The NLRB election at VW in Chattanooga came down to a narrow vote, made in the context of serious interference by third parties intent on seeing the UAW lose. With 89% turnout, the result turned on the votes of 44 workers, less than 3% of the eligible workforce. Cue the schadenfreude and self loathing. While a grave disappointment, this is not the end. This is just the beginning.
As the present UAW secretary-treasurer, and presumptive next president, Dennis Williams put it:
"We're not leaving Chattanooga," said Williams, who likely will be elected to a four-year term as president in June. "It took seven years to organize Ford, and I will be around for at least another five."
That organizing campaign culminated in what's been called Battle of the Overpass, where Ford Service Department, aka hired thugs, men beat down Richard Franksteen, the UAW's Ford organizing director, in full view of the press, and pushed another UAW staffer off the pedestrian overpass to the rails 30 feet below. Sort of puts things into context, huh?
In the grand scheme of things, the threats made by outside parties during the VW organizing campaign, and NLRB election, in Tennessee pale in comparison.
The Battle of the Overpass in 1937 was not the first time that actual, physical, violence had been employed against workers trying to organize. Nor was it the worst. Ignoring the outright massacres: Homestead, Ludlow, Matewan, and Blair Mountain
The organizing campaign had started five years earlier with the Ford Hunger March on the same factory complex, ending in the killing of four, and the wounding of another nearly two dozen. What happened at VW was awful, and wrong, but it was not, by far, the worst that could have happened. If the men and women who had just watched their comrades be shot down, could get up and do it again, surely this isn't the end for the organizing campaign at VW.
Read More