Column: Will UAW vote at VW Chattanooga start another long campaign?

UAW President Shawn Fain and his union have planned a modern-day march through the South that, if successful, threatens to alter the long-term direction of the nation's auto industry.

How historically ironic, then, that it looks likely to step off from the same city — Chattanooga — from which Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman launched a similar, albeit far more deadly, mission 160 years earlier.

On March 18, the UAW announced that workers at Volkswagen's massive Chattanooga Assembly complex had filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board seeking an election to form a union local at the plant that makes the Atlas crossover family and the ID4 electric compact crossover. When the vote happens, it will be the third time in a decade that VW workers will decide whether to form their own union, most recently in 2019. The UAW lost 833 to 776 — a narrow defeat that could've been swung by just 29 voters out of 1,609 in an election that took place during the worst corruption scandal in the UAW's history.

Of all the UAW's publicly identified automotive organizing targets in its $40 million drive, VW's Chattanooga plant was always going to be the most ripe for potential plucking, in no small part because of the close result five years ago. During that campaign, VW allowed then first-term Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, to give a closed-door speech urging workers to reject unionization for the economic good of the state. The governor's pro-business speech was surreptitiously recorded and shared with media.

In the intervening years, VW has indeed brought new products to Chattanooga, including the Atlas Cross Sport and most recently the ID4, added 1,200 jobs and spurred what it says is $2.7 billion in supplier investment in the region. That certainly matters to Tennessee, but it doesn't do much for the worker who's already there.

More importantly on an individual basis, the plant has also had a series of managers from around the globe and struggled with consistent build quality, even dispatching longtime executive Johan de Nysschen to the plant in 2021 to address the issue.

In November, shortly after the UAW settled its most recent contracts with the Detroit 3, VW announced 11 percent pay increases for its Chattanooga workforce and compressed its wage progression. The raises mirrored gains won by the UAW, and other nonunionized automakers in the U.S. granted similar atypical wage increases in the wake of the strike settlement.

From the automakers' standpoint, the increases were a defensive strategy to remain competitive in a tight labor market and a hedge to remain nonunion. But they likely also reinforced to their own workforces what the UAW had won, because those double-digit wage increases wouldn't have happened were it not for the strike, and left them to wonder if their labor was being consistently undervalued.

We, of course, don't know how this latest vote will turn out at VW Chattanooga, nor do we know the extent of the UAW's claim that it has collected membership cards from a "supermajority" of the 4,000 workers there.

Unions rarely call for votes they don't think they can win, but there can be a big difference between collecting commitments online and convincing people to vote yes and pay dues.

What most interests me, however, is where Fain and the UAW will turn after Chattanooga. Will they follow Sherman's path into Georgia to engage Hyundai at the new plant it's building near Savannah? Or perhaps swing Southwest toward a second German-run factory: the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Ala.?

My inner history buff can't wait to find out.