op-ed<\/a> opposing the union campaigns at Mercedes and Hyundai, calling car manufacturing one of the state\u2019s \u201ccrown jewel industries.\u201d
\n\u201cShe\u2019s damn right it is!\u201d Fain responded on April 2. \u201cIt\u2019s under attack because workers are fed up with getting screwed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n \n \n
\n Not the Boss\u2019s Friend<\/h2>\n \n
Since the last union efforts, the workforce has become majority black. When the company used one of its black managers to spew union-busting talking points, workers saw through it and laughed off the company\u2019s \u201cpathetic\u201d attempt to pander.<\/p>\n
None of the four major auto plants in Alabama \u2014 Mercedes, Hyundai, Toyota, and Honda \u2014 nor their suppliers are located where black majorities live. But workers like Moesha Chandler have moved to get auto jobs.<\/p>\n
She grew up in Uniontown, a small town about an hour away, with no grocery stores and no high-paying jobs.<\/p>\n
At Mercedes she found higher pay, but little respect. Group leaders use \u201cdiscretion,\u201d she says, to abuse their authority, grilling workers about bathroom breaks, denying them a break even to take insulin.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s what plowed the fields \u2014 the treatment,\u201d Kimbrell said. \u201cAnd then the workers, we cultivated the anger at the company.\u201d<\/p>\n
In previous organizing drives, the UAW presented itself as the best way to collaborate for win-win solutions \u2014 even promising in advance not to go for \u201cuncompetitive\u201d wages. But what worker needs a union to help kiss the boss\u2019s ass?<\/p>\n
Kimbrell prefers Fain\u2019s approach: openly adversarial. \u201cPeople see that, and they\u2019re like, yeah, we don\u2019t want to hold hands,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ll tell them, \u2018What you\u2019re doing is wrong. We don\u2019t want that, we want this. And we\u2019re the workers, so yeah, we\u2019re not your friends.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n\n \n
\n \n\n\nThis post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Autoworkers are gearing up to smash through anti-union bulwarks in Alabama and Tennessee. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, at the only Volkswagen (VW) factory in the world without a union, votes will be counted April 19 as 4,300 workers who make the Atlas SUV and the ID.4 electric vehicle decide whether to join the United Auto Workers [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":737,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1596609"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1596609"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1596609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1596610,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1596609\/revisions\/1596610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1596609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1596609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1596609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}