Last July car parts as heavy as a small horse fell on Renee Berry. Three surgeries later she has metal rods, bolts and screws up her arms and cannot lift her two-year-old grandchild. In her 14 years working on the assembly line at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, she found the factory floor to be disorganised and unsafe. Eventually she joined a union drive to persuade her colleagues to take action. When workers voted in late April to make Volkswagen the first foreign carmaker in the South to unionise, Ms Berry fell to the floor in joy, raised her hands and called out: “Thank you, Lord, you heard our cry.”

The United Auto Workers (UAW) union hopes that the Volkswagen victory will set off a domino effect across the sunbelt, a region that has long been hostile to labour organisers. But was the win a fluke or a bellwether? That question will soon be tested: next week 6,100 workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama, are due to vote on whether to unionise. There, things look less favourable for the UAW.

In the 1980s carmakers began moving from the Midwest to the South, where regulation was sparse and states offered vast subsidies to newcomers. With the rise of globalisation southern politicians made the region competitive by keeping unions out and holding wages down. Right-to-work laws, which let workers opt out of paying union dues, bolstered the strategy. As carmakers from overseas set up factories in towns with more churches than traffic lights, assembly lines at Detroit’s “Big Three”—General Motors, Ford and what was once Chrysler—slimmed down. Today 30% of America’s automotive jobs are south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Down South foreign firms honed what Stephen Silvia, author of “The UAW’s Southern Gamble”, calls America’s “union-avoidance playbook”. They put factories in places where workers lived far from each other, used questionnaires to screen out prospective hires sympathetic to organising—asking if they played school sports or served in the army to gauge their obedience to authority, for example—showed anti-union clips on break-room televisions and cosied up to pastors and mayors by donating to town fundraisers. For years that worked. The UAW’s Bible Belt efforts failed repeatedly at Nissan, Toyota, Mercedes and Volkswagen.

Three things set the stage for this year’s pivot. The first was a revamp of the UAW. After years of falling membership, the union’s organising muscles had atrophied by the time Shawn Fain was elected president in March 2023. But once in office he sprang into action. By November strikes at the Big Three had led to record pay rises for hundreds of thousands of workers. Those left out of the deals looked on with new appreciation for what the union could do, and the union set its sights on tougher targets.

The second factor was Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, his administration’s flagship climate bill, which so far has spurred $123bn of investments in green manufacturing. Nowhere is benefiting more than the south-east, where over 100 projects have been announced. Mercedes is building a battery plant near Vance and Volkswagen has made Chattanooga its new electric-vehicle hub. More money and more jobs make it harder for the companies to leave, says Michael Gilliland, who worked on the Volkswagen union campaign. The flow of federal funds also makes firms less beholden to conservative state politicians.

Attention from Europe was the third catalyst for change. The president of Volkswagen’s German works council, an employee group that works closely with management, urged workers in Chattanooga to unionise and reassured them that this would not put their jobs at risk. A new German law that punishes union-busting with fines of up to 2% of revenue could make corporate bosses in the South think twice about waging their usual war on organisers. In April the UAW filed a complaint to Germany’s export-control agency alleging that Mercedes’s actions in Vance had violated it. Though organisers at European firms may benefit from allies abroad, those at Asian ones like Hyundai, Kia, Nissan and Toyota may not.

Will the UAW’s success in Chattanooga prove contagious? Opponents of unionisation are determined to prevent that. On April 16th six southern governors published a letter warning of the “ugly reality” that unions put “jobs in jeopardy” and that the UAW cares more about “helping President Biden get re-elected” than about workers. One week later Georgia passed a bill barring union-friendly firms from state tax relief. And Kay Ivey, Alabama’s governor, instructed Mercedes in no uncertain terms to “fix” the problems that sparked the organising. (The company quickly replaced its American boss.)

The best or nothing

Before voting begins, supervisors in Vance are inundating workers with messages about the risks of unionising and pulling those they deem persuadable aside for one-on-one chats. Whereas Volkswagen mostly stayed mum, organisers say Mercedes is “100% in anti-union mode”. Its pushback resembles a campaign Nissan ran in 2017, which fended off a years-long UAW effort in Canton, Mississippi.

Still, Jeremy Kimbrell, who has worked at Mercedes since 2000, is bullish. He reckons his  colleagues at the luxury carmaker’s highly profitable plant are finally fed up with what he calls “the Alabama discount”. “Why do we get paid less?” Mr Kimbrell asks. “Because we’re those dumb hicks down in Alabama,” he answers. “They came down here because we do the same work for less and won’t put up no fight.” No longer. Regardless of who wins next week, southern organisers will fight on.■

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