Republicans Are Rattled by the UAW’s Big VW Victory in Chattanooga
I find this hard to square with the conservative notion that government should be limited and not interfere with the workings of the free market. Conservatives are supposed to believe that a private corporation is better situated than some politician to decide what to do about a union drive. That’s what the Wall Street Journal said, anyway, in its editorial about the Chattanooga victory. In doling out funds from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the Journal complained, “Democrats have used funding to, er, persuade auto makers to welcome unions.” But where was the Journal editorial page’s dudgeon last year when Tennessee became the first state to enact the ALEC law? Wasn’t that Republicans using funding to, er, persuade automakers to spurn unions? Georgia will become the second state to enact the ALEC law after Governor Brian Kemp signs it, and Alabama will likely be next. These will provide ideal news pegs for the Journal to correct this oversight and demonstrate consistency.
In Chattanooga Round One, back in 2014, Volkswagen management stayed neutral, to the profound annoyance of Tennessee’s Republican politicians and Grover Norquist, whose Center for Worker Freedom, a spinoff of his anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform, campaigned against the union drive. Bob Corker, then the Republican senator from Tennessee (and previously mayor of Chattanooga), stated publicly two days before the vote that he was “very certain that if the UAW is voted down” Volkswagen would step up investment “in the next couple of weeks.” That prompted VW’s chief of operations in Chattanooga to effectively call Corker a liar by stating publicly that the union vote would have no bearing on new investment. It was a very weird situation. Anyway, the union vote lost. VW subsequently opposed unionizing the Chattanooga plant, emphatically in the 2019 vote and less so in 2024, when the UAW won a 73 percent majority.
Management at Mercedes-Benz in Alabama is taking a harder line against the union drive there, including holding captive meetings in which the company’s United States chief said workers “shouldn’t have to pay union dues that generate millions of dollars per year for an organization where you have no transparency where that money is used.” As the UAW pointed out, this pretty explicitly violated Mercedes-Benz’s own Principles of Social Responsibility and Human Rights, which state: “In the event of organization campaigns, the company and its executives shall remain neutral.”