The most recent news on the UAW’s attempt to unionize the VW autoworkers in Chattanooga, Tennessee is interesting.
Despite enormous advantages, including the Obama administration’s blatantly partisan efforts to game the game in favor of the UAW, the union lost the vote. The union that nearly destroyed the American automakers, gleefully driving two of them into bankruptcy — a bankruptcy that ripped off taxpayers for tens of billions of dollars and left one of the companies merely a division of the Italian automaker Fiat — couldn’t overcome its unsavory reputation and convince the workers that it wouldn’t destroy their jobs and city as well.
That was in February. Immediately after the vote, the UAW filed an appeal with the Obama-rigged National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), even though it had earlier said it would abide by the will of the workers. But just before the deadline for its lawyers to appear and argue for voiding the vote, the UAW dropped its appeal. It turned tail and ran.
This capitulation came as a surprise. The union had aggressively pursued the plan, issuing subpoenas against the Republican governor of the state, Bill Haslam, and one of its Republican US senators, Bob Corker, to turn over their staff emails regarding the election, under the theory that the two men wrongfully influenced workers to oppose the UAW. The theory, then, is that the UAW is free to spend tens of millions of its members’ dues every election cycle to defeat Republicans, but the targets have no right to criticize the UAW in return. The UAW is nothing if not fair.
One of the workers who organized the vote against the union, Mike Burton, admitted that he couldn’t explain why the UAW gave up so easily. UAW president Bob King would only say that his outfit wanted to put the “tainted election in the rearview mirror … and focus on advocating for new jobs and economic investment in Chattanooga.” But the real explanation was suggested by the Wall Street Journal in an editorial from the same day, namely, that even if the NLRB ordered another election at the plant, the UAW would very likely have lost it — making the union look even worse. The editorial also suggested that the UAW may have been afraid that anti-union workers would sue it for violating the Taft-Hartley Act, which prohibits a company from giving a “thing of value” to any union seeking to organize its workers. This VW clearly did by giving the UAW the right to voice its arguments in the plant while denying the same right to the anti-union workers.
I would add the speculation that — given the recent revelations that GM knowingly covered up defects in its cars, defects that killed a number of people, while it was grabbing billions in taxpayer dollars in the bankruptcy operation — the UAW probably fears reminding people that it was behind the crony deal.
The latest defeat for the union comes on the heels of the failure of its drive to organize workers at a Canton, Mississippi, Nissan plant, and its lack of luck so far in organizing the workers at the Vance, Alabama, Mercedes-Benz plant.
These failures couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch.