Inside the UAW’s Uphill Battle to Organize Southern Auto Plants

Posted on February 19, 2026 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Abe Walker, author of Reassembling the UAW, writes about the Volkswagen workers’ vote on tenative contract agreement.

After over 500 days of tense negotiations, workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga Assembly Plant are voting this week on a proposed contract agreement. Results are expected by tonight. If ratified, the deal would be the United Auto Workers’ first contract at a major foreign-owned automotive plant. My new book, Reassembling the UAW: Insurgency, Contention, and the Struggle for Unionism in the American South, chronicles the decade-long, hard-fought organizing campaign that led to this moment and offers a tentative prognosis for the future. 

For as long as most autoworkers can remember, the story of the UAW has been one of managed decline. As deindustrialization and economic restructuring eroded its Midwestern base, it struggled to make inroads at the new crop of European and Japanese “transplants” that dotted the I-75 corridor south of Ohio. Politicians were eager to sell the South as a low-wage haven for foreign investment and fought back savagely against anyone who dared to challenge their business model, pushing the lie that Southern culture is uniquely hostile to unions. They portrayed the UAW as a job killer that would drive away industry and turn Southern boomtowns into post-industrial wastelands. Meanwhile, the union settled into a pattern of concessionary contracts that did little to attract prospective members.

But in April 2024, the UAW broke its losing streak when workers at a VW plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted overwhelmingly to authorize the UAW as their exclusive bargaining agent. As my book explains, the pivotal factor was the resurgence of rank-and-file militancy. Following a corruption scandal that engulfed the union’s top leadership and led to the imprisonment of two former presidents, workers ousted the old guard and installed a slate of reformers. The new leaders struck a combative tone and committed to reversing decades of givebacks. As importantly, the reform caucus resolved to maintain its independence to keep its new leaders honest.  Within months, the newly emboldened organization had gone on strike against Detroit’s Big Three auto companies. The resulting contract included historic gains that demonstrated the power of collective action, injected the membership with new energy, and rebuilt the union’s image on a national stage.

Another contributing factor was the transition to electric vehicles. In previous decades, the threat of capital flight was the ultimate weapon in employers’ arsenal.  Politicians could credibly argue that companies would move production if the union won. By 2024, this threat had been neutralized, as VW had already invested billions in retrofitting the Chattanooga plant to produce the ID.4 SUV. Together with the Biden administration’s incentive programs, this massive investment in fixed capital effectively anchored the company in place.

Building on momentum from the Big Three strike and buffeted by external market forces, VW workers entered contract negotiations in 2024 with high expectations. If the union’s boldest proclamations were to be believed, after bringing VW to parity with the Big Three, it would parlay its victory across other transplants and take wages out of competition. 

But even as the union set its sights on bigger prizes, the tide had already begun to shift. Within weeks of the win at VW, the union was dealt a stinging loss at a Mercedes plant in Alabama. The rank-and-file caucus that helped elect the UAW’s reform slate collapsed amidst infighting, and the Trump administration turned aggressively against electric vehicles.

Back in Chattanooga, VW dug in its heels, and negotiations stalled out. History shows that winning an election is only half the battle; employers often use the negotiation phase to delay, demoralize, and eventually decertify the union. In the intervening years, not only did the UAW fail to organize additional transplants, but it couldn’t even plant its flag at Ford’s own BlueOval. 

My book went to production at the end of 2024, and it reflects a certain optimism that has since dissipated. As I note in the Conclusion, the VW victory was highly contingent and dependent on an unlikely confluence of factors. Powerful interests are deeply invested in maintaining the regional wage differential that has long characterized the American auto industry. As the Mercedes defeat and the ongoing contract fight at VW demonstrate, the forces of capital—and the political machinery of the South—remain formidable adversaries. Their entire economic development model is built on the promise of cheap labor. Dismantling that system will be a long fight, and nobody had any illusions that it would disintegrate after a single victory. 

The proposed contract is a mixed bag. It doesn’t achieve full wage parity, contains loose language on plant closure, and lacks strong healthcare provisions. Perhaps the greatest disappointment is that the UAW was unable to align the expiration date with the Big Three, whose contracts are set to expire on May 1, 2028.  Grouping VW with the other manufacturers would have had both practical value and symbolic meaning.

For now, the UAW’s future in the South remains indeterminate. It has successfully established a beachhead, but the win at VW looks increasingly like a one-off fluke. It remains to be seen whether the UAW can revive the energy and enthusiasm it enjoyed two years ago, or if it will revert to bureaucratic stasis.  

No matter what the future holds, the UAW has already demonstrated that Southern workers’ supposed aversion to organized labor has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with a lack of exposure to a fighting union.  Any serious student of history will reach the same conclusion. Textile workers in the Carolina Piedmont pioneered the flying pickets that the UAW would later make famous.  Indeed, as recently as 1950, Chattanooga had a unionization rate that rivaled Boston’s. Unions are as native to East Tennessee as moonshine. But ultimately, “reassembling the UAW” is not about dredging up the past or restoring a forgotten mid-century form, but creating a new entity capable of navigating the complexities of the 21st-century global economy. If there is a lesson to be gleaned from history, it is that the UAW can only achieve what was previously deemed impossible by reinventing itself on the fly

Filed under: american studies, economics/business, History, Labor Studies, sociology, Urban Studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

What Workers are Striking For: A View from Detroit

Posted on November 6, 2023 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Michael McCulloch, author of Building a Social Contract, writes about the importance of labor power to create broad-based prosperity.

The 2023 “Summer of Strikes” has continued into the fall, and while the UAW and the Big Three are nearing a deal, Detroit’s casino workers remain on picket lines. Though union membership has declined for decades in the U.S., the Motor City still carries powerful associations as a post-WWII labor stronghold. In September, Joe Biden conjured that historical memory while visiting UAW strikers in suburban Detroit, becoming the first modern American president to take part in a labor protest. “The middle class built the country,” Biden argued, “and unions built the middle class. And that’s a fact. So, let’s keep going.”

News coverage of Biden’s visit emphasized an exchange that followed his remarks. Asked whether he supported the 40% pay increase the UAW initially sought, the President replied, “Yes. I think they should be able to bargain for that,” which prompted public debate about the appropriateness of such a large raise. Yet to reduce this or any labor negotiation to a number, considered in the abstract, oversimplifies the stakes. A more tangible way to think about the significance of workers’ pay would be to consider the places where the rewards of labor are most intimately experienced: workers’ houses. Detroit has a different historical memory to offer in that regard.

Before the founding of the UAW, the Motor City emerged in the 1910s and 20s as a mass-production innovator and a rising economic powerhouse. Amidst that rapid growth, the city gained a prominent role in the national conversation about work and its rewards. High turnover in city factories, and the threat of strikes, hung over Detroit industrialists’ efforts to build more and better cars and other products. To attract and retain the best workers, despite the difficulty of modern industrial labor, employers—lead by the Ford Motor Company—determined that they needed to offer more.

In 1914, Ford famously doubled the company’s effective wage to five dollars per day, and reduced the work day to eight hours, curbing attrition and causing a general increase in wages city-wide. Yet this raise was not an end in itself—what gave it meaning was a concurrent effort to build modern houses in Detroit. Facing a housing shortage in the 1910s, business leaders, lenders, government agencies, developers, and workers themselves contributed to widespread effort to increase the volume and quality of houses available for workers. It was a flawed project—marred by racial segregation—but it did begin to establish the principle that in modern America, hard work should be respected and well rewarded. This housing transformation, which occurred in Detroit and many other industrial cities, brought increased privacy, indoor bathrooms, and electric lighting to many for the first time.

The story of Detroit’s Model-T Era housing boom can serve as a reminder that the current labor crisis, though often conceived of as a problem of wages, is also a housing problem—a shortage of affordable, aspirational dwellings that work can put within reach.

In the 1910s and 1920s, as today, wages were not enough to secure workers’ gains. Before the rise of industrial unions, and before government programs such as unemployment insurance and social security, workers’ economic gains were continuously at risk. Vulnerable to layoffs, illness or injuries—and lost work that could drain hard-earned savings or even lead to eviction—workers found that the front porches of their newly-built bungalows could be places to sit with gnawing worry about the economic future.

Amid the crisis of the Great Depression, workers in Detroit and elsewhere took to the ballot box and the streets to demand security for their hard-earned gains, and in particular, for their houses. Today, amid a wave of twenty-first century strikes, this history points to the importance, beyond wages in the abstract, of work’s lived rewards, and of the urgent need for policies and contracts that can secure workers houses today and into the future.

Filed under: american studies, economics/business, History, Labor Studies, political science, race and ethnicity, sociology, Urban Studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

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