Tenn. GOP pulls out the stops to fight unionization [View all]

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Tenn. GOP pulls out the stops to fight unionization

By Steve Benen

The employees at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., are voting this week on whether to join the United Automobile Workers union, and at first blush, it wouldn’t seem especially controversial. Many of the workers understandably welcome the opportunity to unionize, and the plant’s owners don’t have a problem with that at all. Indeed, Volkswagen executives are accustomed to working with organized labor at its facilities elsewhere...if workers and management are on the same page over unionization, why has this quietly become a major national story? Because Republican policymakers have decided both the workers and the plant owners are wrong – and the GOP officials are desperate to intervene.

State Senator Bo Watson, who represents a suburb of Chattanooga, warned on Monday that if VW’s workers voted to embrace the U.A.W., the Republican-controlled Legislature might vote against approving future incentives to help the plant expand…. A loss of such incentives, industry analysts say, could persuade Volkswagen to award production of a new S.U.V. to its plant in Mexico instead of to the Chattanooga plant, which currently assembles the Passat.

At a news conference on Tuesday, United States Senator Bob Corker, a former mayor of Chattanooga and a Republican, also called on VW employees to reject the union. He called it “a Detroit-based organization” whose key to survival was to organize plants in the South.

“We’re concerned about the impact,” Mr. Corker said. “Look at Detroit.”

That seemed like a pretty cheap shot – by the senator’s reasoning, Detroit’s crises were labor’s fault, and all unions invite crises in all cases – but Corker wasn’t done.

Yesterday, the Republican senator claimed he had secret knowledge of a plan to reward the Chattanooga VW plant with a new product line – but only if workers reject the plan to join the UAW union. This is the exact opposite of what the company has said, but Corker said he’s been “assured” that his secret tip is true.

Asked about Corker’s brazen attempts to intimidate workers, National Labor Relations Board expert Kenneth G. Dau-Schmidt, a professor of labor at the University of Indiana-Bloomington, told Reuters, “I’m really kind of shocked at Corker’s statement.” Another labor expert, Harley Shaiken of the University of California-Berkeley, suggested the senator’s claims may even be illegal.

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http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/tenn-gop-fights-hard-block-vw-unionization