This Day in Labor History: July 27, 1989: The United Auto Workers suffers a devastating loss from Nissan workers in Smyrna, Tennessee, who reject unionization by a 2:1 margin. Let's talk about the consistent UAW failures to organize southern auto and what it means.
Nearly as soon as the CIO organized northern plants in the 1930s and 1940s, they became frightened at what would happen if they did not organize the nation. Companies could simply pick up and move factories to non-union states.
In fact, the textile industry had already escaped unionization by moving South by the time the United Auto Workers came to being. What better way to escape those pesky workers wanting rights than moving to where no socialism would thrive--rural Appalachia.
In the aftermath of World War II, the CIO tried to forestall this by organizing the South, but Operation Dixie was largely a failure.
White workers mostly avoided the CIO because of their unions' reputation as opponents of segregation and because of effective anti-union propaganda that combined racebaiting, anti-communism, anti-Semitism, and an overall attack on outsiders.
Meanwhile, the CIO’s own attempts to downplay its racial progressivism and Jewish origins and thus not really organize the black workers who would actually join the unions backfired, alienating black workers without attracting white workers.
And in fact, by the 1960s and 1970s, massive layoffs did take place in northern union factories as companies sought to reopen in the South and, increasingly, overseas, as I wrote about in my first book, Out of Sight with @thenewpress
amazon.com/Out-Sight-Corp…
amazon.com/Out-Sight-Corp…
Meanwhile, as Japanese car companies began entering the American market in a major way in the 1970s, they found it politically expedient to open some production facilities in the United States.
The Japanese have quite different labor relations than the United States; although not the subject of this thread, it’s worth noting that at least in theory, it’s more collaborative and less antagonistic than in the U.S.
But then almost anything would be, as American employers were always bitter about unionization and daily battles took place on factory floors as foremen and upper supervisors constantly engaged in petty contract violations to bust union members’ chops.
When Japanese companies came to the U.S., there was the same emphasis on flexibility, but that got combined with the old-school union-busting of American employers.
Top executives might not be American, but those running operations day-to-day were. That was true of Nissan’s Smyrna, Tennessee plant, opened in 1983.
The United Auto Workers knew it needed to organize these new Japanese plants, located largely in the South precisely because wages were lower and unions less accepted, if they were to remain a force. So they started working to build organizing capacity in the plants.
Unfortunately, when the ground broke on the plant in 1981, unionized construction workers, knowing it would be a non-union plant, protested with signs reading “Go Home Japs” while hiring an airplane to fly a banner reading “Go home Datsun, Put America Back to Work.”
This was not well-received. The UAW was as embarrassed as anyone. Not a great start.
The UAW made solid points to the Nissan workers. They noted that the Ford plant in Nashville paid workers nearly $8,000 more a year and that safety conditions at the Nissan plant were significantly worse than at Ford.
They discovered massive workplace health and safety issues, especially around repetitive motion injuries, which were affecting workers still in their 20s. Nissan countered with the usual anti-union barrage, denying the safety charges, talking about outsiders, etc.
Nissan also, and this is important here, discussing how a UAW contract might disrupt the fringe benefits Nissan provided, especially the very inexpensive leasing of new vehicles for workers. This gets to the power of truck culture in the working class, second only to guns.
If you give a guy a new truck at a very low rate and tell him he will be able to get another in a few years, any threat to that, especially in a southern culture that values trucks, you may well have him locked in, even if you pay him at a low rate. And I say "him" intentionally.
Organizing was hard-going otherwise. At the time, Michigan was a majority union state, with 53 percent of workers unionized. Tennessee: only 14 percent. Moreover, Nissan had screened interviewees for anti-union attitudes in the hiring process, eliminating obvious union activists.
And even though the wages were low for the auto industry, they were high compared to other local businesses, other jobs that these specific workers could get.
Finally, the day of the vote, Nissan made employees listen to a recorded message by CEO Carlos Ghosn, who had a long history of anti-union activity at various companies, talking about how the UAW would make Nissan uncompetitive, etc. etc.
In other words, this was the typical extreme anti-union campaign that was common by the late 1980s and still is today that intimidates workers on the fence into voting no because they are scared.
You know, voting for a union is actually a very brave political act by workers. I think we often underestimate just what courage it takes to do that in the face of fears of losing your job and the intense anti-union barrage you hear at work. This is really important to understand
The final vote was 1,622 no to 711 yes. A terrible defeat. It’s worth noting that many of those “no” votes were not committed anti-union people, but rather people who were scared by the threats and intimidation of Nissan.
UAW president Owen Bieber said, “All this election demonstrates is that when a company is determined to operate without a union and is willing to use threats and misrepresentation to an unlimited extent, the company can delay, if not escape, its day of reckoning.” Maybe not.
Japanese auto in the South has never had its day of reckoning. The UAW has lost campaign after campaign after campaign. And its power in American life has continued to decline.
The most notorious UAW loss was in 2014, when workers in the Chattanooga Volkswagen plant voted it down, even though VW leaders actually wanted the union to help settle labor relations in Germany.
But the combination of right-wing propaganda, anti-union attacks on the shop floor from foremen and good old-fashioned race-baiting did the campaign in.
Again and again in southern auto, like southern organizing generally, we see white workers’ refusal to join unions overwhelm the black workers who vote for unionization at much higher rates.
In the end, the South is just incredibly hard to organize. It is different than the rest of the nation. I know a lot of southern organizers resist the idea that the South is really a problem when it comes to American labor. But where's the evidence to suggest otherwise?
And then there’s the labor left, which wants to blame UAW leadership and bad organizing tactics for these defeats. We can call this the Labor Notes critique, which always blames union leadership. But again, where's the evidence that its model could work better? Doesn't exist.
Much stronger evidence suggests the power of white supremacy as a union-busting tactic as well as the other parts of white southern culture that attracted employers--evangelicalism, traditions of deferral to local elites, the lack of other good jobs in the South.
I know these aren't the answers that a lot of people on different sides of the left want to hear, but I think the historical and contemporary evidence is very strong for them.
Back tomorrow with a discussion of the time the political leaders of Homestead, Pennsylvania tried to ban Frances Perkins from talking to steel workers in 1933.
