A Chattanooga news outlet has reported that since early March UAW organizers have been at the gates and holding meetings to gather signed authorization cards from Volkswagen workers. One VW employee told a reporter he was gathering signatures in the plant during breaks. It is also rumored that UAW organizers have been meeting with small groups of shop floor activists for several months. Last summer UAW President Bob King traveled to Germany to coordinate support from IG Metall, the union for German Volkswagen workers setting off the first serious speculations about Volkswagen as the UAW’s first (and perhaps only plausible) target to come out of over a year of UAW staff on the ground throughout the south poking around for a ripe target. News of the card drive came as the company announced it was adding 600 jobs to its Chattanooga facility, for a total of over 3000 hourly positions. Both those new jobs and the UAW card drive were discussed in a closed-door meeting between employees and visiting VW executives last week. Several sources said workers stood up and cheered after one employee told the execs the plant was a great place to work and didn’t need a union. VW workers in Chattanooga make around $15 less a month (after dues deduction) than UAW second tier workers in the GM Springhill plant down the road. Bob King and other leaders of the UAW have repeatedly let slip that organizing of a foreign automaker in the South is critical to the very survival of the UAW – the implication there being that what the workers in Chattanooga might want is at best a secondary issue, at least to the UAW.
