Somewhere in heaven Crystal Lee Sutton, the real-life “Norma Rae” of the epic labor war in the Carolina textile industry of the 1970s, has a big smile on her face.
More than anyone, Sutton—the inspiration for the 1979 film Norma Rae--would know the joy that the 4,300 workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, must feel after their huge victory Friday to join the United Auto Workers.
As with Sutton, who died in 2009, and her fellow workers in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, who fought a decade-long war with the giant J.P. Stevens textile company before winning their union, it took the auto workers in Chattanooga three major votes and 10 years to gain Saturday’s win. They went from losing their first vote 626-712 in 2014 and second vote 776-833 in 2019 to win this time by an unofficial count of 2628 to 985, more than a 70 percent margin.
“Being able to have a voice of your own is more important than just letting other people decide for you,” worker Manny Perez, 25, told crusading labor reporter Mike Elk of Payday Report just before the final results came in.
“This is a defining moment for the workers throughout the South and the rest of the country,” the University of California at Berkeley Labor Center Co-Chair Brenda Muñoz said in a statement issued after the victory. “Foreign auto manufacturers can no longer count on the Southern states to provide cheap labor at the expense of working families.”
The victory came despite the fierce opposition of what this writer has long described as the phalanx of anti-union forces in the South. Powerful politicians such as Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee told workers they “risk their futures” if they vote union. A so-called “labor” online site called the LaborUnionNews.com pushed anti-UAW propaganda even as it presented itself as a valid source of labor information.
In the 2014 union vote, then-Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam and then-U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, both Republicans, essentially lied to the public by pretending to remain neutral while working feverishly to defeat the union behind closed doors. Haslam was part of a scheme to offer Volkswagen $300 million to expand its Chattanooga plant so long as the company worked with the state in preventing unionization there. Corker worked with LaborUnionNews.com owner Peter List back in 2014 to defeat the UAW.
“You got the whole community against you, the supervisors, the merchants, the newspapers,” the late Mississippi labor warrior Ray Smithhart, then-dean of his state’s labor organizers, told me in 2004. “You can’t get the message across. What we needed was at least some kind of debate. This would let the employees hear both sides of the issues.”
Several factors contributed to the UAW victory in Chattanooga. A new cadre of young workers have joined the Volkswagen plant in recent years, bringing with energy and a greater willingness to consider the union cause that older workers have had. In a recent Southern Workers Assembly online discussion with workers and activists across the region, veteran organizer Ed Bruno of the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) said that young and energized organizers are key to union success today.
Another factor is the success of the UAW’s Stand Up Strike campaign in 2023 that led to union victories at General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, prompting the union to pledge $40 million toward a new effort to the organize the union-resistant U.S. South. A union vote is already scheduled for May 13-17 at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama. Organizers say they already have majority support for a union.
Volkswagen, unionized everywhere else in the world except in the United States, had to comply with rules from its German base to keep hands-off in the union effort, including forbidding anti-union one-on-one sessions and required attendance at anti-union films.
Workers have complained about safety conditions at the plant and lax efforts to address safety issues even when identified. Company promises of better days to come never materialized. All factors that provide fertile soil for unionization.
After Crystal Lee “Norma Rae” Sutton and her fellow workers won their fight for union recognition back in 1974, they had to wait another six years to get a contract with J.P. Stevens. That contract marked the end of a 17-year war that included illegal firings, delaying tactics, intimidation, what National Labor Relations Board administrative judge Bernard Reiss called “corporate designed lawlessness.”
Let’s hope Volkswagen is less intransigent and more willing now to sit down across the table from workers to develop a fair and equitable contract that can be a model to other foreign-owned and domestically owned companies across the South.
