INTRODUCTION

Peter Applebome, Dixie Rising

This book investigates the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) attempts to orga nize foreign-owned vehicle-assembly plants in the southeastern United States. Organizing unfolded in three phases. The first, which began in the mid-1980s and lasted about five years, had mixed results. The UAW failed to orga nize a Nissan plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, but successfully orga nized a truck factory in Mount Holly, North Carolina, owned by the German company now known as Daimler Truck. Exploratory attempts during these years at a Toyota plant in Kentucky and a Bayerische Motoren Werke (BMW) factory in South Carolina made little headway. The UAW launched a second organizing push, this one more strategic and successful, from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, unionizing two additional truck facilities and one bus plant in North Carolina. There were also setbacks. A second campaign at Nissan failed, and the union was unable to gather enough support at a new Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama to pursue recognition. In the third phase, which ran from 2011 to 2019, the UAW invested many tens of millions of dollars and adopted numerous innovations but failed to orga nize any additional workplaces, despite a second unionization attempt at the Alabama Mercedes-Benz plant, three drives at a Volkswagen (VW) factory in Tennessee, and a campaign at a Nissan facility in Canton, Mississippi. The principal objective of this book is to explain why these organizing drives turned out the way they did.

This study shows how employees who supported and opposed unionization, union officials, transnational managers, leaders of the local business community, and state and local politicians developed new tactics and strategies in successive campaigns, in some instances invoking the American Civil War and in others the 1960s US civil rights movement, to sway specific groups of workers. The book explores how deeper transnational market integration and changes in information technology resulting from globalization have impelled and facilitated employee representatives from different parts of the world to cooperate more than in the past, particularly when dealing with a common transnational enterprise. Still, substantial cultural, institutional, interpersonal, legal, and resource constraints remain that minimize the effectiveness of transnational employee cooperation.

Success was not a function of the size or sophistication of transnational employee cooperation. The largest and most advanced effort, which the German metalworkers union Industriegewerkschaft Metall (IG Metall) undertook in cooperation with the UAW at Volkswagen Chattanooga, failed. The unwillingness of the head of VW’s works council network, who was also a member of its supervisory board, to press the company to recognize the UAW blunted the impact of the joint union effort, which already faced fierce opposition from the local business and political communities.

In some instances interventions by employee representatives on a foreign corporate board made a crucial difference such as occurred at Daimler Truck North America (DTNA). That said, well-placed employee representatives on corporate boards were not always sufficient to achieve organizing breakthroughs. In later years, the head of Daimler’s works council, who was also a member of the company’s supervisory board, strongly supported recognition of the UAW at the Mercedes-Benz U.S. International (MBUSI) automobile plant in Alabama but failed to change a determined management’s unaccommodating position and obtain union recognition.

The book also chronicles the emergence of an increasingly comprehensive and standardized union-avoidance playbook and its diffusion among management at transnational vehicle manufacturers. The playbook is open source; managers learn from one another through observation. They also hire line supervisors from other transplants and engage the same small group of law firms that specialize in union avoidance whenever an organizing drive emerges. The playbook uses old tactics, such as management-required captive-audience speeches, firing unpopu lar supervisors to curry favor with the workforce, increasing compensation before a union recognition vote, calling a union a third party from elsewhere that is simply interested in dues money, and suggesting that unionization would produce greater uncertainty regarding compensation and employment levels at the workplace without crossing the line of legality by making threats. The playbook also includes new tactics such as reducing hierarchy, allowing access (albeit controlled) to management to voice complaints and suggestions, offering benefits to line workers that only white-collar employees traditionally received at domestic firms (e.g., subsidized auto leasing), building plants in rural small towns to scatter the workforce, paying “near union” compensation in regions with a low cost of living and few other good-paying jobs, dividing the workforce by relying heavily on lower-paid temporary employees who cannot vote in union recognition elections because they technically work for temp agencies, avoiding layoffs of permanent employees, and developing close relations with the local community through donations and staging events. Darker pages of the union-avoidance playbook prescribe illegal actions, such as surveilling employees, directly questioning employees about organizing efforts, promising rewards if employees vote against unionization, threatening retaliation if employees vote to unionize, engaging in blackmail and physical coercion, and firing union activists.

In addition to the coalescence and dissemination of a standardized unionavoidance playbook, a new phenomenon in US labor relations has developed in recent decades that has made union organizing increasingly challenging. For several decades, state and local government officials— especially in the Southeast— have engaged in increasingly extravagant competitions to persuade globally renowned foreign manufacturing firms to build plants in their state. This phenomenon has led to the unprecedented involvement of state and local officeholders in the affairs of these plants. If a unionization attempt emerges at one of these plants, regional officeholders pressure transnational managers to fight it because they fear the impact of unionization on local business and politics. The substantial state and local subsidies give regional officeholders new leverage over transnational managers because subsidies can be curtailed or eliminated if a firm does not meet per formance criteria. Transnational managers go to great lengths to stay in the good graces of regional officeholders because they regularly request additional subsidies to support plant expansions. In instances when the local elite judge the response of transnational managers to an organizing effort to be inadequate, they have launched independent anti-union campaigns of their own. This regional elite-transnational manager nexus has altered US labor relations by carving out nonunion regions in sectors that had previously been fully organized, such as vehicle assembly.

Foreign managers have typically downplayed their role in this transformation, claiming they are merely conforming to the labor relations status quo in the United States. In reality, however, they are essential participants in undermining that status quo by collaborating with state and local officials in the creation of new nonunion regions. The corporate leadership of the foreign-owned vehicle plants often hesitated at first to embrace the aggressive anti-union tactics characteristic of firms in the Southeast but, with intense pressure from local political and business leaders, have ultimately adopted them. In other words, the local norms changed transnational managers rather than transnational managers changing local norms. This has been no less true for German managers, despite their country’s well-established postwar domestic tradition of labor-management cooperation.1

The fragile and incomplete architecture of transnational employment relations proved inadequate when faced with real-world challenges. Global framework agreements between transnational enterprises and global union federations, the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), and unilateral enterprise commitments to foster environmental, social, and governance principles in most instances failed to dissuade management from resisting unionization at foreign vehicle plants in the southern United States.

When viewed together, the cases show that organizing drives at vehicle transplants in the South do not inevitably fail, but success is difficult. Involving employee representatives from a firm’s home country is not a magic key that guarantees success, as some US union leaders had hoped.2 Organizing foreign transplants now unfolds on three sites: not only the workplace, which is the traditional venue for organizing, but also the corporate boardroom and the political realm. The latter had been limited to the state and local level, but more recently national political actors have also at times intervened. If actors opposing unionization prevail at any of these sites, the organizing drive fails. In other words, union organizing has become difficult because it is now like opening a combination lock. To be successful, everything must align. Opponents, on the other hand, can thwart it by simply prevailing at just one site. Transnational employee cooperation can make a difference, but there is no single factor that guarantees success. Context and the concatenation of actions within and across these sites determines the outcome.

Why does the hollowing out of unionized sectors matter? In recent years, increasing numbers of policymakers and scholars have called for greater unionization to counteract decades of rising inequality in the United States.3 This analysis shows how difficult it would be to increase unionization, given current labor relations practices in the United States. Even when unions such as the UAW invest considerable time and resources, innovate, act strategically, and engage in transnational cooperation, they fail more often than not to overcome the obstacles and opponents to unionization. Only a radical reconceptualization and restructuring of labor relations in the United States—one that draws on understandings and practices predating the juridico-discursive regime of truth4 introduced during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration—can rekindle workers’ power to such a degree that reversing rising inequality and enhancing employees’ voice in the workplace can be achieved.

This book has six chapters. The first is this introduction, which presents the book’s key findings, data, and method. The introduction also details the growth of foreign-owned vehicle assembly plants (commonly called transplants) in the United States, because it is their rise that prompted the UAW to step up organizing efforts in the Southeast starting in the mid-1980s. Chapters 1 through 4 analyze unionization campaigns at DTNA, MBUSI, Volkswagen Chattanooga, and Nissan’s facilities in Smyrna, Tennessee, and Canton, Mississippi.5 Each of these four substantive chapters focuses on a transnational enterprise and is presented as a historical narrative, because this is the clearest way to explain the dynamics, interconnections, and significance of successive organizing campaigns. Some chapters include thumbnail sketches of organizing activities at other plants and before the 1980s to provide a fuller understanding of the cases under investigation. The conclusion synthesizes the findings and discusses their implications.

The book investigates all sixteen organizing campaigns undertaken at foreignowned vehicle plants by the UAW in the Southeast since 1984 (table I.1). An individual campaign represents a case.6 The sixteen organizing campaigns occurred at nine plants owned by the four transnational enterprises mentioned above. (The number of cases exceeds the number of plants because the UAW made multiple attempts at some plants.) Nine of the cases culminated in a recognition election, and three others ended with a card-check procedure. The other four cases were substantial enough to be considered an organizing attempt but never gathered enough employee support for union officials to ask for recognition. A majority of employees chose the UAW as their exclusive bargaining agent in six of the twelve instances when a recognition process took place, three through an election and three via card check. One plant had both a card-check procedure and a recognition election because some employees challenged the legitimacy of the former. The UAW won both. In total, the UAW prevailed at five of the nine plants. The collective bargaining parties agreed to a first contract at four of those five plants but failed at the fifth—Volkswagen Chattanooga— because management used the appeals process to challenge whether the unit, which was a small group of skilled employees, was “appropriate.” The UAW ultimately disclaimed interest in the small unit five years later to terminate the appeals process and make way for a second wall-to-wall recognition election in tabLei.1 United Auto Worker unionization attempts at solely foreign-owned vehicle plants in the southern United States, 1984–2019

1. Nissan Smyrna, TN

2. Freightliner Mount Holly, NC (DTNA)

3. Nissan Smyrna, TN

4.

5.

6. Freightliner Gastonia, NC (DTNA)

7.

Gastonia, NC (DTNA)

8. Freightliner Cleveland, NC (DTNA)

9.

Gaffney, SC (DTNA)

10. Thomas Built Buses, NC (DTNA)

11. Thomas Built Buses, NC (DTNA)

The UAW begins a multiplant organizing effort.

12. Mercedes-Benz U.S. International, AL 2011–2014 No attempt

13. Volkswagen Chattanooga, TN

14. Volkswagen Chattanooga, TN (skilled- trades unit)

15. Nissan Canton, MS

16. Volkswagen Chattanooga, TN that plant. Overall, in sixteen attempts the UAW successfully unionized four of the nine plants under investigation.7

* The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation supported employee challenges to the card- check recognition. The National Labor Relations Board accepted a joint DTNA- UAW proposal to hold a recognition election in 2005 to settle the challenges.

** Volkswagen management challenged the election. The UAW disclaimed the skilled trades unit in 2019 in order to hold a plant- wide recognition election.

The principal data for this investigation are primary documents from the UAW and the companies and other entities involved in the drives (e.g., foreign trade unions, global trade union confederations, works councils, government bodies, politicians in and out of office, and third-party lobbying entities). Interviews, media accounts, and social media postings are also impor tant source material. The method employed here is comparative historical case study analysis. I use process tracing to analyze each case. Process tracing is a within-case method of causal analysis that is particularly suited to instances such as we have here whereby