Put on those earbuds or crank up that speaker and enjoy The UAW’s decade-long fight to form a union at VW’s Chattanooga plant. You will hear about how a union is formed, how management, and certain politicians, will fight a union being formed, how millions in subsidies are given away, and how things change when workers stand up.
Back in 2008, Volkswagen announced that they would be setting up production in the United States after a 20-year absence. They planned to build a new auto manufacturing plant in Chattanooga.
Volkswagen has plants all over the world, all of which have some kind of worker representation, and the company said that it wanted that for Chattanooga too. So, the United Auto Workers, the union that traditionally represents auto workers, thought they would be able to successfully unionize this plant.
They were wrong.
(graphic courtesy of uaw.org)
