By Evgenii Emelianov @ Shutterstock.com
In a stunning rout, autoworkers in Tennessee defeated a unionization push from the UAW. The heavily funded union bosses tried every trick in the book to scare workers into joining the union, but it wasn’t enough. It turns out America’s workers value their freedom. The National Right to Work Committee reports:
Throughout their latest campaign, launched in early April, to secure monopoly-bargaining control over Volkswagen (VW) employees in Chattanooga, Tenn., United Auto Workers (UAW) union bosses enjoyed important structural advantages.
Because they had ready access to a massive war chest that is stocked largely with workers’ compulsory dues and fees, UAW officials were able to greatly outspend opponents of monopolistic unionism on PR.
Immediately before and during the June 12-14 unionization vote, the radio and TV airwaves in Chattanooga were flooded with Big Labor-funded ads vilifying VW and lauding workplace collectivism.
As rabidly pro-forced unionism journalist Chris Brooks acknowledged in an electoral post mortem for Labor Notes, “The union even had video messages running on the pumps at gas stations near the plant.”
Another major factor working in the UAW hierarchy’s favor was that VW, as an international company whose worldwide production workforce is overwhelmingly unionized, clearly feared repercussions if its Tennessee managers directly asked employees to vote against UAW monopoly control.
Consequently, company messages to front-line Chattanooga workers about the potential detriments of unionization were elliptical, whereas the UAW pitch about the supposed benefits was blunt and unapologetic.
Unfortunately for UAW bosses, their huge advantages turned out in the end to be not quite sufficient to overcome workers’ skepticism regarding a union that was recently named by the FBI as a “coconspirator” in a scheme to loot a multimillion-dollar worker training fund.
And over the course of the 10-week campaign prior to the vote, workers also had the opportunity to learn about UAW officials’ long record of foisting counter-productive, job-destroying work rules on motor-vehicle workers and firms.
If the autoworkers of Chattanooga know that they don’t want to be unionized, why is Bernie Sanders trying to take their rights away? Sanders has attacked Right to Work laws, and says that if he is elected president he would attempt to roll them back. Right to work laws protect American workers from being forced to join a union they don’t wish to. How can Sanders claim to be representing the American worker when he wants to take away their freedom? It’s a big lie. Read more about Bernie’s big lie here.
Originally posted on Your Survival Guy.
E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy
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