Majority of Alabama Mercedes workers join UAW as Southeast's union battle heats up

A majority of workers at the largest Mercedes-Benz plant in the U.S. have voted to join the United Auto Workers (UAW).

The announcement marks another significant milestone by the union in its campaign to organize the auto plants of the traditionally right-to-work Southeast.

"There comes a time when enough is enough,” plant worker Jeremy Kimbrell said in a statement. “Now is that time."

Workers cited a list of grievances that echoed those from other factories where the UAW has gained a foothold. They said in a statement that their pay had stagnated while the company made record profits, and that management had replaced full-time jobs with temporary workers.

"These same temporary workers then worked for up to eight years before receiving full time jobs, [and] our management gave us a 42 cent raise over a six year period while making record profits," the plant workers wrote.

"And these same record profits weren't enough to prevent Mercedes from imposing an unfair two-tier pay scale just as our children were entering the workforce," they added.

The news that more than half of workers at the plant, located in Vance, Ala., had signed union cards comes just after a similar announcement by workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., earlier this month.

It also follows the public coming-out of the union drive at the Hyundai plant in Montgomery, Ala., where 10,000 autoworkers across 14 other nonunion car companies had signed union cards. And last week, the UAW itself announced it was committing $40 million to organize automobile and battery plant workers.

If more than 70 percent of workers at the Vance and Montgomery plants sign on, the UAW will ask management to voluntarily recognize the union — and if management declines to do so, it will trigger an election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board.

In Alabama, this campaign is proceeding against the backdrop of vehement opposition by the state's political and business leadership.

If the union drive succeeds, the "days of Alabama being a premier destination for industry investment may be coming to an end,” state Commerce Secretary Ellen McNair said in a January statement obtained by the Birmingham News.

McNair added that the UAW drive "places our state’s main economic driver in the crosshairs" — echoing sentiments expressed earlier this year by Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R).

Perhaps the most full-throated opposition to the union drive has come from the Business Council of Alabama, the state's chamber of commerce.

In January, the council launched a website and ad campaign to warn Alabamians "of the economic dangers that unionization represents," as council President Helena Duncan wrote in a Birmingham News op-ed.

That website, Alabama Strong, will "suggest ways all of us can take a stand and discourage the UAW from making our state its main battlefield," Duncan said.

The anti-union site contains the list of warnings about the union, including that "they can and do make many promises about what they will get for workers, but these claims are often empty promises to get workers to sign up."

The UAW's drive into the South follows its successful battle for pay and workplace reform at the Big Three auto plants — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis — in Detroit.

In her op-ed, Duncan argued that union militancy in the upper Midwest had led to the 'decline of Detroit.'

"Much of the decay that exists in the 'Motor City' today results from untenable demands that the UAW placed on its automobile manufacturers," Duncan wrote.

"We will not let the UAW do to Alabama what it did to Detroit," she added.

But a 2018 book by two sociologists argues that this has the story backwards. 

In "Wrecked: How the American Automobile Industry Destroyed its Capacity to Compete," sociologists Joshua Murray and Michael Schwartz write that the late-20th-century decline of Detroit's auto companies had far more to do with expensive measures the Big Three took to fight unions.

In order to reduce the ability of unions to shut down a production line as a negotiating tool, big carmakers set up parallel, redundant supply chains, wrote Murray, who teaches at Vanderbilt University.

"If workers at one supplier go on strike, there are two or three others making the same part, so the plants don’t stay idle,” he said in 2018.

That redundancy came at the price of higher costs and inefficiency, which made it harder for the Big Three to compete as foreign automakers entered the U.S. market in the late-20th century, Murray explained.

It also had larger costs for American democracy, according to a 2012 study from the Economic Policy Institute.

Researchers found that the decline of unions during the latter half of the 20th century had accompanied a rise in economic inequality to levels not seen since before the New Deal.

Murray argued that better relations with labor were as essential for American carmakers as new plants and equipment.

"They will need to repair their broken relationship with labor unions to ensure that the plants stay open as the industry recovers,” he said.

Recent UAW victories at an Indiana transmission factory and a Kentucky Ford factory suggest the potential impacts if the union drives succeed.

In February, 9,000 auto workers at the Ford factory in Louisville threatened to strike over concerns that the company was running the plant with too few workers to allow them to operate safely. Within five days of the strike threat, Ford had agreed to make a deal.

In the January agreement, which averted a strike at the Allison transmission factory in Indianapolis, workers won a 150 percent pay raise and an end to wage tiers.

Before the agreement, staff members complained they had struggled to make ends meet.

“I stay in a studio downtown and I don’t even have a kitchen,” Monique Morrison, an Allison employee, said. 

“Something would happen with my car, and I wouldn’t be able to pay my rent. I have not been to the eye doctor or found a primary care physician because I can’t afford it," she added. "It’s been rough.”

The Allison strike threat turned the industry's decentralization against it, because a work stoppage at that facility could have shut down production further down the supply chain at Ford and General Motors plants, which put Allison-made transmissions in their trucks.

“If there wasn’t the threat of a strike, we would’ve never have gotten what we got,” another worker, Zachary Boyd, said in a statement.