Both Volkswagen AG management and the United Auto Workers union want to see history play out differently in Tennessee from the last time the German automaker had a US assembly plant. While the landscape is very different from 25 years ago, the legacy of the older plant's failure is part of the troubled history the UAW will have to overcome as it tries to represent VW workers again - this time in Tennessee, where the automaker employs 2,500 people building Passat sedans.
After the 1988 closure of VW's plant in south-western Pennsylvania, Ron Dinsmore kept a grisly toll of the pain: the number of suicides of former workers. He stopped counting at 19. "I used to go to every funeral home," said Dinsmore, 71. "I quit doing it. It got morbid." Dinsmore was hired at the VW plant in East Huntingdon when it opened in 1978 and stayed on even after the last car - a two-door Golf - rolled off the line a decade later. By that time, he was also a UAW official.
When Volkswagen decided to open its first US assembly plant in the 1970s, it assumed it would have to deal with the UAW, then at the height of its power as an industrial union and a force in American politics. Dealing with the UAW was seen as the cost of doing business. How the German automaker will deal with the US union today at its two-year-old plant in Chattanooga is not so clear. The VW plant in Pennsylvania was troubled from the start with wildcat strikes and costly production shutdowns.
UAW leaders say things will be different this time because they want to establish what they call a new kind of labour model in Tennessee, where the union would represent hourly workers in partnership with a German-style workers council. The UAW, which has said it has the support of the majority of the plant's hourly workers, has pushed VW officials to recognise the union without a formal election, a move the company has resisted.
Success in the South, where anti-union feelings run strong, could open the door to similar UAW organising efforts at other foreign-owned US auto plants and bolster the union's membership, which has shrunk by about three-quarters since its peak in 1979.
VW has moved slowly, however, and a source with knowledge of the management board's thinking told Reuters this month that any final decision will need the approval of the workers through a formal vote. The board is divided on whether and how workers at the plant should be represented by a union. VW's Chattanooga factory is a world away from the plant in rural Westmoreland County in Pennsylvania that employed 5,700 people at its peak.
The state of Pennsylvania has owned the site since VW left and leases more than a quarter of the property to a range of smaller firms, including a maker of sodium ion batteries and energy storage systems. The only traces of VW at the 2.8 million-square-foot plant, which along with the surrounding land is big enough to hold 15 Walmart supercenters, are a few forest green interior walls.
The reasons for shutting the plant included flagging demand for the outdated small cars it built, a weak US dollar that hurt VW when shipping parts to the plant from overseas, and an adversarial relationship between the plant's American managers and VW's headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany, former workers and executives said. There has been similar friction between VW's US executives and leaders back in Germany over whether to allow the UAW to represent the Tennessee workers. To help its cause, the UAW has sought the support of VW's global works council, as well as the powerful German union IG Metall.
It would not be the first time the UAW has received support from IG Metall, which intervened to help the US union in Pennsylvania in the late 1970s. "The word came over, 'We want you to look favorably on the UAW organising the plant,'" one of the former VW executives, who asked not to be identified, said of the Pennsylvania plant. "The fact was that IG Metall put a big threat on VW in Germany - 'Help them organise, or else.'" UAW President Bob King, 67, is eager to show that a new UAW has emerged from the wreckage of the auto industry in Detroit and the union can be a more flexible partner with management.
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