UAW: How Workers Won Big at Chattanooga & Lost at Tuscaloosa

On April 19, Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga won a historic victory, voting by 73 percent to join the United Auto Workers, or UAW. This was the first-ever union victory at a foreign auto plant in the South, and a huge start to UAW’s national campaign to organize 150,000 non-union auto workers in the United States, at companies like Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Tesla. But this success in Chattanooga was soon followed by a disappointing loss at a Mercedes-Benz near Tuscaloosa on May 19, where 56 percent of workers voted against unionizing. Why did the UAW campaign win at Volkswagen and lose at Mercedes? On Strike speaks with Logan Swan, a union Ironworker with Ironworkers Local 86 and a casual longshoreman represented by ILWU Local 19, and member of Workers Strike Back. Logan tells us about what went right and what went wrong, and how those lessons can be applied in order to restart the fight to unionize the Mercedes-Benz plant. In both the labor movement and in social movements, we need to soberly assess the lessons from both our victories and our setbacks. The lessons that Logan shares in this episode will be needed everywhere, especially in the South, which has long been a stronghold for big business and their reactionary, anti-union politics.