UAW Hopes To Expand Its Ranks As Alabama Mercedes-Benz Workers Vote On Union Membership

More than 5,000 workers at two Mercedes-Benz plants in Alabama begin voting Monday on whether or not to join the United Auto Workers. The vote, which ends Friday morning, comes less than a month after workers at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted overwhelmingly to join the UAW, ending the union’s decades-long push to organize workers at U.S.-based, foreign-owned plants..

Robert Johnston, a worker at the Mercedes-Benz battery plant in Woodstock, Alabama, has no doubt his co-workers there, and at the much larger assembly plant in Vance, will prove the UAW’s win in Tennessee wasn’t a one-off victory.

“I mean, hands down. I think we’re gonna win. We’re gonna win. Hopefully by a lot,” Johnston says in an interview. “It seems like it’s gonna be a slam dunk just like Volkswagen. Everybody’s excited.”

Austin Brooks is also excited. A two-year employee at the Woodstock plant, he’s looking forward to joining the UAW to get him through some tough medical challenges.

“I’m always in a medical hospital. I’m always sick. I need better health care. Plus, when I retire I’m not going to have any insurance until Medicare kicks in,” Brooks says in an interview.

About 5,200 workers are eligible to cast their ballots from Monday to Friday morning 10:45 a.m. eastern time, according to the National Labor Relations Board which is administering the vote.

UAW President Shawn Fain’s confidence in organizing non-union auto workers accelerated after winning major raises and improved benefits for members at the Detroit Three automakers last fall. He led bruising negotiations that included a series of strikes against all three over the course of 46 days.

In announcing the settlements, Fain vowed that in the next round of contract talks in 2028, UAW would expand beyond General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and Stellantis to include the foreign, and domestic companies with non-union workers building vehicles in the U.S.

But even if the UAW chalks up a second straight victory at the Mercedes-Benz plants, that doesn’t necessarily portend that Fain will march across the South like Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman notching up one victory after another without suffering at least a few defeats.

“It’s a little bit hard for me to imagine they’re being successful across the board because they’re different companies and there are different levels of union support or hostility elsewhere in the corporate structure,” observes professor David Jacobs at the American University’s Kogod School of Business in an interview. “The South has been a very difficult nut to crack. It’s been the center of an alternative economy. It’s a low-wage economy, low-regulation economy, the southern political economy. I call it the Neo- Confederate infrastructure.”

Indeed just ahead of the vote at Volkswagen, six southern governors, including Alabama’s, signed a letter opposing UAW representation of workers in the region, alleging a vote to do so would threaten jobs in those states.

That’s just one instance of outside pressure workers are feeling to vote no.

Johnston and Brooks say they’re certainly aware of that pressure but predict it will have no effect on the outcome.

“Everybody wants to make it a political issue, and this is not a political issue,” says Johnston. “The UAW didn’t come to us, we went to them. It has to do with the workers fighting back, demanding our rights and, you know, collectively, together. We know we can bargain for better working conditions, better wages, better benefits.”

“People are trying to come in, but what I can say is at the end of the day they ain’t gonna have no control over when we vote yes,” adds Brooks.

While workers like Johnston and Brooks seem confident of a positive vote to join the UAW, a white paper released last week by the Center for Automotive Research titled, “UAW’s Next Frontier: Mercedes-Benz in Alabama,” looks at the effects of both possible results.

“A victory of the UAW would send a message to all automakers that the U.S. automotive blue-collar workers are seeking not just a fair wage but also a better work-life balance, as many white-collar workers in the industry take for granted. A victory for the company would signal that workers value the work culture, employer-employee relationship and already enjoy what unionization might,” said the report written by Yen Chen, principal economist at the Center for Automotive Research and Marick Masters professor of business at Wayne State University.

Indeed, the paper predicts no matter the results they will have a “persistent effect on both the UAW and Mercedes-Benz but also have broader implications for the U.S. automotive industry.”