UAW Wins at Chattanooga!
The United Auto Workers union and the National Labor Relations Board announced Friday night that workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tennessee plan voted to join the union by a margin of 73% to 27%. More than 80% of the workforce cast ballots. The union lost elections at this plant in 2014 and 2019.
From the UAW:
5,000 workers at Mercedes-Benz in Vance, Ala., will have their vote to join the UAW on May 13 to 17. In the wake of the historic Stand Up Strike victory at the Big Three auto companies [last year], over 10,000 non-union autoworkers have signed union cards in recent months, with public campaigns launched at Mercedes, Volkswagen, Hyundai in Montgomery, Ala., and Toyota in Troy, Mo. Workers at over two dozen other facilities are also actively organizing.
The Detroit News reported that
VW said it took a neutral position on the vote, issuing a statement prior to the election that “we respect our employees’ right to decide who represents them in the workplace.” The Chattanooga plant was the company’s only nonunion factory in the world. [However, management tried other tactics, like raising wages 11 percent before the vote.]
The day before the April 17-19 vote, the Republican governors of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas issued a joint statement to express their concern for the working class in their states.
The experience in our states is when employees have a direct relationship with their employers, that makes for a more positive working environment. They can advocate for themselves and what is important to them without outside influence. 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. 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.
This win is huge! It is the union’s first win at an automaker in the South after the two defeats at Volkswagen and three losses at Nissan plants. According to Labor Notes:
Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein compared tonight’s win to the Union Army’s victory in Chattanooga in 1863, during the U.S. Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln declared it “the gateway to the South.”
Taking Chattanooga, Lichtenstein said, “opened the door to the capture of Atlanta, the rest of Georgia, and the Carolinas.
“With UAW’s win at Volkswagen, another gateway to the South has been opened. No longer will the wage-and-benefit standards of the million-strong auto workforce in the U.S. be set by the non-union portion of the industry. A militant and increasingly powerful UAW will set the standard.”
Click the graphic to watch a 7-minute video of the win, produced by More Perfect Union.
The Ludlow Massacre
Yesterday, April 20, was the 110th anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre, one of the bloodiest confrontations in U.S. labor history. Nine thousand coal miners in southern Colorado worked at 19 mines for the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company (CF&I), which was owned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The Legends of America website notes that
European, Mexican, and Japanese immigrants dominated the mining workforce in Colorado. By 1902, the coal workers represented 32 nationalities and spoke 27 languages. In 1915, Anglo-Americans formed only 13% of the workforce. During these times, the workers were often stereotyped and described by one CF&I official as “foreigners who do not intend to make America their home and who live like rats to save money.” Operators distributed multiple ethnic and racial groups in each mining camp, believing it increased workers’ dependence on the employer and prevented union organizing. Company housing within camps was often segregated, based on ethnicity and race, in terms of location and quality. Further, mining companies often mixed immigrants of different nationalities in their work environments, discouraging communication that might lead to organization.
On September 23, 1913, the miners, organized by the United Mine Workers union, went out on strike demanding
recognition of the union as the miners’ bargaining representative, a 10 percent increase in wages on tonnage rates; payment for “dead work” such as timbering in abandoned workings, cleaning passages, and track laying; the right of miners to elect their checkweighmen; semi-monthly paydays; the right to make purchases at any store, live in any house, and visit any doctor of their choosing; enforcement of existing Colorado mining laws; and an end to the system of mine guards.
On October 21, CF&I Vice President Lamont Bowers wrote to Rockefeller:
Our net earnings would have been the largest in the history of the company by $200,000 but for the increase in wages paid the employees during the last few months. With everything running so smoothly and with an excellent outlook for 1914, it is mighty discouraging to have this vicious gang come into our state and not only destroy our profit but eat into that which has heretofore been saved.
CF&I evicted the miners from the towns, but the union had prepared several tent camps, the largest of which was just outside Ludlow and provided shelter, food, and social activities for 1,200 families.
The company created paramilitary gangs made up of hired thugs and mine guards, which began harassing the camps. The governor sent in the state militia (now called the National Guard), which was supposed to be neutral but which joined with the gangs. Through the winter of 1913 and the early spring of 1914, the militia would enter the camp at Ludlow, arresting and beating miners, and the gang would shoot at the families from vantage points above the camp. The miners had to arm themselves for protection.
On the morning of April 20, gunfire erupted. It’s not clear who fired the first shot, but it also doesn’t matter. At the end of a 14-hour battle, the militia looted and set fire to the camp.
After the fighting ended and surviving miners and their families had fled, volunteer rescuers found an underground space beneath one of the tents, with the charred, asphyxiated bodies of two women and 11 children. (The miners had dug the spaces so the families could hide from the militia’s and the gang’s bullets.) In all, the militia killed two dozen men, women, and children.
The massacre infuriated miners in other camps, according to the Colorado Coal Field War Project:
When news of Ludlow got out, the striking miners at the other tent colonies went to war. For ten days they attacked and destroyed mines, fighting pitched battles with mine guards and militia along a 40-mile front from Trinidad to Walsenburg. The fighting ceased when the desperate governor of Colorado asked for Federal intervention. After Ludlow and the 10-day War, the strike dragged on for another seven months, ending in defeat for the UMWA in December 1914.
After the strike ended, mass arrests were made of the miners, 408 in total, with 332 being indicted for murder, including the main strike leader, John Lawson. These trials dragged on until 1920. All were eventually quashed, with most never coming to trial. In contrast, 10 officers and 12 enlisted men were court-martialed for Ludlow, by the Colorado National Guard, and exonerated.
Although it ended in the defeat of the union, the Ludlow Massacre focused national attention on the conditions in the Colorado coal camps, and in labor conditions throughout the U.S. John D. Rockefeller Jr. was singled out and excoriated in the press and in a spectacular series of public hearings before the Commission on Industrial Relations.
No elected officials or company officers were held legally accountable. Estimates of the number of people killed during the strike range from 69 to 199.
Note: Photos of the Ludlow Massacre are from Wikimedia Commons.