From SCDigest's On-Target E-Magazine

- Oct. 8, 2013 -

Supply Chain News: United Autoworkers Last Stand at Mississippi Nissan Factory an Inflection Point in Union Fate

UAW Focus is Less on Workers than External Opinion and Pressure; Protests at Dealerships in Brazil

SCDigest Editorial Staff

For decades, Michigan and other Rust-Belt states in the Midwest dominated US automobile production. In the past 20 years, new factories, especially but not exclusively from foreign OEMs, have largely gone south, to right to work states such as South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Texas that do not have strong union traditions - and not one of these transplants has become unionized.

That has been the source of endless frustration for union forces.

Now, the united Auto Workers (UAW) is throwing out the old playbook to organize the Nissan factory in Canton, Mississippi, using totally new techniques to pressure Nissan management to accept a union. If the effort succeeds, it may spread to other plants and rejuvenate the flagging US labor movement. If it fails, it may be viewed as the UAW's last stand.

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Traditional union drives focus on convincing factory workers to vote for a union in a secret ballot election. Not at the Nissan plant - the UAW is taking the fight to almost everyone but the workers.

According to an article this week in the New York Times, the UAW has mobilized thousands of union members in Brazil to picket Nissan dealerships there as the company prepares to co-sponsor the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. It has deployed a team of Mississippi ministers and workers to South Africa, where Nissan has an assembly plant, to try to tarnish the company's images through accusations that it violates workers' rights at the Canton plant.

In the US, the UAW has hired actor Danny Glover to speak at colleges across the South and recruit students to distribute union fliers at Nissan dealerships. The union was also involved in the creation of a group of students and community leaders called the "Mississippi Alliance for Fairness at Nissan," including support from the NAACP, to also help take the message the broader community. The alliance often uses the slogan that "Labor Rights Are Civil Rights."

There are somewhat similar campaigns at Volkswagen's new plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee and the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama, under the active leadership of UAW president Bob King.

But none is as intense as the campaign at the Nissan plant in Canton, where clearly the effort is more about pressuring Nissan from the outside than winning hearts and minds on the inside of the factory that produces some 450,000 cars each year.

The UAW's King, for example, says that unions in Japan, Germany, Australia and Britain are backing the Mississippi fight, and that "That kind of global pressure on them, as a labor rights violator, will make a big difference. There are outrageous violations of the workers' right to organize."

The global nature of the campaign is perhaps what is most noteworthy. Do union forces in Brazil really care about the unionization effort in Mississippi? Apparently so.

The president of Brazil's giant General Workers Union told the Times that "We're not going to stop until they have a union inside the plant in Mississippi" when it comes from protesting at Nissan dealers on the country.

This new strategy comes after virtual complete failure in organizing any of the foreign assembly plants in the US. At another Nissan plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, workers in 2001 voted two to one against joining the UAW, a huge embarrassment for the union. If this latest gambit fails, the UAW may have to write off the Southern auto plants for a long time.

"It's a life-and-death matter for the UAW to succeed in the South," Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor and labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara told the Times. "That's why they've put their best organizers into this campaign."

(Manufacturing Article Continued Below)