After Historic Chattanooga Win, the UAW Is Bargaining for Better Conditions at Volkswagen

The bargaining process often gets less publicity, less attention than the battle to win a union election, but if anything it is often harder on the workers, a grinding war of attrition in which the company attempts to wait out the workers while acceding to as few of their demands as possible.

The VW workers and the UAW have plans, though, to make that process look a little different than it has in the past, and hopefully get to a solid contract that can be an example for autoworkers across the South and the country.

Renee Berry has been at VW for 14 years, since the German managers brought over to open the plant still ran the shop floor. She’s worked ​“everywhere” in the plant in that time, from the body shop to assembly, logistics. She recalled falling on her knees when the third union election, this past April, was successful, when more than 2,600 of her coworkers, 73% of the workforce, voted to join the UAW.

“I just went to my knees and I just started praying because I asked God. I said, ​‘Lord, if you bless us with this, I will get on my knees.’ God heard our cry, and we got it.” 

She’d been part of all three organizing efforts at VW, part of the earliest group that reached out to the UAW and eventually came up short in that first election, in 2014. ​“You would think we were running for the president of the United States or something, they were so against us,” she said of the first attempts. Local and state politicians made threats of cutting off subsidies for the company, and though VW professed neutrality in the campaigns, managers pressed workers to vote no. The second time, in 2019, she said, was closer. ​“That let us know people really wanted it. Then we didn’t give up.”

It’s still a struggle in the plant sometimes, she said, with some of her anti-union coworkers. But to her, it feels like they’re on the downhill slope of the struggle, toward making material, enforceable change in their working conditions.

Zach Costello got a job at VW between the first two union elections, having worked in food service most of his life. At first, he said, he was ​“a bit excited and impressed with the work.” But the thrill soon wore off. The plant inside is bleak, he said; everything is ​“devoid of color” and contrasts with the shiny exterior. He was already pro-union when he arrived: ​“I had had a lot of really bad situations happen where it just felt like our job kept getting worse and worse and worse in order to grow their profit margins of the business owners.”

He was vaguely aware of turmoil at the national UAW around that time, of the 2019 strike and the corruption scandal that eventually led to new leadership, but mostly he was concerned with the conditions at VW. They had gotten much worse as the Covid pandemic hit. There was a lot of security theater, he said, a lot of obsessive precautions but often ones that made little sense when workers still had to labor side by side. 

“It was miserable, and they had us working a lot of Saturdays to make up for the lost volume,” he said. Everybody was tired, worn out, ground down.

The exhaustion in the plant made it hard to get some workers on board for a third try for the union, Berry said. People would tell her ​“I want it, but I ain’t coming to no meetings for it.” They ​“didn’t want to put their heart and soul back in it, but mine was in it. I told them, ​‘This is blood, sweat and tears for me, literally, because I’ve got hurt in that plant so many times and things just hadn’t changed.’” 

The 2023 Stand-Up Strike across the Big Three US automakers was instrumental to the April win at VW, Costello said. Workers ​“woke up to all the things they haven’t been getting.” He recalled a moment in 2020, when he and a handful of coworkers walked off the line to demand management listen to them.

“We wanted to take our entire line up to HR to really hammer the point home that we were being overworked and pushed past our limit,” he explained. The plant was understaffed, and it only took a few of them leaving the line to stop production for a little while. He recalled a manager saying to him later, ​“When you guys walked up there and we had to stop the plant for you, y’all took money out of my pocket.” It angered him because the boss’s profit came from wages not being paid to the workers. The Stand-Up Strike, he said, proved to them that they could be paid more.

The Stand-Up Strike was what introduced Bashaar Al-Hussieni to the concept of a union. VW, he said, gave the workers the ​“UAW bump” in pay, an 11% raise mirroring the increases at the unionized companies. He joined the organizing committee, one of the newer workers to take part, just 22 and working at VW for a little more than a year when we spoke.

The election win was ​“probably one of the best nights I’d had in a long time.” He’d worked in manufacturing before, but never with a union. He wasn’t at work when the votes were counted, but texted a friend the results and ​“they said that they already knew, there were people honking horns from the cars and they were cheering, chanting ​‘UAW!’”

“I didn’t expect to ever be a part of history the way that I was,” Al-Hussieni said.

Gilliland was at a small activist organization called Chattanooga Organized for Action during the first union election at VW and organized some events and prayer vigils to support the workers. CALEB was getting off the ground in 2019, but by 2024 they were able to participate in a much more comprehensive way. They coordinated signatures from organizations around the city calling on Volkswagen to deal fairly with the workers, participated in a march with the UAW to share those signatures and demonstrate that the community was behind the workers’ union drive. 

“I do think that it is important to any organizing effort that workers feel like they’re not alone,” he said. ​“And since the very beginning, we’ve been clear to say that the workers are carrying all of our hearts in their hands when they’re going to fight for a better life. They are an opportunity for setting a new standard here locally.” The community support has helped to push back against the politicians’ opposition to the union, to say that the workers’ demands are good for the community and its economy as a whole. 

It’s been important to the workers, too. At VW, Al-Hussieni said, ​“We see each other about as much as we see our family. So we are family inside of there. We keep watching each other’s backs.” And that goes for the rest of the city, too. ​“We’ll get things done, and hopefully it’ll benefit not just Volkswagen, but the community around. A lot of people inside the factory are always willing to give.” 

The 4,300 workers at VW are a big bargaining unit these days, and even historically, Gilliland said, ​“You’d have to look back to steel organizing, to textile organizing. I wouldn’t expect anything this large since the 1950s in terms of one single bargaining unit being organized.” 

There is also a history of labor organizing in the area to draw on. As political scientist Michael Goldfield wrote in The Southern Key, it’s a mistake to think that in the CIO days, Southern workers were any less militant and radical, any less willing to organize and strike, than those in Detroit. But they often had less structural power in their industries, particularly textiles, which made it hard for them to strike and win.

And so making bargaining a public concern, with a public rally and a relatively open bargaining process, Gilliland said, is a smart strategy to keep the energy up. ​“There was great turnout, so much energy and being able to see and recognize the actual bargaining committee that’s going to be there. I think that energy reverberated around the room.” There’s a lot of discussion of bargaining for the common good in labor lately, he noted.

“I really think that we’re trying to do here is building for the common good. That’s the sort of relational infrastructure that we need to have to be able to make sure that we’ve got a strong labor movement that’s actually winning for all of us.”

The new UAW leadership, under Fain, has changed bargaining strategy drastically. Rather than keeping negotiations under lock and key, which has the side effect of demobilizing workers, they’re doing it much more out in the open. 

In 2023, Chris Brooks, now a top strategist at the UAW and then field director at the NewsGuild, told me, ​“We have to bring the bargaining table into the shop and the shop into the bargaining table. And that means we need union democracy. What we have to do is radically change the way the majority of the labor movement does bargaining, which is often behind closed doors.”

It’s a strategy championed by the late Jane McAlevey: opening up bargaining as much as possible to the participation of the workers, to keep up morale and to leverage as much shop floor power as possible to back up the bargaining team’s demands at the table. 

Brooks, in a panel that I chaired at the Southern Labor Studies Association conference in Chattanooga, explained the shift from so-called ​“blackout bargaining,” where the UAW agreed to not update members about bargaining until they had a tentative agreement, to open bargaining: ​“We don’t sign those ground rules. We tell the company to go take a hike and we’re going to tell our members everything that’s going on, we’re going to keep them updated, we’re going to keep them engaged because we know that our collective power, what we win at the table is dependent on our ability to take action on the shop floor.”

Bargaining can take months — the average time to bargain a first contract in the United States is more than 400 days—and the VW workers have just gotten started, presenting 680 demands to the company in their first round. So the engagement of the workers back in the plant will be critical to speed the process along.

“The new UAW is very clear about building power and that in order to build power that you have to organize,” Gilliland said. ​“I think using bargaining as an opportunity to make sure that the workers are leveraging their numbers and their support in the best way possible makes sense.” 

Wins at the table don’t come, Brooks said, from making the sharpest argument. They come from the knowledge and the input of the rank and file, the ones who are best placed to refute the company’s arguments. That’s why the demands came straight from worker surveys and suggestions, and why the workers I spoke with are all continuing to organize on the job.

Such a strategy can pay off for Chattanooga and VW workers: the workers can compare their conditions to those won at the Big Three, and also to those at non-union plants. The goal is for wins to snowball, to raise standards across the industry — and, of course, to create more interest in joining the union.

“We’re presenting people with a plan for how they can win and how they can turn the tide and how they can get their lives back. We think that the South is obviously a critically important part of that,” Brooks said. ​“The demonstration effect is critically important. So winning a strong contract is not only super important for the workers of Volkswagen, it’s also super important for all the workers across the South to be able to see what’s possible when they organize, when they unite together.”

Of course, as I wrote for In These Times in May when the Mercedes workers came up short in their vote to join the UAW, it takes more than momentum to win a union vote, particularly in the South. 

“Our hearts went out to Mercedes,” Berry said. ​“I literally cried because I knew their pain, that they wanted it and they lost.” But a strong contract at VW can give the workers at Mercedes and elsewhere something to point to when they suggest another try for the union.

The workers are getting updates each week from the bargaining team, as different members present different demands. And there are a lot of those demands, but, Berry said, ​“We’re not asking for something that they don’t have.”

Some of the top demands are for the employer to cover the costs of health insurance, for a raise and also a cost of living allowance (COLA). That, Costello noted, is ​“standard stuff” in the industry, or at least it is once again after the most recent strike. But he’s looking at safety, too. ​“I would like to see standards where we have more process engineers. I’d like to see safety taken more seriously, at least in a sense of how things are designed.” 

He’s also interested in peer reviewed systems for promotion — where the supervisor isn’t the only one making promotion choices — and a better policy around staffing, so that they can stay ahead of attrition and make sure they have enough workers to run the plant safely and efficiently.

Al-Hussieni noted that the plant can ​“be pretty chaotic sometimes.” It depends, he said, on who is running things that day. ​“One minute we’ll be told we have to build this many cars and we have to do this, sort of standardized work, and then next thing you know, it’ll just kind of switch completely.” 

He’s looking for more accountability in the plant, for managers to do what they say they’re going to do. Profit sharing is a big demand for him: he’s getting married in October, and he wants to make a career at VW, to buy a house and take care of his future family and retire comfortably someday.

For Berry, it’s about respect. ​“People think we’re fighting for more money. We know that’s going to come. But we want better healthcare. We want safety. I shouldn’t go to work and leave my job broke down and hurt,” she said. ​“They don’t treat you right. Who wants to work at a job where you’ll just be treated and talked to like a dog. That’s the way I feel because they don’t treat us like human beings.”

She wants to see a different system for sick leave. Currently, she explained, they use ​“PTO” or a paid time off system that doesn’t differentiate between sick time and vacation time. If you’re sick and don’t have any PTO left, you’ll get ​“points.”

“To me it’s like, I’ve either got to try to stay at work and act like I’m not sick or be at home and lose my job.” But human resources and the supervisors, she noted, aren’t working on the line with them, and have less incentive to care if production employees come to work ill.

“They know we need our jobs, so they treat us this way. It’s basically hush and do your job. No, I’m sorry,” Berry said. ​“Those days are over.” 

The contract, Gilliland said, is the real win: ​“For all the talk about workforce development programs and economic mobility and apprenticeship and all that, the labor movement knows very well that the quickest way to make the biggest gains for working class people is a strong contract.”

It helps, Costello said, to have the support of workers in the union who have an idea of what is possible in their contract, people who can bring those lessons to bear in the VW bargaining process, and they in turn can pay it forward. ​“This could be a new standard in the South. I hope that people can watch and see what they might be missing out on. All you have to do is take your fate into your own hands.”

Volkswagen will likely plead poverty during bargaining; the company recently furloughed 200 workers at the Chattanooga plant after a recall of its ID.4 electric vehicle. But Al-Hussieni is confident in the future of EVs and the company. 

“The union’s doing good work inside of the factory and people who are antsy to see what we’re going to get when it comes to our bargaining. They’ll hopefully see soon, as long as we just keep pushing the agenda and don’t just let it fall through the cracks.”

Berry is excited for the future. Even her daughter has said she might want to come get a union job.

“I said go ahead and put your application on in, honey, because it will be a lot better, because they’ll care. You’ll have somebody to have your back.”