Why would a worker in TN vote to join the union that failed to protect big 3 workers?

[pampango]

41. UAW membership maxed in 1978. By then the industry was already moving plants to rural areas and the

SunBelt states (right-to-work).

The auto industry had started to expand beyond the city and was building plants and putting offices in suburban and rural areas, and eventually sought refuge from the city's powerful unions in the nation's Sunbelt states and even overseas.

Membership in the United Auto Workers topped out at 1.5 million in 1978 and stands today at about 400,000, said Mike Smith, the union's archivist at Wayne State University's Walter Reuther Library.

"What happened in Detroit is not particularly distinct," said Kevin Boyle, a history professor at Northwestern University who has written extensively about his hometown. "Most Midwest cities had white flight and segregation. But Detroit had it more intensely. Most cities had deindustrialization. Detroit had it more intensely."

"Unlike cities such as Chicago or Philadelphia, where segregation produced disinvestment in certain neighbourhoods, the nature of segregation in Detroit meant that the entire city suffered disinvestment," Douglas Massey, a sociology and public affairs professor at Princeton, said in an email.

http://www.ctvnews.ca/business/detroit-decline-of-auto-industry-racial-history-blamed-for-city-s-economic-collapse-1.1377195

You are right about Germany and workers' rights there. VW management must be scratching their heads when workers reject a union when the company actually wants one so they can implement work councils. That would never happen in Germany.