How unions are stopped before they start (Update)

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2024

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

(Note: This episode originally ran in 2023.)

Union membership in the U.S. has been declining for decades. But, in 2022, support for unions among Americans was the highest it's been in decades. This dissonance is due, in part, to the difficulties of one important phase in the life cycle of a union: setting up a union in the first place. One place where that has been particularly clear is at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

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.

In this episode, we tell the story of the UAW's 10-year fight to unionize the Chattanooga plant. And, what other unions can learn from how badly that fight went for labor.

This episode was hosted by Amanda Aronczyk and Nick Fountain. It was produced by Willa Rubin. It was engineered by Josephine Nyounai, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and edited by Keith Romer. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

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Transcript

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0:19.2	npr.org and thank you. Thank you. Quick note, we mentioned Amazon in the show.
0:27.0	Amazon is a sponsor of NPR and they pay to distribute some of our content.
0:32.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:35.0	Last week, unions got a big win.
0:40.0	Workers at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted to Unionize by a lot.
0:46.8	2,628 votes for 985 against.
0:51.6	And this is a result that even less than a year ago kind of felt like a long shot
0:55.6	which I feel comfortable saying because we did a whole episode on the plant in
1:00.2	Chattanooga. Today we are revisiting that episode. It ran originally in Chattanooga. Today we are revisiting that episode.
1:03.8	It ran originally in October 2023 and it's about why it has been so hard to unionize in places
1:09.8	like Tennessee, why it wasn't happening. And then at the end we will have an update
1:14.2	about what changed last week and how this win is potentially just the first domino to
1:19.3	fall. It all starts with a story of a party back in May 2011.
1:24.0	Hundreds of people dressed business casual, show up, have some more dervs,
1:28.8	and witness the grand opening of a brand new 2 million square foot auto manufacturing plant.
1:35.0	This is a good stuff.
1:38.0	It's like a fun party.
1:40.0	And some of the guests are cars.
	...

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