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The UAW is escalating its fight to organize tens of thousands of autoworkers.
The union on Monday filed unfair labor practice charges with federal labor regulators, accusing three foreign automakers of union busting. The claims stem from what the union says are illegal tactics by management at a Honda plant in Indiana, a Hyundai factory in Alabama, and a Volkswagen facility in Tennessee where workers have been organizing.
“Our message to workers everywhere is simple: The UAW has your back,” UAW President Shawn Fain said on Facebook Live on Monday. “And our message to the companies is clear: An attack on a worker anywhere is an attack on workers everywhere. If you come after one auto worker, you’re coming after all of us.”
Workers at Honda’s Indiana Auto Plant, where the UAW says hundreds have signed union cards, reported being “targeted and surveilled by management for pro-union activity.” In a statement, Honda denied the claims and said it “encourages our associates to engage and get information on this issue.”
At VW’s plant in Chattanooga, where the UAW recently went public with an organizing campaign after more than 1,000 workers there signed union cards, the UAW claims plant management has “harassed and threatened workers for talking about the union,” confiscated pro-union materials, and attempted to stop workers from handing out pro-union materials, among other claims.
VW responded in a statement that it “respects our workers’ right to determine who should represent their interests in the workplace,” and said it takes the union’s claims “very seriously” and would investigate them.
The UAW also claims that management at a Montgomery, Alabama, Hyundai plant have “confiscated, destroyed, and prohibited” union materials in non-work areas even when workers are off the clock.
In response, Hyundai said in a statement that workers “may choose to join a union or not as is their legal right” and disputed the union’s portrayal of events: “We look forward to having a fair opportunity to present the facts through our participation in the legal process.”
It’ll now be up to the National Labor Relations Board to investigate the charges.
The UAW’s organizing campaign seeks to unionize workers across the auto industry at BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Lucid, Mazda, Mercedes, Nissan, Rivian, Subaru, Tesla, Toyota, VW, and Volvo. The drive comes on the heels of the union winning record contracts for workers at GM, Ford, and Stellantis earlier this year after a six-week strike—and as the union looks to shore up future jobs at EV assembly and battery plants amid concerns about the electric transition displacing workers.
“They have clearly put the non-union companies they’ve targeted on a legal notice,” Marick Masters, a management professor and labor expert at Wayne State University, told Tech Brew, “and they are setting the stage for a challenge if they’re not able to get the number of authorization cards they want, that they have been denied that opportunity because of [unfair labor practices].”