How unions are stopped before they start (Update)

This episode examines the challenges and systemic barriers to union formation, specifically at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

1. Political and corporate resistance significantly impacts union campaigns.
2. Strategic adjustments in union approaches can influence outcomes.
3. Public perception and political climate in a region can affect unionization efforts.
4. Legal and procedural delays are common tactics used against union formation.
5. Persistent advocacy and adaptation to circumstances are crucial for union success.

1: Opening Scenario

The episode opens with a historical context of Volkswagen's establishment in Chattanooga and its significance. Nick Fountain: "The greatest moment in my public career was receiving the call from the Volkswagen group that they were coming to Chattanooga."

2: First Union Drive

Details the first attempt at unionization, thwarted by local political intervention and corporate rejection. Steve Cochran: "It changes everything that you ever do."

3: Micro Unit Strategy

Covers the second attempt focusing on a smaller, skilled workers' unit, which faced legal obstacles despite initial success. Steve Cochran: "We won by 68%."

4: Legal and Political Challenges

Explores the influence of changing federal policies and local politics on union efforts. Maury Nicely: "This is part of a presentation that Maury gave to workers to convince them not to vote for the UAW."

5: Final Success

Concludes with the successful unionization after changing tactics and a more favorable political environment. Steve Cochran: "If those go well for the union, maybe next time more workers at his plant in Chattanooga will vote."

1. Understand local political climates when planning union campaigns.
2. Employ strategic flexibility; adjust tactics based on immediate feedback and external conditions.
3. Build broad worker support and maintain transparent communication.
4. Anticipate legal challenges and prepare with knowledgeable legal support.
5. Leverage public and media support to counteract negative campaigning.

(Note: This episode originally ran in 2023.)

Union membership in the U.S. has been declining for decades. But, in 2022, support for unions among Americans was the highest it's been in decades. This dissonance is due, in part, to the difficulties of one important phase in the life cycle of a union: setting up a union in the first place. One place where that has been particularly clear is at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Back in 2008, Volkswagen announced that they would be setting up production in the United States after a 20-year absence. They planned to build a new auto manufacturing plant in Chattanooga.

Volkswagen has plants all over the world, all of which have some kind of worker representation, and the company said that it wanted that for Chattanooga too. So, the United Auto Workers, the union that traditionally represents auto workers, thought they would be able to successfully unionize this plant.

They were wrong.

In this episode, we tell the story of the UAW's 10-year fight to unionize the Chattanooga plant. And, what other unions can learn from how badly that fight went for labor.

This episode was hosted by Amanda Aronczyk and Nick Fountain. It was produced by Willa Rubin. It was engineered by Josephine Nyounai, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and edited by Keith Romer. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

People

Steve Cochran, Bob Corker, Sean Fane, Wilma Liebman

Companies

Volkswagen

Books

"The UAW's Southern Game" by Steven Silvia

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

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Planet Money
Last week, unions got a big win. Workers at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted to unionize by a lot, 2628 votes for, 985 against. And this is a result that even less than a year ago kind of felt like a long shot, which I feel comfortable saying because we did a whole episode on the plant in Chattanooga. Today, we are revisiting that episode. It ran originally in October 2023, and it's about why it has been so hard to unionize in places like Tennessee, why it wasn't happening.

And then at the end, we will have an update about what changed last week and how this win is potentially just the first domino to fall. It all starts with the story of a party back in May 2011. Hundreds of people dressed business casual, show up, have some hors d'oeuvres, and witness the grand opening of a brand new, 2 million square foot auto manufacturing plant. This is spectacular. This is the good stuff, right?

It's like a fun party. Some of the guests are cars. The crowd is invited to an enormous room with rows and rows of chairs facing a stage. Please be seated. The opening ceremony is about to begin.

NPR
The overhead lights dim and the video screens flash the Volkswagen logo. Das Audo is finally back in the states. The future for Volkswagen begins here in Chattanooga. I gotta say, this is such a weird announcement. Yeah, it kind of gets weirder.

Planet Money
As part of the opening ceremonies, there's an interpretive dance by people in white bodysuits, and it kind of appears like they're assembling a Volkswagen. Afterwards, there is a more just straight ahead press conference, right? Tennessee Senator Bob Corker is there, and he's emotional. The greatest moment in my public career was receiving the call from the Volkswagen group that they were coming to Chattanooga. And I want to thank all of you for making that decision.

NPR
The opening of this Volkswagen manufacturing plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, was the culmination of years of negotiation. The company had shut down its only american plant back in the 1980s, and this was their comeback. And the competition to win Volkswagen's new plant was fierce. Around that time, southern states were desperate to lure in big companies. South Carolina gave BMW more than $130 million in incentives.

And Alabama gave Mercedes more than $250 million worth of incentives to build a plant there. And Tennessee, they wanted in. They wanted a car plant, too. Steven Silvia, professor of international relations at American University, he says the state did everything they could to woo Volkswagen. Well, Bob Corker works very closely with the state establishment, and they get a range of subsidies and other benefits.

Steven Silvia
They offer Volkswagen, they offer tax abatements, they offer them land. They offer them educational facilities. When you add it all up, it comes to more than $570 million in aid, tax breaks, and incentives. Right. And at the time, a typical auto plant cost about a billion dollars.

Planet Money
Wow. So that is how Das auto came back to the states and set up in Tennessee. Now, just to remind you of what this moment was like, the plant opens as the country is still recovering from the financial crisis. For locals, this is like this one shiny star in a long, dark night when the Volkswagen plant starts hiring, 85,000 people apply for just 2000 jobs, 2000. New jobs making cars.

NPR
And of course, this is interesting not just to locals, but also to unions, specifically the United autoworkers. You know, the union that traditionally represents people who work in car manufacturing and currently has members on strike. They want these to be union jobs, right? Because the way the UAW sees it, Chattanooga is one place where they maybe can regain some ground. The UAW used to represent a majority of auto workers in the US.

Planet Money
Back in 1979, they had more than 1.5 million members. By the time this plant opened, that number had fallen to below 400,000. And Steven says that decline is in part because of right to work laws that make it hard to form and fund a union. But it's also because a bunch of foreign owned car companies came into the US and set up non union factories. The UAW has had a frustrating time for almost 20 years, trying to organize foreign owned car plants and failing.

But the arrival of Volkswagen in the south, for the UAW, this seems different. Potentially good. The UAW leadership saw Volkswagen as their best opportunity. Their best opportunity for good reason, because Volkswagen has plants all over the world and they all have some kind of worker representation. Plus, the company had actually come out and said that they wanted that in Chattanooga at their new plant.

So management was open to a union. The UAW definitely wanted a union. And now its just a matter of convincing the workers. Yeah, youll want a union, too. What could go wrong?

Hello, and welcome to Planet money. Im Amanda Aronczyk. And Im Nick Fountain. Union membership in the US has been declining for decades, in part because of how difficult. This one phase in the life cycle of any union has become the setting up of that union.

NPR
And if you want a case study in just how many ways things can go wrong, well, look no further than Chattanooga. Today on the show, we look at three attempts over ten years to establish a union at this one car plant in Tennessee. And what these attempts tell us about why union campaigns live or die.

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Join 70,000 teams who trust Grammarly with their words and their data. Learn more@Grammarly.com dot Grammarly. Easier said done. The indicator from Planet money is all in on video games, not just because they're a fun hobby. Video games are one of the fastest growing businesses worldwide, worth more than the film and music industries combined.

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We're seeing some games that are really taking, I mean, half a billion dollars to make. We're taking a week long look at the video game industry. Listen to the indicator from Planet Money podcast on NPR. One of the 2000 workers hired by Volkswagen at their new plant in Chattanooga is Steve Cochran. I was there the first day the first car was produced.

So I've been there since the groundbreaking, pretty much. So. Steve's job is to maintain the equipment. When something breaks, he's one of the people they call to fix it. He used to work at Goodyear tire factory.

Planet Money
His entire career has been working in factories, right? And he says, when you work at one of these places, you gotta stay sharp. Even though there's a lot of automation in there, there's still a lot of hands on the car, screwing in bolts and stuff, so. And I still got all ten toes and ten fingers. And there's a lot of people out there that don't my age, you know?

Cause they get them hung up in something or do something dumb. And I like to go home with all my. With all my digits and all my. Same way I come in, you know? So I get that.

Planet Money
I get that. I feel like that's a reasonable thing to expect from work. Oh, yeah. Now, Steve had been in a union before when he'd worked for Goodyear. So when he heard that Volkswagen was supportive of unions, he was like, yeah, great.

That's what I want, too. Like, if you get a job at General Motors, Ford, or any other place like that. It's life changing. That changes your life for years. It change.

It changes everything that you ever do. You know, that should be the same thing when you get a job at Volkswagen. Volkswagen had set starting wages at the plant at $14.50 an hour, which was pretty decent for Chattanooga. But Steve is pretty sure that if they had a union, they'd probably get higher wages, better benefits, more time off. Not long after the plant opens, the United Auto workers hold their first meeting in Chattanooga.

Planet Money
Steve shows up and hes into it pretty quickly. He decides that not only does he want a union, he wants to be a union organizer. So he starts campaigning for the UAW. Hes making flyers, hes talking to people, doing social media. Hes trying to convince his coworkers, we need a union.

NPR
We need the UAW now to establish. A local chapter that is able to sit down and negotiate with Volkswagen. They have to prove that a majority of workers actually want a union. Here is how that happens. Union officials go around with authorization cards.

Planet Money
This is Professor Steven Silvia again. So they're not membership cards, but they're authorization cards. What they say on them is, I authorized the UAW to be my representative in collective bargaining. Right. The first step to getting a union at the plant is getting signed cards from a majority of the workers, which the UOW says they got.

But here's where things go a little sideways. Remember how Volkswagen ended up in Tennessee? That $570 million worth of incentives? Yeah. Many of those politicians behind those incentives do not want the UAW at this plant.

They do not want the UAW in Chattanooga. They do not want the UAW on a boat. They do not want it with a goat. They do not want the UAW anywhere near anything. Right.

NPR
The way they figured, a union at the plant could lead to contagion. Next thing you know, all the companies in Chattanooga would end up unionized. That would be expensive for business. So Volkswagen trying to be pro labor, but also trying to keep things, you know, kind of chill with the Republicans running the state. They are stuck in this mushy middle, and they do this kind of weird thing.

Planet Money
They reject the cards, don't recognize the union. But at the same time, they still insist they do want a union. So the UAW decides to try the next option for setting up a union with an election, which to Volkswagen seems more acceptable. An election is called. Theres a week and a half of official campaigning where the UAW makes their case and people opposed to the union make theirs.

NPR
And then theres going to be a secret vote. Both sides campaign everywhere. There are billboards, tv ads, radio ads, testimonials. A lot of people who dont work at the plant also get into the mix, like Maury nicely. Hes a lawyer who works for an anti union group called Southern Momentum.

Maury Nicely
This is the top of the UAw in Detroit. This is part of a presentation that Maury gave to workers to convince them not to vote for the UAW. And in this moment, in the presentation, he's pointing to a pyramid which is on the screen. Understand you're at the bottom of this pyramid. Revenue goes up to the top and control goes down.

Planet Money
I spoke with Maury, and according to him, he was brought into this campaign by some Volkswagen workers who did not want a union at the plant. If you want to think of southern momentum, think of it as it's basically a loudspeaker for these employees who are concerned about the UAW, who, beyond southern momentum, didn't have a voice. Southern Momentum was partly funded by donations from members, but Maury also acknowledges that money came from people who didn't work at the plant, local businesses, and people who really didn't want the UAW to come to Chattanooga. Another person who really didn't want the UAW to come to Chattanooga, Senator Bob Corker, one of the politicians who offered Volkswagen that $570 million plus in incentives and said that the plant opening was the greatest moment in his public career. Well, right before the big vote, he shows up in a news segment pointing out how dangerous and radical the union leaders are.

The officers a month ago talking about fighting and combat and all of those kind of things. If that's the environment you want, UAW certainly is the people for you to choose or the people to choose. Then on the first day of voting, he delivers a shocker. He says he has it on good authority that if workers reject the union, Volkswagen would commit to expanding its operation and build its new suv right there in Chattanooga. After three days of voting, it's finally time to tally up the votes and see who's won for the union.

Planet Money
626 votes against it. 712. It's decided there will be no union at the plant in Chattanooga. And tomory from southern momentum, Bob Corker and a bunch of local politicians weighing in like this on the union election. That totally made sense.

Maury Nicely
These were Tennessee politicians, these were Chattanooga politicians. These were citizens saying, this is not the best thing for our state. And that's exactly what those people should be doing. But for maintenance worker Steve Cochran, the senator had gone too far. I'd say he was probably one of the biggest deciding factors, and the media ran with it.

You know, they pushed it everywhere, on the news, radio, everything in the world. To Steve, the senator had intimidated the workers, and he thinks some of them might have changed their votes. Well, some people did out of a fear thing. I ain't gonna say they believed him, but they said, you know, what if. You know, what if, what if Bob Corker is right?

Planet Money
What if Volkswagen sets up a new plant elsewhere? What if they cut our jobs? What if, what if, what if? So that was union campaign number one. Doomed, Steve would say, by a politician putting his finger on the scales.

And maybe that is the takeaway from this first campaign. Sometimes big, powerful people interfere with union drives and change the outcome. In the past bunch of years, leaders at Amazon and Boeing have gotten in trouble for this, threatening, dire consequences if their workers unionize for workers. Sometimes those threats can overshadow the potential upsides of joining a union, like how much more vacation they might get or more pay. Which brings us to chapter two, the micro unit.

NPR
After the failure of the 2014 campaign in Chattanooga, the UAW decides that they should try again, and quickly. We gotta do something different. So Steve and some of his fellow workers come up with a new plan. They decide instead of trying to organize the whole plant, what if they start a micro unit? You know, a small group that would get to bargain directly with management.

In this case, it would be just for the skilled workers. So not like workers on the line, but electricians and machinists, those kind of jobs. When there's 150 of you, you know, you're like, you know about all of them, you know, so you kind of talk to each other and stuff and know how things are going to shake out. Steve thinks a bunch of these skilled workers are going to vote for a micro unit. Many of them have been in unions before, and they supported the UAW in the first campaign.

Planet Money
And the plan is, if they win, then they can scale up and unionize the whole plan. The process plays out kind of like it did the last time. Steve and the other organizers try to get people to sign authorization cards. Volkswagen again rejects those cards. Again.

NPR
There's some campaigning, then an election, and this time the UAW wins. We won by 68%. You actually did better than that, Steve. 71% of workers voted for the micro unit. This is a big deal.

Planet Money
All of these foreign owned car companies, BMW, Mercedes, Nissan, they'd been setting up plants in the south, and none of them had unions. Now, at this point, Volkswagen's management's like, wait a second. We're not really into this whole micro unit thing because we do want some kind of worker representation, but it needs to represent all the workers, not a fraction of them. We can't negotiate with just some of you. That's verboten.

Oh. Now, this is when Stephen, the professor, says that Volkswagen's attitude towards the union hardens. And so what happens is they go to fight it. So they hire Littler Mendelssohn, which is a very well known union busting law firm. And then they learn about the union avoidance playbook.

Steven Silvia
This is where it's injected into the Volkswagen bloodstream. Once it's there, it just takes and they just run with it. We should mention that we reached out to Volkswagen for this story and they declined to comment. So now instead of the fight happening with ads and billboards and flyers, it's going to happen with lawyers. Lots of lawyers.

Planet Money
Volkswagen and the UAW ask the National Labor Relations Board to weigh in on the dispute. They're the federal agency that oversees union elections. And for a peek into how that agency works, we called up Wilma Liebman. She's a former chair of the labor board and also a former planet money guest. By the way, I came here about a couple months ago to do an interview for a different planet Money episode.

NPR
Wilma knows a lot about labor unions. That's why we call her. She's also worked for the UAW as a consultant and as one of their ethics officers. Wilma says that the UAW went to the board to try to get Volkswagen to recognize the micro unit. And Volkswagen, they refused.

And here's where it gets interesting in an albeit kind of wonky way. A lot of times when this kind of thing happens, Wilma says, companies will actually weaponize the whole labor board process and use it to gum things up. I think some employers slow walk it so they make it look like they're engaging in good faith bargaining. But if they really are determined to avoid unionization and having to bargain with the union, there are different ways that the whole process can be slowed down. Wilma says that's what happened here.

Planet Money
Generally, the labor board has permitted these micro units, but Volkswagen argued that grouping those skilled workers together that did not qualify. Maintenance workers like Steve work with everyone in the plant. They weren't really what's known as a community of interest. They weren't a self contained group. The UAW, of course, argues that this micro unit that they're trying to set up is a community of interest.

NPR
Volkswagen's like, nope. So back and forth hearing this, appealing that Volkswagen drags this whole thing out as long as they can, which Wilma says is perfectly legal. There's no real penalty for employers using all these kinds of delaying strategies. There's no fines, there's no damages to speak of. It doesn't have much in the way of teeth.

Planet Money
Despite all of that, around the end of 2016, it's finally starting to look like Volkswagen is running out of things to appeal. And the UAW might get their micro unit. But then, big plot twist. A new president is elected. Donald Trump, you may remember him.

NPR
And the political orientation of the labor board completely changes. Yeah. So this agency is famous for what's typically called flip flopping. Every time the White House changes, a more formal expression is policy oscillation. I, too, have been accused of policy oscillation by my family.

Planet Money
It happens to the best of us. So here is what happens. A new chair is appointed by the president, and now the board is like, you know what? We need to look at how we define community of interest again. Tighten up those rules for forming a micro unit.

All of a sudden, the UAW is back at square one. Wilma says the labor board can be annoyingly inconsistent over time, that the rules are always changing. I think the reasons for that are pretty obvious. It's, you know, the labor and capital have deep divides, and labor law and the role of unions in the US have always been subject to very deeply held and divided views. The UAW and Volkswagen continue to fight over the micro unit thing in the background for years.

Kind of gets stuck in a stalemate. So the takeaway from the second failed union drive in Chattanooga, timing really matters. Under some administrations, the NLRB seems to take the side of management, like what happened to the UAW in Chattanooga. And under others, the NLRB is just way more union friendly, like how they had a bunch of rulings in favor of the new union at Starbucks. And for some grad students who have organized around the country, just kind of depends on who's in charge.

Meanwhile, Steve and his buddies, they still want a union.

Coming up after the break, they take their fight to the factory floor. Try a little spontaneous protest.

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Planet Money
We will unpack the debates on these issues and whats at stake. You can listen to NPR's consider this. Wherever you get your podcasts. By 2018, the plant has been open for seven years. Steve and the other union supporters have been trying to get a union set up pretty much the whole time.

But this conflict has sort of been a slow burn. Yeah, they never really had a big dramatic type moment that you see in a union movie. But then a week and a half before Christmas 2018, that moment happens, and it basically launches the unions third campaign. It happens when the company changes this one policy. So we have a shutdown every Christmas and every summer, you know, for putting new equipment in or whatever it is.

It's called winter shutdown. And they pay us for that week. The shutdown was so that they could change up the assembly lines so they could start making their new suv. This time, it was going to take even longer than the week. They usually needed three extra days.

NPR
Normally, how this would work is that workers would have the option to just not get paid for those days. But this time, management makes an announcement and says, hey, everybody, for those three extra days, you're gonna have to use your paid time off. We were just like, really? People were like, I ain't doing that. They didn't like it.

Planet Money
So at that moment, there are a bunch of people working on the floor of the plant, and they're all looking at each other over these half assembled cars, muttering to each other about management taking away three of their already limited paid days off for a lot of the workers. That's three out of just ten days that they get each year. If y'all make us use all of it up, then when are we gonna have to take time off? Be our families, be sick, take our KIds to the doctor, you know, so it's kind of like, you know, that doesn't work for me. And meanwhile, the workers know that the people who made this new policy are sitting just upstairs, up in their glass walled offices.

You know, this one guy said, man, what can we do? You know, I'm walking there during our break time, I said, I'll go up there with you. By break time, the number of angry people has grown. About 50 of us marched upstairs, said, no, we're not gonna do this. At first, management kind of digs in, but the workers, they dig in too.

Planet Money
Yeah, because when break time ends, they don't go back to the floor. Production just stops. They couldn't start the LIne back up. Cause there's so many people missing from the line. Steve says he could see on the managers Faces that their little protest, it was working.

So the workers and the managers are in this standoff. The cars on the plant floor are not being assembled. Finally, the managers say, okay, theyll think about it. By the end of the day, theyre like, fine, you dont have to use your paid days off. When that happened, that actually changed the way they handled that stuff for a.

NPR
Little while, but it didnt stick. Steve says that not too long after, they actually changed the policy back. And Steve, he used this moment, he told his colleagues, if they had a union, this flip flopping by management around policies, it would not be happening. Try to explain to people, if we had had a contract and that stuff was written in a contract, then we wouldn't have to do that no more. All that stuff is just not left up to somebody's.

This is how I feel about it today. In the months after this mini Protest, Steve and the other union supporters are actively trying to drum up support for another election. But you know what was also happening around this time? The FBI has raided the home of United Auto Workers Union president Gary Jones. This is part of a probe regarding alleged corruption within the US auto industry.

Planet Money
Yeah, the whole time they're campaigning, this corruption scandal at the UAW is all over the news. Again, in addition to the pro union side, there's a campaign against the union, and they are making a very big deal of this scandal. So, you know, a lot of the, a lot of the discussion in the campaign flowed down to, is this really who you want representing you? Southern momentum's Maury nicely. Again, he says he doubled down on this message, made the whole campaign very personal.

Maury Nicely
Is this who you want? You know, look, guys, is this who you want to marry? Is this who you want to step up and say I do, too. When the campaign for the third election wrapped up, the vote tally came in for the union, 776 against it, 833. The union loses again.

NPR
Now, some of this obviously had to do with the UAWS legal problems. The corruption scandal was like a gift. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Maury Nicely
I mean, I certainly take no revelry in that, but that obviously colored and influenced that election. Maury says he knew workers who were open to the idea of joining a union. They just didn't want to join the UAW. So the takeaway from union drive number three, it's kind of a self evident one. Maybe don't have a giant scandal in the middle of your union election.

Planet Money
Right. But Maury said there was more going on here than just the scandal. The real reason, he says, that this third union drive failed, really why they all failed was because of where they were taking place. We are a very right leaning state, and particularly in terms of politics. And union equals Democrat.

Maury Nicely
Right. And an anti union equals Republican. And so when you come into Tennessee, you're probably already dealing with that on this point. Union organizer Steve Cochran actually agrees. He says people decide whether they're pro or anti union based partly on their political identities.

NPR
But he says that didn't happen by accident. It was the result of a deliberate campaign by anti union forces. They've politicized it. That's the biggest one that I've seen where they're saying, well, if you vote in favor of union, you're a Democrat. And I'm like, no, that's not true.

That has nothing to do with anything inside my workplace. It just doesn't. I mean, sorry, but Democrat, Republican, either one, you know, it doesn't matter. But they've done a real good job of doing that, you know, playing them kind of politics of people. So Steve has been at this for more than ten years.

NPR
He's tried three times to get his plan organized, but he says he's still not done. Do you think there's. Is there a plan to try to unionize the whole plant again? Oh, always. Oh, oh, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, always. Always. It's kind of a thing, you either give up or die, you know? You know, you keep pushing or you die. You just want to the other, you know, don't give up.

Planet Money
Steve has been watching the big UAW strikes happening right now across the country. If those go well for the union, maybe next time more workers at his plant in Chattanooga will vote. Yes.

That is where we left it back in October 2023. Now, as we know, things did in the end go well for the union. So what changed? What changed to flip so many votes at the Chattanooga plant? To answer that, we called up Professor Steven Silvia again.

Steven Silvia
If you want to start at what made things different, it was the election of Sean Fane. Sean Fain became president of the United Autoworkers in March of 2023. And late last year, he led the UAW on strike nationally and won huge victories against the big three automakers. That's General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, which used to be Chrysler. Many people looking at it were in some ways skeptical at first.

But the thing that was amazing is the way that the UAW was very clever in selecting tactics. Traditionally, the UAW would target just one of the big three car companies at a time. But Sean Fein threw out that old playbook and the UAW decided to hold strikes at all big three companies at the same time, but not at every single plant. They picked strategic plants. So when they shut one of these down, it meant that another plant downstream wouldnt be getting what they needed to do their jobs.

Planet Money
So the whole thing was very disruptive to production, and it also let a lot more workers stay on the job collecting paychecks. By having a strike that would have a relatively small number of employees involved, you could shut down a significant amount of production, and they were very successful. And as the workers in the Chattanooga plant watched all of this, another thing, Stephen says that made Sean Fein and the UAW seem more attractive was transparency. Workers got to watch the UAW negotiate in real time, often with live streaming updates on the negotiations. Like there's this one video where Sean Fein gives his response to a Stellantis offer.

Everything they're looking for in this document is about concessions. So I'll tell you what I'm going to do with their proposal. I'm going to file it in its proper place because that's where it belongs, the trash, because that's what it is. Shawn is different because he is so transparent and Honest with everyone. That's the thing that we like best about him.

Planet Money
This is Steve Cochrane again, does Maintenance for the Volkswagen Factory in Tennessee. He's a union organizer. When I called him up, he was in his car driving Home from work. Steve says that Sean's transparency tactics were able to change some people's perceptions of unions in the south. Having all that done in the public eye was very, very, very eye opening, very educational for a lot of people.

When we last left steve, the union had just lost their third election. He and the other UNioN organizers were getting ready to regroup. Since then there's been one other BIg Change. This time from the Volkswagen Side. The company decided to stay neutral this time.

You know, they didn't put out a Big Anti Union Campaign. They didn't put out FeaR Tactics with us. They said, hey, it's going to be your decision, y'all's decision is what it is, and we'll stay as neutral as possible. And they did. Steve says this is because the BRasS at Volkswagen headquarters in Germany told the management at the Chattanooga factory that you will not run an anti union campaign.

Planet Money
Because of that. The stalling tactics that the company had used last time did not come into play. So Steve Cochran said it was much easier to make his case this time. Even in conservative Tennessee, which is a right to work state where unions are very politicized, theyre considered aligned with the Democratic Party and are generally pretty unpopular. You have to understand, though, there's a lot of republican voting people in Chattanooga.

A lot of, we're never going to tell anybody how they should or shouldn't vote. That'll never happen. But everybody put that aside and they put all that aside and said, we got to do it ourselves. And then after all of those campaigns for in the past dozen or so years, last week, workers at Steve Cochran's factory voted overwhelmingly to form a union. We had a watch party at the union office and a lot of people were there and stuff.

There was some good fireworks going off and some people drinking a little bit, alcohol stuff. Nothing got out of hand. Steve, how did it feel to walk into work on the first day after the vote? It is a lot better feeling than walking in after a loss. I know that I was very proud and at the outcome and very smiling and stuff, but I didn't gloat.

Planet Money
Steve said there were a couple of people who might have cheered a little, maybe a few handshakes, some high fives, but mostly people just got back to work side by side with their colleagues, regardless of how they voted. We've been at this thing for twelve long years, and it's just a, it's a, it's a great feeling now, you know? But honestly, people can disagree about something. We're still gonna do our job, though, and build the best quality cars we can. That shows me the true grit.

And Steve's hoping that maybe this is the start of a new era of unionizing in the south. You know, we're gonna, we're one of the first dominoes, you know, so if they, if our domino knocks their domino in, the next domino. So this may be a huge, huge push throughout all the automotive industry in the south. The next dominoes Steve hopes will fall are the Mercedes factory in Vance, Alabama, a Toyota engine plant in Missouri, a Hyundai plant in Alabama, and a plant that Volkswagen is currently building in South Carolina.

Our original episode was produced by Willa. Rubin, engineered by Josephine Neonai, fact checked by Sierra Juarez, and edited by Keith Roemer. Ida Porosad helped with research. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Today's update was produced by James Sneed, engineered by Valentina Rodriguez Sanchez, and fact checked by Sam Yellowhorse Kessler.

If you want to read more about union organizing at car manufacturing plants, Steven Silvia has got a new book out. It's titled the UAW's Southern game. Special thanks this week to Blake Farmer, Michael Gilliland and Bob King. I'm Amanda Aronczyk. And I'm Nick Fountain.

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