Autoworkers Union Gets Help From German Counterparts For Chattanooga Push

Newly-elected UAW president Dennis Williams announces the creation of Local 42 in Chattanooga earlier this year. Credit: UAW via Facebook

The United Auto Workers is now getting help organizing at Volkswagen’s only U.S. plant from the company’s labor board and the dominant auto union in Germany, IG Metall.

Previously, lone representatives from both entities have voiced support for the UAW effort in Chattanooga, but this letter of intent formalizes the support. The union has never gotten this kind of help organizing at a U.S. plant of a foreign-owned automaker, say UAW officials.

“It is a formal agreement – a contract of sorts – between the three, that we’re all committed at an equal level to the organization of the Chattanooga plant,” UAW Secretary Gary Casteel tells WPLN.

Importantly, Casteel points out that the VW Global Works Council and IG Metall specifically want the Tennessee plant to be a “UAW-represented facility.” There has been a competing organizing effort from anti-UAW workers trying to start an alternate union under the name American Council of Employees.

The document, signed by IG Metall’s Detlef Wetzel and the VW Global Works Council’s Bernd Osterloh, says the three entities will develop a “joint communication plan. The works council will supply company information to the UAW. IG Metall will help establish the local UAW chapter on the ground in Chattanooga.

While workers voted down the union in February, the UAW established a local chapter anyway in an end-run around the traditional election process, which met stiff resistance among Republican politicians. Casteel says the union now has a majority of workers in the plant signed up, though none of them have to pay dues unless Volkswagen officially recognizes the union.