At an event held Monday at Chattanooga’s office of the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT), Gov. Bill Lee (R) said it would be a “big mistake” for Volkswagen employees at a plant there to unionize.
Lee reportedly said:
I believe it would be a big mistake for those workers to risk their future by giving up the freedom to decide it themselves and hand that over to a negotiator on their behalf. I think it’d be a mistake for them to vote to join a union. We’ve seen union decline in in many places all across this country for the last decades. And we’ve seen plants close that made the decision to go union. So I hope that’s not what happens here. I think every every worker is interested in certainly their wages in their work environment and the safety and they alone can decide what that environment is. Encourage them to decide that for themselves, and to keep that under their own control.
Lee’s comments come as debate the fight over unionization at the plant has reached a fever pitch.
At the end of March, employees at the plant filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to hold a vote on whether workers will join the United Auto Workers (UAW) union.
“The milestone marks the first non-union auto plant to file for a union election among the dozens of auto plants where workers have been organizing in recent months,” UAW said in a press release at the time. “The grassroots effort sprang up in the wake of the record victories for Big Three autoworkers in the UAW’s historic Stand Up Strike win.”
For five years, attempts to unionize at the plant have failed.
Vinnie Vernuccio, president of the Institute for the American Worker and a senior fellow at The Workers for Opportunity Initiative at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy thinks the effort will fail again, even though this time, the auto workers have come further in the process than ever.
“I guess it’s pretty obvious that here they go again because they have tried and they have failed and they have tried and they have failed. And they’re trying again, and you know what? It sounds like they’re failing again,” Vernuccio told The Star News Network’s CEO and Editor-in-Chief Michael Patrick Leahy on The Michael Patrick Leahy Show in February. “The good news is if there’s an election and workers get that secret ballot vote, I really hope that is what happens. Usually that is not what the UAW is pushing for, so it was actually surprising that they said they wanted to vote.”
President Joe Biden is keeping tabs on the effort from afar.
“I congratulate the Volkswagen autoworkers in Chattanooga who filed for a union election with the UAW,” he said in a March statement. “As one of the world’s largest automakers, many Volkswagen plants internationally are unionized. As the most pro-union president in American history, I believe American workers, too, should have a voice at work. The decision whether to join a union belongs to the workers.”
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Pete D’Abrosca is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on Twitter/X.
Photo “Gov. Bill Lee” by Gov. Bill Lee and image “Volkswagen Plant Floor” is by Volkswagen.
