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'Ready to Win': Mercedes-Benz Workers in Alabama Move to Join UAW
"We're here to tell you that we are the majority. Mercedes workers are ready to stand up."
Feb 27, 2024
The United Auto Workers announced Tuesday that a majority of the approximately 6,000 workers at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama have indicated they support joining the union.
That's the largest Mercedes-Benz plant in the U.S., and getting more than half of its employees to sign union cards is a major win for the UAW.
"We're here today to make a major announcement. A majority of our co-workers at Mercedes here in Alabama have signed our union cards and are ready to win our union and a better life with the UAW," Mercedes worker Jeremy Kimbrell said in a statement. "We haven't taken this step lightly. For years, we've fallen further behind while Mercedes has made billions."
"We’re here to tell you that we are the majority.
Mercedes workers are ready to stand up.
This is our decision.
It’s our life.
It’s our community.
These are our families.
It's up to us."#StandUpMercedes pic.twitter.com/tV0ctaPW2M
— UAW (@UAW) February 27, 2024
Kimbrell cited insufficient wage increases and the abuse of temporary workers as reasons the plant should be unionized. Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee achieved majority support for joining the UAW earlier this month. This indicates the UAW is making gains in the South, which has historically been a difficult task.
The UAW has been working hard to fight for autoworkers and expand the union over the past year, and it was able to get improved contracts with the "Big Three" auto companies—Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis—after a six-week strike last year.
President Joe Biden even became the first sitting U.S. president to join striking workers on a picket line. The UAW later went on to endorse Biden for reelection and declare that former President Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee, is a "scab."
Rather than slowing its efforts to improve conditions for autoworkers after its win with the Big Three, the UAW instead proceeded to launch "the largest organizing drive in modern American history." The union clearly has momentum and no plans to stop its fight for workers' rights, and the Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama achieving majority support for unionization is just the latest example.
"There comes a time when enough is enough," Kimbrell said. "Now is that time. We know what the company, what the politicians, and what their multi-millionaire buddies will say. They'll say now is not the right time. Or that this is not the right way. But here's the thing. This is our decision. It's our life. It's our community. These are our families. It's up to us."
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Democrats Walking the Picket Lines vs. Anti-Worker Republicans
The UAW is fighting for worker rights. At least one major political party is standing with them.
Sep 26, 2023
When Dwight Eisenhower was running for president in 1952 as the nominee of a saner Republican Party, he appeared at the American Federation of Labor convention and delivered a full-throated embrace of industrial unions.
“Today in America unions have a secure place in our industrial life,” Eisenhower told the delegates. “Only a handful of unreconstructed reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions. Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice.”
Well, Ike, meet the Republicans who are running for your party’s 2024 presidential nomination. Since United Auto Workers union members struck the Big Three automakers, GOP candidates have confirmed that the party of Eisenhower is now the party of unreconstructed reactionaries.
While Democrats such as President Joe Biden and Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan have joined UAW picket lines — and echoed the union critique of the auto companies, declaring that “record corporate profits should be shared by record contracts for the UAW” — Republicans like Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina want to fire the strikers.
Recalling former President Ronald Reagan’s decision to dismiss striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization in 1981, Scott said, “I think Ronald Reagan gave us a great example when federal employees decided they were going to strike. He said, ‘You strike, you’re fired.’ Simple concept to me, to the extent that we can use that once again.”
The anti-union senator’s proposal to extend Reagan’s assault on public-sector workers to the private sector drew a stiff rebuke from the UAW. Union President Shawn Fain ripped Scott’s remarks as “just another example of how the employer class abuses the working class in America; employers willfully violate labor law with little to no repercussions.”
Fain filed a complaint against Scott with the National Labor Relations Board on Thursday and declared, “Time for more stringent laws to protect workers’ rights!”
Scott was hardly an outlier among the top GOP contenders.
Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, an anti-union zealot in the mode of former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, denounced both Biden and the UAW strike.
“When you have the most pro-union president and he touts that he is emboldening the unions, this is what you get,” griped Haley. “The union is asking for a 40% raise, the companies have come back with a 20% raise. I think any of the taxpayers would love to have a 20% raise and think that’s great.”
What she neglected to mention, however, is that the UAW asked for a sizable wage boost — over a number of years — to make union members whole after they sacrificed earnings, cost-of-living increases and benefits to keep the auto companies afloat during the Great Recession. According to the Economic Policy Institute, “Across the U.S., auto manufacturing workers have seen their average real hourly earnings fall 19.3 percent since 2008.”
There is nothing huddled or helpless about the UAW. It’s fighting for worker rights
And of course Haley failed to acknowledge that the union demand for a 40% pay bump merely parallels the increase in pay for CEOs in an industry that has made $250 billion in profits over the past decade.
As ugly as the anti-worker rhetoric from Scott and Haley has been, there’s a case to be made that the most crudely anti-union sentiments were expressed by Donald Trump, the former president who for years has sought — cynically, but with some success — to fool industrial workers into imagining him as their ally. Since the strike began, Trump's rhetoric has been even more anti-union, and more disingenuous, than that of the CEOs of GM, Ford and Stellantis.
During an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last week, Trump was asked which side he was on in the strike. Trump pointedly avoided taking the side of the strikers and their union. “I’m on the side of making our country great,” he announced, before launching into a critique of electric vehicles.
As part of his diatribe, Trump ripped into UAW leaders and members for focusing in negotiations on preserving jobs and improving pay and conditions as the industry transitions to electric vehicle production.
“The auto workers are being sold down the river by their leadership,” claimed Trump, who alleged that Fain is “not doing a good job in representing his union, because he’s not going to have a union in three years from now. Those jobs are all going to be gone, because all of those electric cars are going to be made in China.”
Since the strike began, Trump's rhetoric has been even more anti-union, and more disingenuous, than that of the CEOs of GM, Ford and Stellantis.
Trump’s playing one of the oldest cards in the corporate deck, seeking to drive a wedge between workers and their union. He planned to up the ante Wednesday with an appearance in Detroit. But the union is having none of it. Though the UAW has not made an endorsement in the presidential race, Fain ripped into Trump.
“Every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers,” said Fain. “We can’t keep electing billionaires and millionaires that don’t have any understanding what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck and struggle to get by and expecting them to solve the problems of the working class.”
Trump would have done better to study up on the perspective of Eisenhower, who referred to right-wingers who attacked labor laws as “stupid” and said, “I have no use for those — regardless of their political party — who hold some foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when unorganized labor was a huddled, almost helpless mass.”
There is nothing huddled or helpless about the UAW. It’s fighting for worker rights, and polling shows that — no matter what these Republican presidential contenders say — 75% of the American people are on the union’s side.
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Giving the Union What It's Demanding Would Be Good for Automakers
The Big Three could unlock federal funding, avoid disruptions to their inventories, and ensure that their financial losses are spread out over several years rather than just a few months — all by simply meeting UAW’s salary demands.
Sep 22, 2023
The United Auto Workers (UAW), a union of nearly 150,000 workers at America’s “Big Three” automakers, are on strike.
On the face of it, UAW’s demands sound audacious. They’re calling for a 46 percent pay raise and a four-day workweek, among other things. But in the broader context of a decades-long decline in labor rights and wages, they’re perfectly reasonable.
What’s unreasonable is massively profitable corporations’ insistence on squeezing every last drop of productivity from their workers with paltry wages, long hours, and little-to-no job security — and then feigning outrage at union demands.
The Big Three made more than $20 billion in profits in the first half of 2023 alone. Their CEOs are compensated to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year. Meanwhile, even the top-paid auto workers earn less than six figures a year. Temporary workers start at only $17 an hour.
After years of making concessions, auto workers believe they — and not just their bosses — should share in the industry’s record profits. “Record profits mean record contracts,” as UAW president Shawn Fain put it.
Linking worker pay to CEO compensation is a savvy move. As unions remain popular, the idea of sharing the wealth appeals to a basic sense of fairness among the public.
It also makes financial sense for the automakers themselves. When GM workers went on strike in 2019 for 40 days, the cost to the company was far greater than anticipated — nearly $4 billion.
NBC estimates that meeting the union’s salary demands today would cost the companies comparable amounts — but spread out over much longer periods. “A 40 percent wage bump for UAW members would cost GM $4 billion to $5 billion and Ford $5 billion to $6 billion over four years,” they report.
But rather than offer salaries that enable workers to budget their lives, buy homes, and project expenses, the Big Three want to pay workers individual bonuses during years when profits are high. Their ostensible reason is to remain flexible as the industry is pressured into evolving away from fossil-fuel based vehicles to all-electric vehicles in the face of a warming climate.
But President Joe Biden’s administration just announced a massive funding plan to boost EV production and tied it to labor rights. “Building a clean energy economy can and should provide a win-win opportunity for auto companies and unionized workers who have anchored the American economy for decades,” Biden said.
In short, automakers can unlock federal funding, avoid disruptions to their inventories, and ensure that their financial losses are spread out over several years rather than just a few months — all by simply meeting UAW’s salary demands.
What more incentives do the big companies need?
There’s another beautiful win-win opportunity for workers and automakers in the EV transition. It takes significantly less labor to make an EV compared to a gas-run car. According to Ford, it’s 40 percent more labor efficient to make EVs.
According to UAW, auto workers “are working 60, 70, even 80 hours a week just to make ends meet.” But if they’re making EVs, they could work fewer hours at a higher rate without impacting production or their yearly salaries. Studies show that the companies would likely remain profitable and retain employees better if they switched to a four-day workweek with no loss of pay.
UAW’s demands, in short, are hardly unreasonable. But with corporations insistent on squeezing more profits no matter the cost, merely pointing out the mutually beneficial rewards of meeting union demands isn’t enough to sway shareholders and their allies.
So the striking workers are fighting for their demands. It remains to be seen how much autoworkers can flex their power. The Big Three can certainly test their patience and find out.
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