UAW workers just won a historic union drive in Tennessee, with the Chattanooga Volkswagen becoming the first nonunion automaker to become unionized in the US since 1941. Now, the United Auto Workers (UAW) have their sights set on taking on the anti-labor machine in the South and ensuring better conditions for workers in some of the most disenfranchised states in the country.
On April 26, the contract between 7,000 UAW workers spread across North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee and Daimler Truck North America (DTNA) will expire. Workers are fighting for better wages, health insurance coverage, and an end to tiered employment, and have expressed a willingness to strike if their demands are not met.
In 2023, Daimler Truck raked in 39% more in profits than the previous year, but wants to divert those profits to its shareholders, planning to increase stock dividends by 46% and spend USD 2.1 billion on stock buybacks, according to the UAW. Workers are fighting for a fairer share of the money they made for the company.
As workers ramp up their organizing at Daimler, “The company and the corporate media will increase their scare tactics and they’ll claim there’s no money to be found for the workers,” said Fain during an April 23 livestream to workers. “They’ll pretend that the sky is going to fall if we get our fair share of the 20 billion in profits Daimler’s made since 2018.”
Indeed, before UAW won its contract, the governors of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas teamed up to write a “concerned” open letter about the organizing efforts of auto workers in the South. “The UAW has come in making big promises to our constituents that they can’t deliver on. And we have serious reservations that the UAW leadership can represent our values,” wrote the governors. “They proudly call themselves democratic socialists and seem more focused on helping President Biden get reelected than on the autoworker jobs being cut at plants they already represent.”
“These workers are struggling. We’ve all lived it. The price of everything, groceries, clothes, insurance. It’s all going up. Thanks to corporate greed and consumer price gouging. But workers’ wages at Daimler haven’t kept up,” Fain said. “When you hoard all the wealth and you share it only with corporate execs and Wall Street, the workers are going to come for their fair share in the new UAW. We don’t take concessions. We raise standards for everyone. And we fight for what we deserve. And we’re not afraid to strike to get it.”
UAW workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama are also gearing up for a National Labor Relations Board Election in May. Alabama Mercedes workers have already been subject to an intense anti-unionization drive on the part of the company, being forced to attend anti-union meetings by their bosses.
