UAW pushes VW to recognise union as rep for Tennessee workers

The United Auto Workers would like Volkswagen to voluntarily recognise the US union as the best choice to represent the German automaker’s workers at its Tennessee plant, the union’s president said.

Doing so would eliminate the need for a more formal and divisive vote, UAW president Bob King said, and allow the union and VW to represent the workers using an “innovative model” that would be a milestone in the union’s long-running effort to organise foreign-owned auto plants.

King has been trying to organise foreign-owned, US-based auto plants to bolster a union membership that has shrunk since its peak in the late 1970s. Historically, the US South has been hostile to unions.

The question would be whether the UAW seeks a formal vote for recognition or asks VW officials to simply recognise the union as the official bargaining unit for the workers under a new German-style representation model called a “works council.”

“An election process is more divisive,” King said in a telephone interview, referring to outside nonunion groups that would likely pit workers against each other. “I don’t think that’s in Volkswagen’s best interests. I don’t think that in the best interests of Tennessee.

“If they want to...recognise us based on majority, I think that is the quickest, most effective way,” he added, saying the UAW has taken a similar approach with hundreds of other companies in the United States. King declined to give a timeline on how long the process will take.

VW executives said last week in a letter to employees at the Chattanooga plant they were in talks with the UAW about the union’s bid to represent workers.

King said the union has received cards signed by a majority of the plant’s 2,500 workers saying they want UAW representation. He declined to give the exact percentage, saying the number was still rising.

In VW’s home country of Germany, the IG Metall union that represents workers has seats on the company’s board. IG Metall would like to see the UAW organise the Chattanooga plant and bring it in line with Volkswagen’s other major factories around the world, all of which have union representation.

King declined to say what preference IG Metall or VW officials have voiced to him on the question of a vote, but said the union was anxious to work with the German automaker to make the plant more productive.

In Germany, IG Metall negotiates worker compensation every few years, while the works council handles working conditions in the plants. The UAW would play the role of the German union in the United States, a model King thinks can be transferred to other foreign-owned plants, including those of the Japanese and South Korean automakers.

VW board member Horst Neumann, who is also an IG Metall member who has voiced support for the UAW, told Automotive News this week that company lawyers were working on a proposal for a works council-like model for the US plant and a proposal for the workers could be ready for discussion as soon as mid-January.

VW executives in the United States have said the workers will have the final decision on whether to choose the UAW, but they have repeatedly focused on the formal voting process. Don Jackson, an industry consultant who was VW’s US manufacturing chief until last June, said he expects VW would only accept the union after a confidential ballot vote by the Tennessee plant’s workers.

Tennessee state officials are more hostile to the union. Republican Senator Bob Corker told Reuters on Tuesday that bringing the UAW into the VW plant would be “a job-destroying idea” and called the union’s claims it was more flexible and easier to work with laughable.

Earlier on Thursday, a Tennessee state legislator said he is trying to prove that the state’s governor promised VW additional incentives if it kept the UAW out of the two-year-old Chattanooga plant.

While King declined to discuss efforts at other plants, the UAW has been collecting signature cards at the Mercedes plant near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and working to win over Nissan

workers at the Japanese automaker’s plants in Tennessee and Mississippi.

“We have a number of campaigns going on,” he said. “We’ve got some traction, momentum at Mercedes and obviously a lot going on at Nissan. Which one will be next? I don’t know for sure. A number of factors will determine that.”

However, the production chief for Mercedes, which is owned by Germany’s Daimler, said at the Frankfurt auto show on Tuesday that the German company had no need for a German-style works council at its plant near Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Reuters