Mercedes-Benz workers in Vance, Alabama, will vote on whether to join the United Auto Workers (UAW). On Friday, the UAW filed for an election to represent all 5,200 of the plant’s hourly employees, after the union said a supermajority of workers at the company’s mammoth plant signed union cards in three months.
Jeremy Kimbrell, a measurement machine operator at the plant, said as part of the UAW’s announcement: “At Mercedes, at Hyundai and at hundreds of other companies, Alabama workers have made billions of dollars for executives and shareholders, but we haven’t gotten our fair share. We’re going to turn things around with this vote. We’re going to end the Alabama discount.”
The union election filing comes as 4,300 workers at Volkswagen’s 3.8-million-square-foot factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, prepare to vote on whether to join the UAW between April 17 and 19 in a National Labor Relations Board election.
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The results at Volkswagen and Mercedes will be a key test for the UAW’s bid to translate the momentum of its landmark strike at the Big Three automakers into new organizing. The UAW is betting that as goes the South, so go the rest of the non-union citadels of cheap auto assembly labor across the nation.
More than 10,000 workers at 13 non-union carmakers across two dozen facilities nationwide have signed union cards since last November, when the UAW announced an ambitious goal to organize 150,000 workers at major non-union auto and battery plants.
Workers at a Toyota plant in Missouri are well on their way to 50 percent support, putting a third election on the map in the coming months.
The UAW has committed $40 million through 2026 to support organizing at non-union auto and battery plants. Under a prior administration, in 2011, it had committed $60 million over four years—but never came close to spending it.
Workers are especially angry about tiered pay, which was instituted in 2020.
Previous organizing efforts at Mercedes and Volkswagen over the past decade have either failed narrowly or fizzled before coming to a vote, except for a group of skilled trades workers in Chattanooga who won their union election at VW. But since then, grievances have grown and workers are fed up.
One of the few Southern footholds for unionized autoworkers, at Daimler Truck North America, has a Mercedes connection. Mercedes is the largest shareholder of Daimler Truck; the company was spun off from the Mercedes-Benz Group (formerly Daimler AG) in 2021.
Seven thousand Daimler Truck workers voted by 96 percent in March to authorize a strike if necessary after their contracts across six facilities in North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee expire on April 26. UAW President Shawn Fain rallied with workers Tuesday in North Carolina.
“For centuries, the Southern economy has been a rigged game—a scheme designed to enrich a select few at the expense of the many,” said Fain. “It’s a system where the wealthy and powerful have hoarded the wealth and monopolized the power … So, to the bosses and talking heads: go ahead and cry your crocodile tears and rage against the inevitable. But know this: Southern workers are rising, and we won’t rest until justice is served.”
BUILT IN A PINE FOREST IN NEARBY TUSCALOOSA in 1997, the Mercedes factory complex, covered in gleaming metallic panels, has a body and a paint shop that feed two assembly plants. The company recently added an electric-battery plant nearby, where company supervisors have engaged in some of the most egregious union busting, according to plant employees.
Mercedes’s two non-union U.S. plants, the Alabama plant and another one in South Carolina, are the company’s only non-union plants in the entire world.
Autoworkers at Mercedes-Benz’s Alabama factory complex make highly profitable luxury GLE SUVs and the $170,000 Maybach GLS. These luxury products attracted workers because Mercedes used to be seen as a destination employer for its high-road benefits and pay.
But today, workers feel betrayed. “In 17 years, we have gotten a raise of roughly $4.50,” said Jacob Ryan, a body shop worker who started out as a temp. “We are making luxury vehicles. The company is making record profits year after year, while taking more and more from us.” Mercedes has earned $156 billion in total profits over the last decade, the union has pointed out.
As the workforce became more diverse, workers say, Mercedes started taking away benefits. It reduced the allowance for company-branded uniforms, for instance, and raised insurance costs.
Plant conditions deteriorated. Moesha Chandler started in the battery plant, six miles away in Woodstock. “The hours were very long, and we worked six days out of the week, but I had no complaints since it wasn’t hard manual labor,” she said. But later she moved to the assembly line, where the work is more grueling and cruel.
As the workforce became more diverse, workers say, Mercedes started taking away benefits.
Workers have urinated on themselves for fear of stepping off the line, said Chandler, because managers would upbraid them and force them to stay until they hit the shift production target.
“It’s one thing to work long hours,” said Sammie Ellis, another assembly-line worker. “It’s another to impose penalties for using the bathroom. They’re denying us our human rights.”
On Wednesday, the UAW filed charges against Mercedes-Benz Group AG, parent company of the U.S. subsidiary (Mercedes-Benz U.S. International, or MBUSI) that runs the Alabama plant. The UAW charged that Mercedes violated Germany’s Act on Corporate Due Diligence Obligations in Supply Chains and workers’ human rights on seven separate occasions. Should the company be found guilty, Mercedes could face billions in penalties and bans on government contracts.
Workers said the strategy was to tie up the company legally in the U.S. and Germany ahead of the election announcement. Last week, workers filed multiple unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB, requesting an injunction against MBUSI to stop the company’s illegal retaliation.
On the trim line, workers touch 430 vehicles during their ten-hour shifts. “Every minute the line goes down, there are cars we are losing,” Ellis said. “When you build a car and it gets ready to go to another area, there is a buffer. The buffer might hold ten cars. Within the first two or three minutes of a person going to the bathroom, we have to race to catch up because we will not hit the number of cars we want to hit within ten hours.”
The company is routinely understaffed, which prevents workers from even taking vacation.
Meanwhile, pay has stagnated. Ryan has done the math: “The top pay was $27.77 in 2007. That would be $41 in today’s money. Up until the union push, we were at $32 an hour. We were falling behind inflation!”
Workers are especially angry about tiered pay, which was instituted in 2020. “It rubbed me the wrong way that co-workers who had been working there for two years longer than I, doing the exact same job as me, were making five and a half dollars more an hour to do the exact same job at relatively the same skill level,” said battery worker David Johnston.
Workers have reason to be defiant. They aren’t only taking on the company, but also Alabama politicians and auto industry figures.
Mercedes never rehired workers who had been laid off in 2008, and it locked temps into a two-tier system. The company offered some workers buyouts, but many felt that they were forced out. “Some were recently hired back under the second tier, which would have paid them less topped out than they were making when they left almost 15 years prior,” said Kimbrell, who has been at the company for over 20 years.
But even newer hires remember the way the company treated workers. “I’ve come to find out that Mercedes dragged its feet when the company switched staffing agencies,” Johnston said. “The temps were hired on after January 2020, so that they no longer got the same pay rate, even though these people had been working three to six years, waiting to be hired on with the company. They got shoved into a tier system that didn’t account for seniority rights.”
In February, a month after workers had signed 30 percent of their co-workers on union cards, Mercedes announced it would hike the top pay by $2 and eliminate the wage tiers. That would mean a jump in pay for top tier from $32 to $34 an hour, while the second tier would also top out at $34 after four years, according to Kimbrell.
Workers interpreted this as a move to stem their union momentum. It didn’t work.
BESIDES THE CARROT, MERCEDES HAS TRIED the stick. Pro-union worker Al Ezell was fired for having his phone on the assembly line in case his doctor called him to refill a prescription to treat stage 4 lung cancer, according to a UAW press release. Supply chain snarls have made it difficult for Ezell to refill his prescription.
“Management called me into the office to discipline me for having my phone on the floor,” Ezell said. “My manager looked me in the face and told me she didn’t care that I have cancer or that I had permission, she was going to enforce the company’s zero-tolerance policy. We’ve never had a zero-tolerance policy for having a phone on the floor. Management is just trying to scare us, but we won’t back down.” The UAW has filed federal charges over this and other unfair labor practices.
In February, the Department of Labor recovered $438,625 in back wages, unpaid bonuses, and damages for two Mercedes-Benz workers, who charged that the company had violated their rights to protected leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act.
Another pro-union worker, Lakeisha Carter, says she was also denied an FMLA request, and attributed it to her organizing. “I’m an outspoken union supporter and Mercedes illegally disciplined me for medical absences that were clearly covered by my FMLA requests,” she said in a union press release. “It’s just plain retaliation from Mercedes, but I’m not going to be intimidated.”
Workers have reason to be defiant. They aren’t only taking on the company, but also Alabama politicians and auto industry figures.
Mercedes-Benz U.S. International CEO Michael Göbel told workers forming a union would mean strikes, costly dues, and roadblocks to conflict resolution, reported Josh Eidelson for Bloomberg, after reviewing an audio recording a worker provided him. “I don’t believe the UAW can help us to be better,” Göbel said.
Like Walmart and Tyson in Arkansas, Mercedes and Volkswagen exert formidable influence over their host states. Volkswagen operates a park next to its Chattanooga plant. Mercedes sponsors Tuscaloosa’s primary concert venue and pitched in with the recovery efforts after devastating tornadoes in 2011. One grievance among workers there is that the company’s civic role has diminished overtime, including company-sponsored family days and concerts at the Tuscaloosa amphitheater.
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey wrote an op-ed vowing to oppose the union campaigns in the state, not only at Mercedes but also at Hyundai. Ivey went one step further and said the union push by the UAW means that Alabama’s “model for economic success is under attack.”
Fain responded to that comment on Tuesday. “She’s damn right it is! It’s under attack because workers are fed up with getting screwed,” the UAW president said.
Alabama’s commerce secretary, Ellen McNair, has echoed the same talking point, saying the unionization drive “places our state’s main economic driver in the crosshairs.”
Workers brushed off these union-busting comments, and want politicians to stay out of their union vote. Referring to Gov. Ivey, Chandler said: “She’s not here walking in our shoes.”
