After the UAW’s stand-up strike against the Big 3, the union pledged to embark on an aggressive campaign to organize nonunion automakers. Today, the UAW announced it is filing an election at the Chattanooga, Tennessee, Volkswagen plant.
The South has long remained a nearly impenetrable citadel for labor. Fresh off of the success of its Big Three strike last year and looking to organize an Alabama Mercedes plant, the United Auto Workers wants to storm the castle.
In a historic breakthrough, Starbucks and its workers announce they’ve come together. In a joint announcement Starbucks and Workers United agreed “to begin discussions on a foundational framework designed to achieve…collective bargaining agreements.”
By devoting $40 million to its campaign to organize non-union auto plants, the UAW is challenging not just corporate America but also labor’s status quo.
Union democracy shouldn’t be seen as an abstract good separate from more important strategic considerations about rebuilding labor. Without democratizing labor, we can’t rebuild labor.
Should the UAW's southern organizing drive succeed, then its 2023 work stoppage will stand with the great strikes of 1937 and 1946 as a social and political achievement of epic proportions.
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The UAW’s newish president won Detroit auto workers their best deals in decades. Now he’s out to organize Tesla and the rest of the industry’s EV jobs.
In America’s Other Automakers: A History of the Foreign-owned Automotive Sector in the United States, Timothy J. Minchin investigates why the companies located where they did and what the decisions meant for workers and their communities.
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