The UAW petitioned the National Labor Relations Board on Friday
to hold another election in the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga
after its narrow loss. But even if it wins the next round, I note
in a morning piece at TIME Ideas, the war for its future is
essentially unwinnable.
The union was hoping to reverse decades of membership declines
by an easy victory in this plant. Easy, because IG Metall, the
German workers union, had forced Volkswagen to sign a neutrality
agreement with the UAW. In Germany, unions can veto management
decisions that don’t serve worker interest. And IG Metall had
threatened to bar the company from manufacturing a new line of SUVs
in Chattanooga, the only Volkswagen facility worldwide that is not
unionized, unless it remained “neutral” by forfeiting its right to
campaign against the UAW.
But the union claims that Big Bad Republicans intervened and
made it lose. And it is not wrong (pardon the double
negative). The Republican-controlled state legislature, for
example, threatened to withdraw an “incentive package” meant to
keep this facility in the state.
Government officials of course have no business trying to
influence decisions of private workers, much less using taxpayer
dollars to do so. If Democrats had tried to pull a similar stunt to
encourage unionization, the GOP, the allegedly free market party,
would have been up in arms.
And what was the point anyway? Tennessee is a right-to-work
state, which means that even if the UAW manages to unionize the
plant, it won’t be able to automatically collect union dues and use
them to elect Democrats, the big GOP fear.
Nor is this victory replicable elsewhere because there is not
much the UAW can offer workers besides lighter pockets:
The post-bankruptcy restructuring of the Big Three slashed UAW
wages to levels comparable to those at foreign transplants. And the
union can no longer insist on lavish health care benefits
without signing the death warrant of auto companies given
Obamacare’s 40 percent excise tax on gold-plated health care plans.
Moreover, transplant workers are rarely ever laid off, so union
membership does not buy any more job security.
What’s more:
General Motors and Chrysler’s bankruptcy has forced even
Northern states to shed their union shackles. Indiana, and even
more remarkably Michigan, are now right-to-work states, something
scarcely imaginable five years ago. It is hardly likely that
Southern workers will embrace unionization just when Northern
states are de-unionizing, especially given the new competitive
pressures emerging from low-wage Mexico and China.
So any way you look at it, the UAW as we know it today is pretty
much defunct, whether it realizes it or not. So please chill,
Republicans, and let Chattanooga workers decide their own fate.
Go here to
read the whole thing.
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