United States: historic victory for the UAW at Volkswagen in the South

On 19 April, the United Auto Workers (UAW) achieved a historic victory in the Southern United States by winning the membership of 5,500 employees at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The result came despite a warning from the Republican governors of Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas. The week before the vote, they wrote in a joint statement that a “successful unionization campaign would stop the auto industry dead in its tracks” in the South and ca