(CN) — When Jeremy Kimbrell landed a job 24 years ago at the Mercedes Benz plant in Vance, Alabama, he thought his life had taken a turn for the better.
Just 22-years-old at the time, his experience included working in a clothing warehouse and for a roofing company. The pay was low, the benefits were meager, and Kimbrell wasn’t exactly fond of the hot and dangerous work.
Through an acquaintance, Kimbrell heard the newly minted Mercedes plant was hiring temporary workers with the possibility to be retained as employees. The jobs offered pay of up to $20 per hour, health insurance, vacation and sick days and a retirement plan. The incentives fell short of what union workers were earning at the so-called “Big Three” automakers of General Motors, Stellantis and Ford. Still, it was “pretty good for Alabama,” Kimbrell recalled thinking at the time.
But as the years passed and the economy evolved, Kimbrell and other Mercedes workers began to feel increasingly neglected. Pay raises became smaller and less frequent, while promotions slowed to a trickle. Management constantly increased production goals and whittled away at employee liberties.
Temporary workers became less likely to be offered full-time employment — and even when they were, their wages were capped at lower levels than more senior employees. Turnover increased.
“Around the time of the Great Recession is when the workers began to feel like we were being treated like a dime a dozen,” Kimbrell said in a phone interview Feb. 13. “That has led to where we are now, where people are finally fed up.”
Since January, at least 30% of workers at both the Mercedes and Hyundai plants in Alabama — plus more than half of workers at the Volkswagen plant in Tennessee — have signed union authorization cards seeking recognition from their employers to unionize. That’s according to the United Auto Workers, a major union focused on the automobile industry with more than 400,000 current members.
If the union reaches a 70% authorization threshold at any facility, the company can either voluntarily recognize the union (they rarely do) or employees can file cards with the National Labor Relations Board to oversee an election. If such a vote passes, it would be a major inroad for organized labor in the historically un-unionized South. Beginning around the 1970s, automobile manufacturers began shifting production to the American South, drawn by — among other things — weaker labor protections and smaller union numbers.
There have been previous attempts to unionize the Mercedes plant and other auto manufacturing facilities in the South, where unions represent employees at a much lower rate than the rest of the nation. But until last year, when Big Three employees represented by the United Auto Workers renegotiated contracts to push their pay scale north of $40 per hour, those attempts have always been unsuccessful.
That may be changing, as workers at non-union plants see the gains that UAW bargaining has brought workers elsewhere in the industry, said Dan Cornfield, a professor of sociology, political science, and American studies at Vanderbilt University. He pointed to the example of Volkswagen’s Tennessee plant, where a majority of workers now support a union.
“It’s a very strong sign of pro-union sentiment well in advance of an actual representation election,” Cornfield said in an interview. “The UAW is capitalizing on its tremendous collective bargaining gains recently with the Big Three to try to encourage workers to unionize new plants [and] to show that unionization pays off.”
Because Southern states remained largely dependent on an agricultural economy well into the Industrial Revolution, union representation in the South has long lagged behind the rest of the nation. Nationwide, union membership declined throughout the late 20th century as automation and outsourcing increased.
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