CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — Union supporters have renewed hopes of organizing in the South after the United Auto Workers scored a breakthrough victory Friday night.
Why it matters: The South has historically been a no-go zone for unions at major private companies due to political, legal, cultural and business opposition.
Between the lines: UAW president Shawn Fain said the status quo is changing after Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted 73% against 27% to become the only non-Detroit Three automotive assembly plant in the U.S. to be unionized.
- "Many of the talking heads and the pundits have said to me repeatedly ... you can't win in the South," Fain said to a boisterous crowd of supporters at a victory party Friday night. "But you all said, 'Watch this!"
- "A domino just fell, baby," someone in the crowd yelled.
- Fain smiled. "You guys are leading the way, and we're going to carry this fight on to Mercedes and everywhere else," he said.
The big picture: The victory came after the UAW's two previous attempts to organize the VW factory in 2014 and 2019 failed by a narrow margin.
- But public support for unions recently hit a near-six-decade high, and the UAW is riding high after winning record contracts from General Motors, Ford and Stellantis following an unprecedented strike in the fall.
- "The UAW"s really showing — building off the momentum from their strike and the wins against the Big Three — that they're serious about organizing the non-union South," Columbia University public affairs professor Alexander Hertel-Fernandez tells Axios.
- Workers in the South "realize when they're being taken advantage of," Victor Vaughn, who helped organize his fellow VW Chattanooga workers, tells Axios. "We're going to prove that moving forward — and we're going to help our sisters and brothers at the other plants realize what their net worth truly is."
The intrigue: After becoming president of the UAW in early 2023, Fain set a new tone in his communications, often speaking of the union as a "family" and using Christian rhetoric that often resonates in the South.
- At Friday night's victory party, he quoted the Bible to rapturous applause: "As Matthew 17:20 states, and I quote this: 'Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, move from here to there, and it will move."
- "You already moved one mountain," he added, "and now we're gonna move another one."
The next mountain is the Mercedes-Benz plant in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, where the UAW has secured a vote from May 13-17 after a majority of workers at the plant signed unionization cards.
- The win in Tennessee "projects strength to the Mercedes workers that they're not in this alone — that there's a strong foundation the UAW is building in the South," Harvard Law School professor and Center for Labor executive director Sharon Block tells Axios.
Reality check: It won't necessarily be smooth sailing for the UAW in the South, which is dominated by states with "right to work" laws that make it harder for unions to collect dues.
- Several governors in the South, including Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, issued a statement on Tuesday bashing the UAW campaign to organize plants in their states.
- The effort is "driven by misinformation and scare tactics," and "we do not need to pay a third party to tell us who can pick up a box or flip a switch," Ivey said in a statement issued along with the governors of Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.
The bottom line: "Organizing in the United States is never easy, particularly in the South," Hertel-Fernandez says. "But I think the momentum that's coming off of the win really provides wind at their backs in a way that I think maybe changes the dynamic."
