The United Auto Workers’ ambitious drive to expand its reach to nonunion factories across the South and elsewhere is facing a key test Friday night as workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, finish voting on whether to join the union.
But this time, the UAW is operating under new leadership, directly elected by its members for the first time and basking in a successful confrontation with Detroit's major automakers. The union's pugnacious new president, Shawn Fain, was elected on a platform of cleaning up after the scandal and turning more confrontational with automakers.
Volkswagen says it is neutral on the issue of whether the plant should be unionized. But in a presentation for reporters this week, the company listed examples of how it pays and treats its Chattanooga workers well. To approve membership, though, the workers in Chattanooga will have to look past the warnings that joining the union, with the accompanying higher wages, would lead to job losses. Since the UAW's new contracts were signed in the fall with General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, all three companies have cut a relatively small number of factory positions. But Ford CEO Jim Farley has said that his company will have to rethink where it builds future vehicles because of the strike.
But under the UAW contracts, top production workers at GM, for instance, now earn $36 an hour, or about $75,000 a year excluding benefits and profit sharing, which ranged from $10,400 at Ford to $13,860 at Stellantis this year. By the end of the contract in 2028, top-scale GM workers would make over $89,000.
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