Put yourself in the steel-toed boots of a worker at Volkswagen’s auto assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tenn. Let’s say you vote Republican — not a stretch, since Donald Trump got 60.7 percent of the popular vote in Tennessee in 2020, versus 46.9 percent nationally.
There’s a vote on whether to join the United Automobile Workers union, giving organized labor its first factorywide foothold at a major foreign automaker in the South. Are you a yes or a no?
We know now that the pro-union side won with nearly three-quarters of the vote in an election that ended on Friday. And while there’s no breakdown of the votes by party affiliation, it stands to reason that at least some of the people who voted for the union were Republicans — members of a party that, especially in the South, has been strongly anti-union.
I think what we saw in Chattanooga is workers voting on the basis of economics rather than party alignment. If that continues to happen elsewhere, the South could some day become as unionized as the rest of the country. It won’t happen quickly, though, because government officials and corporate groups are likely to continue to fight back.
Some opponents of the U.A.W.’s organizing clearly attempted to use some workers’ loyalty to Trump as leverage against the union. The website Still No U.A.W. featured a message from Trump on Truth Social that called Shawn Fain, the U.A.W. president, “a Weapon of Mass Destruction on Auto Workers and the Automobile Manufacturing Industry in the United States.” The same website said unions are “major donors to left-wing Democrats” and pointed out that President Biden supported the organizing effort in Chattanooga.
The governors of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, all Republicans, issued a statement just before the vote in Chattanooga warning that U.A.W. leaders “seem more focused on helping President Biden get re-elected than on the autoworker jobs being cut at plants they already represent.”
Yolanda Peoples, a member of the plant’s voluntary organizing committee, who told me she’s a Democrat, said the Republicans’ warnings were “an issue that we did face while we were organizing.” She said, “We were trying to leave politics out of what we had going on inside the plant.”
The outside pressure to vote against the union might have backfired, Peoples said. “My co-workers, whether they were anti- or for, they just got tired of politicians speaking on how we should run our plant. Instead of hurting us during our campaign, it actually helped us.”
I heard the same thing from Billy Dycus, the president of the Tennessee A.F.L.-C.I.O. Labor Council, who describes himself as a political independent. “People said, ‘Wait a minute, we don’t want to hear you tell us what to do anymore,’” he told me, referring to the six governors’ message. “We want to make up our own minds.”
The Detroit Free Press reported in 2020 that according to the U.A.W.’s 2016 postelection survey of its members, about a third of those who voted chose Trump. I think unions are benefiting from the same wave of populism that has helped lift Trump. Workers, including Republicans, appear to have lost confidence that their employers will look out for their best interests. Gallup reported last year that just 18 percent of Republicans have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in big business, the lowest level since at least 1973. About twice as many, 35 percent, reported having little or no confidence in big business.
Labor unions, which claim to protect workers from management, seem attractive by comparison. Forty-seven percent of Republicans approved of labor unions last year, up from 26 percent in 2011, according to Gallup. That’s far less than the figures for Democrats (88 percent last year, 78 percent in 2011), but still pretty high.
I see the interest in unions as a rejection of Republican orthodoxy, but not necessarily a sign of budding support for Democrats. It’s worth noting that a majority of the right-to-work laws that allow workers to enjoy the benefits of union-won contracts without belonging to the union aren’t Republican creations. Most were passed in the 1940s and 1950s, when Southern states were solidly Democratic.
“Most workers are looking at it and saying: ‘This is the workplace. Whether Biden or Trump is president is not going to change what I’m paid,’” said Stephen Silvia, an American University political scientist and the author of a 2023 book, “The U.A.W.’s Southern Gamble: Organizing Workers at Foreign-Owned Vehicle Plants.”
Renee Berry, another member of the voluntary organizing committee in Chattanooga, said workers at the Volkswagen plant were impressed by the contracts that the U.A.W. won last year after striking General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, the parent of Chrysler, Jeep and Ram. “If they can do it, we can do it,” Berry told me.
“This is our plant,” she said. “It’s not about Trump. It’s not about Biden. It’s about us, getting what we deserve.”
Elsewhere: Quirky Reasons for Higher Inflation
Idiosyncratic factors largely accounted for the rise in inflation in the first quarter of the year, and as those factors fade away, inflation “will fall in the rest of the year,” economists at Goldman Sachs predicted in a client note on Monday.
Consumer electronics prices rose in the first quarter at the fastest pace since records began in 1959, probably because they were rebounding from bigger-than-usual holiday discounts, according to Jessica Rindels, who wrote the client note. Financial services prices also rose rapidly, “reflecting the mechanical boost from rising equity prices to financial services prices,” she wrote. And health care services inflation ran hot “because price catch-up to the pandemic cost surge occurs disproportionately at the start of the year,” she wrote.
Goldman economists are predicting an inflation rate of 2.2 percent in the second, third and fourth quarters, down from an estimated 4 percent in the first, going by the average monthly annualized pace of change in prices of personal consumption expenditures excluding food and energy.
Quote of the Day
“To ask today’s regulators to save us from tomorrow’s crisis using yesterday’s toolbox is to ask a Border collie to catch a Frisbee by first applying Newton’s Law of Gravity.”
— Andrew Haldane, then executive director for financial stability at the Bank of England, speech, “The Changing Policy Landscape” (Aug. 31, 2012)