lee, Ivey, and Republican governors of four other states in the South issued a joint statement denouncing the UAW. 

"I hope if the Mercedes people see me talking right now, we know they're going to win their [election] too,” Volkswagen worker Robert Soderstrom told More Perfect Union last week. “And Chattanooga is rooting for them too.”