CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (CN) — For weeks, ads have played during commercial breaks on Hulu and been posted on billboards in and around the city. Gov. Bill Lee stumped against the proposal in late April.
But starting at 4:45 a.m. Wednesday and running until Friday evening, the 1,700 hourly employees in Volkswagen’s “Dynamo of Dixie” plant will slip their secret paper ballots into a ballot box to answer the question: Will the workers unionize in an effort to change the working conditions at the plant or will they once again reject the attempts to join the United Auto Workers?
Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga narrowly rejected the first effort to unionize five years ago.
The plant is a strategic spot for labor issues: an attempt to unionize a major auto plant in the South, which has been historically resistant to unions.
According to UAW spokesman Brian Rothenberg, the issue is whether the Chattanooga workers will be represented by a local chapter of the UAW.
“Chattanooga workers are the only VW workers in the world that have to ask the boss, not sit across as an equal and bargain with the boss,” Rothenberg said in an interview. “Why should Chattanooga workers be any different? Why should they be different than GM in Spring Hill [Tennessee]?”
Critics of UAW’s second attempt at the Volkswagen plant say the UAW could imperil the facility’s long-term health, and questions about the effects of unionization ripple through the businesses surrounding and serving the Chattanooga plant.
But one voice has remained a whisper in all of this: Volkswagen’s.
Dan Gilmore, an adjunct at the school of business at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, said Volkswagen has portrayed itself as neutral party during the recent discussion on whether to unionize.
In 2014, Volkswagen filed the petition to hold a unionization vote with the National Labor Relations Board. This time around, it was the UAW that filed the petition to hold a vote.
The petition with the NLRB hit a snag because of an existing dispute between Volkswagen and a group of 162 maintenance workers at the plant represented by UAW. After Local 42 withdrew from the disagreement, the petition for a plant-wide unionization vote was resubmitted and approved.
“VW has continued to take a public position of being neutral, while Southern Momentum appears to be doing a good job of having VW's back in response to attacks on its position and corporate practices as well as holding the UAW's feet to the fire in the way the vast majority of American employers would do it in this situation,” Gilmore wrote in an email to Courthouse News.
A spokesman for Volkswagen did not respond to a request for comment.
Maury Nicely, a Chattanooga-based labor and employment attorney, said the organization he represents, Southern Momentum, is not so much as anti-union as it is anti-UAW.
Nicely said Southern Momentum is a nonprofit designed to rebut UAW’s messaging and amplify the voices the workers who are skeptical of UAW.
Some programs that Volkswagen workers enjoy, such as their vehicle-lease program that allows employees to lease cars at favorable rates, may be placed upon the negotiation table, Nicely said.