March has been a busy month for the automotive labor movement.
The United Auto Workers––which represents hundreds of thousands of autoworkers and is trying to organize thousands more at foreign automakers and EV manufacturers to try to secure workers’ futures in the EV transition––filed federal labor charges against Volkswagen, ratified a contract for EV battery plant workers, and threw its support behind proposed tariffs that have jolted the industry.
First up: The UAW alleged that Volkswagen is “violating US labor law” by reducing jobs at a Tennessee plant and claimed the automaker is attempting to “make major changes without first negotiating with the union, as required by law.” Volkswagen says this claim is “categorically false” and that it has been negotiating the shift reduction with the union “for months.”
Workers at the Chattanooga plant voted last year to join the UAW and are negotiating their first contract with the company.
VW attributed its decision to reduce a shift at the plant, where it builds numerous models including the electric ID.4, in part to slower EV demand, as well as broader efforts to make its global business more efficient. The company is implementing a voluntary attrition program.
“The UAW has notified the Trump administration of Volkswagen’s unacceptable, anti-union, anti-worker, and anti-American conduct,” UAW President Shawn Fain said in a statement. “It is no accident that they want to ram through a layoff in America in the days before expected auto tariffs take effect, as they profit from high exploitation labor in Mexico.”
Speaking of: Despite UAW leadership’s historically sour relationship with President Donald Trump, the union backed his proposed 25% tariff on imports from Mexico and Canada and spoke out against the harm it says unrestricted free trade has had on US workers.
“Tariffs are a powerful tool in the toolbox for undoing the injustice of anti-worker trade deals,” the union said in a statement. “We are glad to see an American president take aggressive action on ending the free trade disaster that has dropped like a bomb on the working class.”
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Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, pointed to a 1960s trade policy known as the chicken tax, whose name came from a dispute over Germany refusing to buy chickens from the US, to explain the UAW’s stance.
“In retaliation, the United States passed a 25% tariff on pickup trucks,” Wheaton told Tech Brew. “In effect, it was designed to try to stop Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz, who were the two biggest German automakers of any kind of trucks at that time or commercial vans...The net effect was that they stopped almost all other pickup trucks being imported to the US.”
But while that policy has held steady for decades, Trump has repeatedly changed his tariffs policy.
“I think there’s support for tariffs in general,” Wheaton said, “but I don’t know that the UAW is going out of the way to say, ‘Trump’s got it perfect.’”
Meanwhile: This month, UAW members in Spring Hill, Tennessee, voted to ratify their first contract with Ultium Cells, an EV battery manufacturing joint venture between General Motors and LG Energy Solution.
“We do the hard, dangerous work of building EV batteries, and now we’ve got a union contract that guarantees our future,” bargaining team member Derrick Kinzer said in a statement.
The contract mirrors the one that workers at an Ultium plant in Ohio ratified last year.
In a statement, Ultium Cells said it “looks forward to working with the UAW at the Spring Hill [plant] as we implement the contents of the agreement.”