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Since six Southern Republican governors last week showed “how scared they are” of the United Auto Workers’ U.S. organizing drive, Tennessee Volkswagen employees have voted to join the UAW while GOP policymakers across the region have ramped up attacks on unions.
The UAW launched “the largest organizing drive in modern American history” after securing improved contracts last year with a strike targeting the Big Three automakers—General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis. The ongoing campaign led to the “landslide” victory in Chattanooga last week, which union president Shawn Fain pointed to as proof that “you can’t win in the South” isn’t true.
The Tennessee win “is breaking the brains of Republicans in that region. They’re truly astonished that workers might not trust their corporate overlords with their working conditions, pay, health, and retirement,” Thom Hartmann wrote in a […]
This will be a fascinating process to watch. The corporate elites have squeezed workers for decades and have been earning massive profits over years and years. There are three questions which I believe most important:
1) Are workers finally willing to set aside fear to organize? If the answer to this question is “yes”, it has the prospect of undermining the bedrock of the empire which has built itself on fear for decades, and that fear went on steroids after 9/11 with the so called “Patriot Act”. It is clear that the young are willing to protest on University campuses, and this exposes the contradictions of elite institutional support for the empire vs. what is actually taught. The campus administrators have little incentive to allow these protests for long.
2) If these efforts are successful will the current Democrat administration be willing to defend unionization via structural bureaucratic process and in the courts? The answer will tell you where the rubber meets the road with Biden. My guess, is that he will support unions until the election, then stab them in the back as many Democrat administrations have done over the years.
3) Will the corporate elite undermine this process through financial backing of Democrats willing to sell out the worker for small amounts of short-term cash? I suspect that this is how it will play out giving Biden (should he win the election) plausible deniability for not supporting labor. “Not the right time”, “We don’t have the support” – all the classic excuses used by Democrats who end up “disappointed” in the administration as business goes on as usual.