The UAW and Southern Organizing: An Historical Perspective

AS MANY INDUSTRIES, both domestic and foreign owned, have moved to the southern United States, analysts point to several factors for this shift. One suggested reason is the attractive packages southern officials have put together to lure new business including large tax incentives and the offer of lower labor costs given a mostly non-unionized workforce.

The commitment of state officials to maintaining an attractive anti-union environment includes passing restrictive labor legislation as well as crowing that this environment provides “steady job opportunities” for the community. Thus, joining unions allegedly threatens stability. But it is worth asking whether this pro-business, anti-union culture explains the alleged backwardness and anti-unionism of southern workers?

Historically, when given a chance, southern workers have faced obstacles but are as prone to organize and to strike as other workers. This has certainly been the case in Alabama, currently a choice target for expanded auto production. Coal miners, steel workers, wood workers, packinghouse workers, longshore, auto, even public-sector employees, and at times textile workers, organized in Alabama during earlier years.

This was especially the case during the 1930s and 1940s, and at times Alabama workers were among the most militant nationally. In 1945, the unionization rate in Alabama was 25%, higher than any state in the United States today.

Given that the recent period has seen a sharp growth in union organizing and winning elections, it’s clear that southern workers have a chance to challenge that anti-union atmosphere. And without southern workers, a nationwide labor upsurge cannot be successful.

Over the last few of years we have seen union elections administered by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on the rise, surging up from their pandemic lows by 53% between 2021 and 2022, and ticking up again modestly by another three percent between 2022 and 2023 before rising again by 35% between 2023 and 2024.(1)

Unions are also winning a growing proportion of these elections. The NLRB estimates that in 2024 so far, unions have been successful in around 79% of election efforts, a win rate unseen in decades.(2)

Work stoppages have also been on the rise: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 459,000 workers struck in 2023, reaching a level not attained since the year 2000.(3) The more inclusive Labor Action Tracker placed the figure even higher at 539,000 workers.(4)

The total number of union members also rose slightly in 2023, growing to 14.4 million workers, even as the union density rate remained largely unchanged (just 10% of the wage and salary labor force).(5)

More significantly, the recent period has seen a sharp growth in organizing. This includes the highly visible Starbucks Workers United campaign (now with almost 500 stores with certified unions), as well as organizing at other name brand retail outlets, including Apple, Trader Joe’s and REI.

Across U.S. college campuses, new graduate and undergraduate student unionization has taken off; the Student Researchers United-UAW collective bargaining unit at the University of California was so large that once it was certified in 2021, national union density increased by 0.1%.(6)

There is also the unionization of the large Amazon warehouse JFK8 in Staten Island, New York, where workers continue their fight to negotiate a first contract. These recent victories were preceded by several other earlier spikes that suggested to many a similar period of labor ascendancy, although their lasting influence has been less substantial than expected.

These include the large-scale protests in Madison, Wisconsin in 2011 in response to the proposal of Act 10, which crippled the rights of public sector workers, and many teachers’ strikes. Led by the Chicago Teachers Union, these strikes also involved militant displays by so-called Red State teachers, especially in West Virginia and Oklahoma in 2018.

Some of the most exciting recent developments have occurred in the U.S. South. Recently, there have been successful contract struggles in the unionized Daimler truck plants (mostly in North Carolina)(7), as well as a large scale organizing campaign of over 20,000 teachers in Fairfax County, Virginia.

The dramatic 73% United Auto Workers (UAW) victory in the NLRB election at Volkswagen (VW) in Chattanooga, Tennessee was a blowout, followed recently by another UAW victory in Tennessee at the Ultium electric vehicle battery plant in Spring Hill.

In its immediate aftermath, many saw the UAW’s victory in Chattanooga as the labor movement’s long sought-after beachhead in the U.S. South, with the potential of realizing the promises of the CIO’s 1946-1953 failed Operation Dixie campaign.(8) Yet shortly thereafter, the UAW lost a second election at the Mercedes plant in Vance, Alabama, where the union predicted they would win decisively given that they already had cards signed from more than 70% of the workers.

In the wake of the Vance election, we want to provide a sober analysis of what happened by placing the loss into a broader historical context. In so doing, we seek to avoid the most exaggerated claims and, in some cases, the deep misunderstandings of certain analysts about labor’s recent upsurge.

Automotive Organizing in Perspective

It is important to note that the motor vehicle industry remains a central industry in the U.S. economy, employing directly more than one million workers, and contributing approximately $156 billion to U.S. GDP.(9) Unlike most other industries, auto has always had a huge multiplier effect. It uses parts, components and raw materials from a wide range of other industries, making a good part of the economy dependent on it, and with integral connections to supply chains around the world.(10)

In contrast to most other manufacturing industries, the automotive industry includes over two million workers in sales and dealership personnel and over one million repair workers. While smaller and second in size to China, automobile purchases are still arguably the most important U.S. consumer market.

Since the 1980s, foreign firms (referred to as transplants) have established their U.S. production facilities largely, although not exclusively, in the South, along with hundreds of foreign-owned parts facilities.(11) Given the number of workers employed, vehicles produced and other metrics, these facilities today make up more than half of U.S. motor vehicle production. With a few exceptions these southern transplants have proved difficult for unions to organize.

Unlike in auto, many of the leading U.S. industries of the 1930s and 1940s are now marginal, including coal, textile and basic steel. Yet while recent contract negotiations — in rail, on the West Coast docks and with United Parcel Service (UPS) — all went to the brink of a strike before settlement, the situation in southern auto appears decidedly different.

For example, it should be noted that longshore, railroad and logistics are heavily balkanized in ways that auto is not. West Coast longshore workers, organized by the International Longshore Workers Union, are highly separate from the East and Gulf Coast longshore workers, whose union is far less militant (with the recent strike serving as an exception) and whose leadership has historically not been left-led.(12) Despite the importance of the West Coast’s trade relations with Asia, when a West Coast longshore strike appeared imminent, companies began switching some of their freight to the East Coast.

Railroad workers, overwhelmingly unionized, are in 14 different, often uncooperative unions. This allowed them to be stifled by the Biden administration in the last round of the 2022 contract negotiations. Although a majority of the railroad rank and file rejected the proposed contract, the Biden administration imposed a settlement. Once heavily unionized, truckers are now largely unorganized. Even in the package goods sector only UPS, the largest company in control of roughly one-third of the market, is unionized.

By contrast, the UAW has free reign and complete jurisdiction in the auto industry, with only some very minor exceptions, since World War II. Thus the successful unionization of southern auto would solidify a single nationwide union of autoworkers.

Such a development would be highly consequential internationally, both because for many decades the “world car” platform, which imposes global standardization of vehicle design, has depended upon components from around the world, and because several of the transplants produce largely for international markets.

Assessing Victories and Defeats

Careful analysis suggests that several of the most popular explanations for the loss at Mercedes and difficulties in the South generally, when looked at closely, carry little weight. One such explanation both on the left and in the more mainstream media is the strength of southern political opposition. In 2014, when the UAW lost a previous union certification attempt at VW in Chattanooga, numerous observers cited the coercive rhetoric of Governor Bill Haslam and Senator Bob Corker as an important negative factor.

But political opposition, we argue, has historically rarely been decisive in the outcome of union elections. In the late 1940s, numerous southern union drives prevailed despite more vitriolic resistance from the region’s political class.

For example, in 1948 in Laurel, Mississippi during a Textile Workers Union of America recognition campaign, the white supremacist Dixiecrats Senator Bilbo and Congressman Rankin came to town to oppose the union, calling its members Communists and race mixers. But when the vote came, white workers as well as African Americans voted overwhelmingly for the union. Likewise, in Memphis, Tennessee in 1948, the UAW overcame comparable political opposition to win recognition at the city’s International Harvester plant by 861 to 4.

United Tobacco Workers Local 22 on strike, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 1947.

Union drives among tobacco workers in Virginia and North Carolina in 1947, and at International Harvester in Louisville in 1948 faced similar levels of resistance but prevailed nonetheless.(13)

When politicians’ rhetoric did have an impact on workers’ decisions, it was reinforced with violent repression. Yet calling out the National Guard to escort scabs and shoot workers, as often happened in the 1920s and 1930s, is less common today.

Other observers have cited, as evidence of effective political hostility, the hundreds of millions of dollars in tax incentives that southern states provided to auto companies on the condition they not voluntarily recognize unions without a secret ballot election. Once given, however, these abatements are frequently contractually irrevocable and remain in effect for decades — suggesting that tax incentives likely have little to do with employer hostility to unions. So in our opinion, analysts who cite this opposition tend to be unconvincing.

Furthermore, southern states are not alone in offering corporations tax incentives. The online Bridge magazine reported that Michigan has offered over $2 billion in state aid to attract and develop electric vehicle projects. In early 2023 Michigan promised Ford Motor Company over a billion dollars in incentives toward the construction of the first in the U.S. factory to produce lithium iron phosphate batteries. This included providing 950 acres of land and infrastructure along with grants, loans and the creation of a 15-year renaissance zone that will allow Ford to run the plant essentially tax-free.(14)

In terms of workers themselves, there are numerous instances that counter the narrative that the southern working class is union averse. After World War II, for example, in one of the few successes of the CIO’s post-World War II Operation Dixie, 40,000 workers were fully organized in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the so-called “Atomic City,” site of the enormous federally-run complex, although under the aegis of private companies.(15)

To take another example, the United Rubber Workers, a relatively mainstream, non-left union, was completely successful at organizing foreign and domestically owned tire factories in the U.S. South through the mid-1970s.

Moreover, there is considerable variation within the south in terms of its level of union density. Even today, Alabama is far more unionized than most other southern states (almost 8% compared to the 2-3% rate in the Carolinas).(16)

Finally, still others have made the argument that current labor laws make it more difficult to organize. While regressive laws certainly have some impact, historically they are rarely the determinative factor. Workers have organized successfully in much more difficult legal environments in the past, and it is our opinion that legal improvements tend to follow successful organizing, rather than foster it.(17)

Bureaucratic Degeneration and Revival

Rather than focusing on the southern political climate or the supposed attributes of southern workers, one might begin tracing the UAW’s problems in the South to its degeneration from a once militant democratic union to a crass, company-oriented, rather sycophantic, authoritarian operation.

This transformation began early, and Walter Reuther and his cohort played a critical role, from his gutting of the dense steward system at GM in 1940, to the transformation of the union under his leadership (beginning with his 1946 presidency) and consolidated in the 1950, five-year contract, the “Treaty of Detroit,” which some hagiologists have compared positively to the victories in the wake of Flint.

This stance became more extreme over time, beginning with the 1979 concessions to Chrysler, and eventually leading to a position that the union must cooperate with and enhance the profitability of the company, regardless of its impact on workers. This stance, seen historically from Samuel Gompers in the early AFL to Sidney Hillman in the 1930s CIO, to many unions today, has never worked. It is a recipe for failure.

UAW leaders accepted concessions, two-tier wage systems, use of long-term temporary workers, abandonment of cost-of-living adjustments (COLA), and degradation of pensions and healthcare. At VW and elsewhere, the union’s attempts to make nice with the companies, and help keep them profitable, suggested to workers that the union had nothing to offer.

Recently the former UAW leadership suffered from corruption scandals that severely damaged the legitimacy of the then-ruling Administrative Caucus. Decades of close collaboration between the Big Three auto manufacturers, General Motors, Ford and Stellantis (owner of Chrysler) and the UAW laid the groundwork for an internal culture of corruption built on the back of successive contracts characterized by union givebacks and concessions. This was sold to the membership as necessary, with the promise that these concessions would be reversed when the industry regained its footing.

Initial federal probes in 2017 led to the conviction of several top union officials on charges of embezzlement and accepting kickbacks. Former presidents Gary Jones and Dennis Williams, who reportedly stole $1.5 million in members’ dues, were eventually sentenced to prison.(18)

What has changed? As the recent successful UAW campaign at VW, the earlier contract gains first at the Big Three, and then at Daimler truck, suggest that the “new” UAW presented southern transplant workers with a more attractive picture.

The old, corrupt leadership was ousted in a campaign that elected Shawn Fain as president, and half of the union’s new executive board, supported by the opposition group UAWD (Unite All Workers for Democracy), have presented a different image. The karma from these two contract struggles (25% wage gains at the Big Three, a substantially improved contract at Daimler), added further positive cache.

The recent UAW victory in Chattanooga’s large Volkswagen plant was preceded by the rolling “Stand Up” strikes at the Big Three, which were perceived as winning immense gains for workers, presenting the UAW as a much more viable alternative for southern workers.

While the jury remains out on the new leadership, Daimler activists have suggested to us that the degree of support in their recent struggles with the company has been night and day from the old leadership.

Today’s Moment

What accounts then for the difficulties and ultimate loss at Mercedes in Alabama, in contrast to the victory in VW at Chattanooga? First, we are not (yet?) in a period of upsurge, where union victories are universal and easily overwhelm capitalist resistance.

This becomes evident when we contrast our present moment with earlier periods of massive union upsurge —whether in 1918 and 1919, when union membership had more than doubled from 1914 and massive strikes were taking place in meatpacking, steel, coal and southern textiles, among other industries; or in 1933 when union membership jumped 20% from roughly 2.9 to 3.5 million members in the wake of the rapid unionization of the country’s 600,000 coal miners.

The following year began a long period of militancy and union growth that included several important, often radical-led strikes in San Francisco, Toledo, and Minneapolis, and the eventual seizure of GM plants by sit-downers in Flint, Michigan in 1936-1937.

All these latter strikes electrified the entire U.S. working class and parts of the international working class as well. From 1933 to 1945, during such a period of worker upsurge, union membership increased dramatically from just under three million to almost 15 million. By contrast, the number of union members grew by a relatively modest 139,000 over the past year.

Second, it has always been the case that the largest plants of the most powerful companies have been exceedingly difficult to organize. The largest U.S. coal mines were quite small compared to the size of the average steel mill, and the former were organized before the latter. In auto, labor’s initial victories came at White Motors in Cleveland and Briggs in Detroit, long before the larger Flint plants at GM. Mercedes likewise was not low hanging fruit.

Third, unlike the noisy right-wing Republican political rhetoric, employer resistance makes a far bigger difference, as illuminated by numerous prior failed attempts at organizing the Toyota plant in Georgetown, Tennessee. Overcoming this resistance requires the most important type of outside support, what we have elsewhere called associational power, tends to be from the mobilization of fellow unionized workers in the nearby vicinity.(19)

The anti-union playbook, perfected over the last few decades by employers, was deployed with great effectiveness at Mercedes. Unlike VW, Mercedes initially had among the highest wages of any transplant, although recent data suggest that Alabama Mercedes workers have lost real wages over the past decade or so. Still, the company immediately raised pay after the Big Three strike, as well as mostly getting rid of the two-tier employee system.

One anti-union strategy, which Mercedes carried out, is to blame problems on a plant manager, fire them, and replace them with a seemingly more conciliatory figure who asks workers to give them a chance to address workers’ grievances. The company also used many other tactics, from video monitors throughout the plant, one-on-ones with team leaders who oversee and can influence the opinion of other employees, breaks from arduous work for workers who could be turned toward an anti-union stance, as well as several special captive audience meetings.

These tactics apparently had enough of an impact. The UAW has filed unfair labor charges against Mercedes with the NLRB and demanded a new election.(20)

An example of the importance of associational power is illuminated by prior efforts at organizing the Toyota assembly plant in Georgetown, Kentucky. In Georgetown, the hardly radical construction trades forced Toyota, who originally hired a nonunion Japanese firm to build the plant, to use only unionized labor. Toyota had planned to contract nonunion trades people to both construct the facility and work skilled jobs in the plant.

Between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s, building trades unions mobilized workers in Tennessee and in surrounding states, organizing nearby communities around threats of environmental degradation, and holding massive demonstrations throughout the state and in Washington, DC. This show of associative power finally forced Toyota to abandon its plans to go nonunion. In Vance, a more substantial and longer-running campaign of support might have helped.(21)

Finally, the union itself has already admitted to making some important errors. Rather than slowly and covertly building support for the union, the organizers went public at 30% of union cards signed. Organizers also relied on digital contact through QR codes as a predominant method for obtaining the crucial 70% of authorization cards rather than confirming workers’ support through face-to-face meetings.(22)

It seems that the UAW believed that calling a quick election in the wake of their other successes, building on the momentum generated from the Big Three strikes, would take the company by storm, which clearly did not take place.(23)

Going Forward

Our assessment is that short of a major upsurge, the building of strong, widespread inside support alongside networks of associational power is essential in the organizing stage. However, just as it takes time and careful work to organize large workplaces like Mercedes and the immense Amazon fulfillment centers, it will take time and extensive networking to organize southern industries.

To do this, unions should consider dispatching organizers to work in these plants. Although there is much talk today about “salting,” there is a great deal of historical precedence for this tactic. The Wobblies early in the 20th century often sent their activists into workplaces, lumber camps, fields, mines and other venues to “fan the flames of discontent.”

Even the AFL trades have historically salted industries. During WWII, both the AFL and the CIO agreed not to organize the aforementioned Oak Ridge facility until the war was over. Yet the AFL had sent over 1000 activists into the workplaces at Oak Ridge during the war, many of whom switched to production jobs in the aftermath.

None of this is to diminish what has happened. There are many examples of both slow, careful organizing work as well as major upsurges. However, union growth happens most rapidly during periods of dramatic organizing takeoff, and that is not only true of the 1930s.

For example, public school teachers were largely unorganized before 1960. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) maintained two chapters, in New York City and Chicago, both limping along each with memberships perhaps in the 100s. By contrast, the National Education Association, a professional organization which included principals, opposed strikes and eschewed collective bargaining, was dominant throughout the country at the time.

The Condon-Wadlin Act in New York state, the precursor to the current Taylor Law, was one of the most draconian pieces of public-sector labor legislation in the country. Yet by November 1960, when more than 10,000 New York City teachers struck for collective bargaining, city politicians were afraid to put the law into practice.

The teachers won in early 1961, and within months, virtually every large city in the country had a vibrant AFT chapter. Within several years, teachers overwhelmingly organized across the country, even in so-called red states like Oklahoma and Utah where no state-level collective bargaining legislation existed.(24)

We are certainly not in the midst of a dramatic upsurge of this sort, but when it comes, we will know it.

Notes

1. National Labor Relations Board. “Election Petitions Up 53%, Board Continues to Reduce Case Processing Time in FY22.” October 6, 2022, https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/election-petitions-up-53-board-continues-to-reduce-case-processing-time-in; National Labor Relations Board. “Unfair Labor Practices Charge Filings Up 10%, Union Petitions Up 3% in Fiscal Year 2023,” October 13, 2023, https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/unfair-labor-practices-charge-filings-up-10-union-petitions-up-3-in-fiscal. National Labor Relations Board. “Union Petitions Up 35%, Unfair Labor Practices Charge Filings Up 7% in the First Half of Fiscal Year 2024,” April 09, 2024. https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/union-petitions-up-35-unfair-labor-practices-charge-filings-up-7-in-the
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2. Wiessner, Daniel, “US Union Organizing, and Unions’ Election Win Rate, is Surging, NLRB Says.” July 17, 2024. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-union-organizing-unions-election-win-rate-is-surging-nlrb-says-2024-07-17/.
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3. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Major Work Stoppages in 2023,” February 21, 2024, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkstp.nr0.htm.
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4. Kathryn Richie, Johnnie Kallas, and Deepa Kylasaam Iyer. Labor Action Tracker 2023. (Ithaca: Cornell ILR School, 2024), https://www.ilr.cornell.edu/faculty-and-research/labor-action-tracker/annual-report-2023.
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5. Barry T. Hirsch, David A. Macpherson, and William E. Even. “Union Membership and Coverage Database from the CPS.” Unionstats.com, 2024, https://www.unionstats.com/.
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6. Tanzil Chowdhury, Sierra Dodd, and KDan Lee.”17,000 University of California Researchers Could Soon Win a Union,” Jacobin, July 29, 2021. https://jacobin.com/2021/07/university-of-california-student-researchers-union; William Herbert, Jacob Apkarian, and Joseph van der Naald. “Union Organizing and Strikes in Higher Education: The 2022-2023 Upsurge in Historical Context,” in The State of the Unions 2023: A Profile of Organized Labor in New York City, New York State, and the United States, au. Ruth Milkman and Joseph van der Naald (New York: CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, 2023). https://academicworks.cuny.edu/slu_pubs/18/.
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7. For an incisive analysis, see Ben Smith, Lessons from the UAW Contract Struggle and Victory at DTNA, Southern Workers Assembly, 2024), https://southernworker.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/DTNA-Lessons-pamphlet-FINAL.pdf.
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8. See Michael Goldfield, “The Failure of Operation Dixie: The Poverty of Liberalism,” in The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 288-330.
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9. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Industries at a Glance – Automotive Industry: Employment, Earnings, and Hours,” May 22, 2024 https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iagauto.htm. U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Gross Domestic Product: Motor Vehicles, Bodies and Trailers, and Parts Manufacturing (3361-3363) in the United States [USMVEHMANNGSP], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis on May 25, 2024, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USMVEHMANNGSP.
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10. It was even recently discovered that components for one BMW model were made by a banned Chinese supplier who used forced semi-slave Uyghur labor at their factories. See Peter Hoskins, “BMW and Jaguar used banned China parts — US probe,” BBC, May 21, 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv2237rplg8o.
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11. Details of this history can be found in Timothy Minchin. America’s Other Automakers: A History of the Foreign-Owned Automotive Sector in the United States (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021). More detailed specialized treatments can be found in Stephen Silvia. The UAW’s Southern Gamble: Organizing Workers at Foreign-Owned Vehicle Plants (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023) and Amy Bromsen. “Condescending Saviors: Union Substitution at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky (TMMK),” PhD dissertation, (Wayne State University, 2019). The latter focuses on Toyota, the largest of the transplants.
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12. While West Coast longshore workers are represented by the historically radical and left-led ILWU, elsewhere longshore workers are represented by the historically conservative International Longshoremen’s Association. For the origins of this history, see Howard Kimeldorf. Reds or Rackets? The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
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13. Michael Goldfield. The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 299-300.
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14. See Gardner, Paula, “Ford EV battery plant on Marshall Michigan megasite gets $1B in incentives.” Bridge, February 13, 2023. https://www.bridgemi.com/business-watch/ford-ev-battery-plant-marshall-michigan-megasite-gets-1b-incentives.
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15. Michael Goldfield. The Southern Key, 297-9.
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16. Hirsch, Macpherson, and Even, “Union Membership and Coverage Database from the CPS.”
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17. For an overview of this debate as it pertains to the New Deal, see Michael Goldfield. “Worker insurgency, radical organization, and New Deal labor legislation.” American Political Science Review 83, no. 4 (1989): 1257-1282; Michael Goldfield and Cody R. Melcher. “The Myth of Section 7 (a): Worker Militancy, Progressive Labor Legislation, and the Coal Miners.” Labor 16, no. 4 (2019): 49-65.
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18. For a summary of the Administrative Caucus’ corruption saga, see Chris Brooks, “How the UAW Went From a Militant, Trailblazing Union to a Corrupt, Dealmaking One.” In These Times, March 5, 2020. https://inthesetimes.com/article/uaw-history-militant-corruption-concessions-gary-jones-indictment.
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19. Goldfield, Southern Key, 33. Also see, Wright, Erik Olin. “Working-class power, capitalist-class interests, and class compromise.” American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 4 (2000): 957-1002.
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20. See Chance Phillips, “UAW petitions National Labor Relations Board to rerun Mercedes election,” Alabama Political Reporter, May 27, 2024. https://www.alreporter.com/2024/05/27/uaw-petitions-national-labor-relations-board-to-rerun-mercedes-election/.
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21. This contrast is described in great length in Amy Bromsen. “Condescending Saviors: Union Substitution at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky (TMMK),” PhD dissertation, (Wayne State University, 2019).
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22. Kimbrell, Jeremy, “Why the Alabama Mercedes Union Campaign Faltered.” Labor Notes, May 21, 2024. https://labornotes.org/blogs/2024/05/why-alabama-mercedes-union-campaign-faltered.
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23. For an exhaustive analysis in this vein of the UAW’s past attempts at organizing in Chattanooga, see Abraham Walker. “Unionization at Volkswagen in Chattanooga: A Postmortem.” Labor Studies Journal 48, no. 2 (2023): 121-148.
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24. See Michael Goldfield. “Public sector union growth and public policy.” Policy Studies Journal 18, no. 2 (1989): 404-420.
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November-December 2024, ATC 233