Been a busy month for me so I haven’t had a chance to give the story due diligence, but if you didn’t hear: the German automaker Volkswagen’s U.S. division attempted to unionize their own workers in Tennessee.
This is unusual for a number of reasons, as I’ll get to in a moment, but it’s particularly significant coming in Tennessee, a state that has become home to a lot of foreign car manufacturers’ American branches and is a so-called “Right to Work” state. “Right to Work” laws are designed discourage unionization by changing how worker votes occur and allowing management to intimidate or pressure workers into voting against forming a union, i.e. giving workers the “right” to work outside of union (because every American must have the right to be their own David against the corporate Goliath in contract negotiations… I guess?).
So anyway, if VW employees unionize, it will automatically put pressure on Tennessee’s other foreign-based carmakers to raise wages somewhat to remain competitive and retain their workers, even if they remain non-unionized (past studies have demonstrated this effect pretty clearly), and it will probably encourage unionization drives elsewhere.
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