A spectre is haunting the American labor movement movement — the spectre of Detroitism.
Last month, the UAW in particular and Big Labor in general suffered a devastating defeat when the workers at the VW plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted to reject the UAW.
Big Labor has had and continues to have a lot of influence on the American political system, because of its ability to seize workers’ dues and use them to elect progressive and other leftist candidates for office. But it has seen a massive melting of its membership over the last few decades. In 1983, around 20% of all American workers were members of unions; now, only 11.3% are. And while the percentage of public sector workers currently in unions is 35.3%, in the private sector it is a meager 6.7%.
And in the UAW — the venal organization of a minority of American autoworkers — the figures are even worse: in the last three decades, it has lost 75% of its membership. (The UAW claims it has 382,500 members, but that is out of about 820,000 total American autoworkers).
The Obama administration used every trick possible to help the UAW win in Tennessee.
So for several years, the UAW has set its eyes on the South, where — thanks to the prevalence of right-to-work laws — automakers, mainly foreign ones, have opened plants. The unprincipled union has had the help of the Obama administration, which it helped elect by lavish logistical and financial support, and which in turn ripped off both taxpayers and secured investors in a cynical crony bankruptcy deal to enrich the UAW.
The Obama administration used every trick possible to help the UAW win in Tennessee. First, the president stacked the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with union tools by means of “recess appointments” that are probably illegal. The NLRB then allowed unions to use “card check” to win representation; that is, instead of holding a secret ballot election, the NLRB lets a union to be certified if the majority of workers sign authorization cards.
Of course, this opens the door for union coercion of workers, intimidating them into signing under the threat that if they don’t and the union gets voted in anyway, it will retaliate against them.
Some brave workers (represented by the estimable National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation) filed allegations that they had signed under UAW deception and coercion. The Obama-controlled NLRB dismissed the charges, but the worker outrage was so great that it forced VW — which, as explained below, needed to be forced — to ask that a secret ballot election be held.
Also helping the UAW was IG Metall, the union that represents autoworkers in Germany (and in fact has members on the boards of directors of not just VW, but BMW and Daimler as well). IG Metall is deeply afraid that more and more German auto plants will move to the Southern US, where right-to-work laws prohibit unions from forcing workers to support them, and lower energy costs prevail (thanks to our embrace of fracking — and Germany’s embrace of inefficient so-called “renewable” energy sources).
The NLRB was gaming the system, but VW (under pressure from its German union) tried to give away the game itself. VW pushed for a quick election (within nine days, far less than the average 40 days) and agreed not to speak against unionization. Moreover, VW agreed to allow the UAW to campaign inside the plant itself, and did not allow workers opposed to unionizing the same freedom.
But in spite of the blatant deck-stacking by Obama, his bogus NLRB, the company, the UAW, and the German union, the Big Labor gang was defeated by a 53% to 47% margin. Considering that the opponents of unionization were banned from stating their case in the plant, and considering the hardball tactics of the UAW, this was a decisive defeat for the union. As Art Schwartz (a former General Motors labor negotiator) put it, “If they can’t win this one, what can they win?”
There seem to have been several specific factors that led to the workers giving the UAW the bum’s rush. First, the very unfairness of the scheme — letting the UAW speak, silencing its critics, and rushing the election — had to have been infuriating to the honest autoworkers.
Second, Obama made this a personal issue. He attacked Tennessee Republicans in his characteristically snide, mendacious way as caring more for “German shareholders than American workers.” His involvement brought the suffocating stench of his administration to the issue. Workers, in a state that voted for Obama’s opponent Romney by a margin of 20%, were reminded of the extensive corruption, abuse of power, and radical politics regnant in the White House. Grover Norquist, head of the invaluable group Americans for Tax Reform, pointed out the connection between Obama and the UAW on a billboard near the plant. The billboard message was that the “United Obama Workers” had spent millions in union dues to elect the man.
Third, workers were scared off by the miserable history of the UAW’s destructive and selfish war of confrontational tactics against the American automakers. The UAW drove GM and Chrysler off a cliff. VW and the other foreign carmakers pay and treat their employees in the southern US very well. Thus the workers were rightly afraid of losing their good jobs.
Fourth, workers obviously resented the UAW’s massive financial support of progressive and other leftist politicians, who vote for policies the workers generally hate, such as unlimited abortion and the elimination of gun rights. As one worker, Travis Finnell, put it forcefully, “We’re in the South. We have a lot of religion. I don’t want my money going to those causes.” This brings up what is doubtless another reason workers refused to enslave themselves to the UAW: the dues it takes from workers are quite steep — 2.5 hours of pay a month, and 1.15% of all the worker’s bonuses.
As a former General Motors labor negotiator put it, “If they can’t win this one, what can they win?”
Finally, it was well known in Tennessee that VW will soon decide where to locate a major new SUV factory — in Tennessee or Mexico. Please note: Mexico is a country that, unlike the US, has a free-trade agreement with the EU. The workers don’t want to give the company another reason to locate there.
But I suspect that the overarching reason for the UAW’s ignominious rout was the specter of Detroit. The Democrat-Big Labor complex has utterly destroyed one of America’s iconic cities. Between them, the UAW, the iniquitous city employee unions, and a mob of unscrupulous Democratic politicians drove two of the domestic automakers and the city itself into bankruptcy. As one worker said in a TV interview, the “common denominator” of the city’s collapse into a cesspool of decay was — the unions.
The reaction of the union was as predictable as it was despicable. Despite assurances that it would honor the workers’ decision, the UAW has just asked the Obama jury-rigged NLRB to call for a revote. The union is whining about “a coordinated and widely publicized coercive campaign” by outside interests (namely, Tennessee Republicans) to deprive the VW employees of their voices. The UAW naturally never mentions the coercive campaign by Obama, his stooge-packed NLRB, IG Metall, and the UAW itself to shove a ruinous union down the workers’ throats.
We will see if these miscreants can carry this off.