Exciting news! A supermajority of workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama, have officially filed with the National Labor Relations Board to vote on joining the United Auto Workers union. This is great news for the workers, as well as a significant victory for the United Auto Workers union (UAW), which has committed to spending more than $40 million in the next two years to unionize all of the non-union automotive and battery plants across the nation.
Just two weeks ago, workers at the Chattanooga, Tennessee, plant also filed for a union vote — so far, you could say, it’s going pretty well.
Well, except for how the CEO of the luxury car company and several managers have been caught on video talking about how they hope to keep the workers at their Alabama plant from unionizing — which is extra gross because they are a German car company and should know better. I mean, while trade unionship is declining, 46 percent of all workers in Germany still work at a company that is subject to collective bargaining agreements. This should be nothing new to them — every single Mercedes-Benz plant in the whole entire world is unionized, save for the two in the United States — but here we are.
Ever since a majority of workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama signed union cards back in February, the company has engaged in what workers and the UAW believe amounts to union busting.
According to a press release from the UAW, these union-busting practices have involved such charming incidents as:
The firing of a union supporter with Stage 4 cancer. The employee had been allowed to have his cellphone with him at work so he could receive updates on the availability of his scarce chemo drug. But a supervisor who has intimidated union supporters claimed there was a zero-tolerance policy on cellphones and had him fired.
A January letter from MBUSI CEO Michael Göbel to employees that attempted to chill union activity and violated their freedom of association. The letter was filled with stock phrases used by anti-union consultants designed to stoke fear, uncertainty, and division.
A mandatory plant-wide meeting Göbel held in February to discourage workers from unionizing. At this meeting, Göbel told workers, “I don’t believe the UAW can help us to be better” and that they “shouldn’t have to pay union dues that generate millions of dollars per year for an organization where you have no transparency where that money is used.”
Another mandatory plant-wide meeting in February that featured former University of Alabama football Coach Nick Saban. Before and during the meeting, MBUSI supervisors attempted to stop union supporters from passing out UAW hats.
Not great! This is why, last week, the UAW and workers at the Vance, Alabama, plant filed federal union busting charges against Mercedes-Benz with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
Mercedes-Benz then responded to those charges by denying any union busting and saying that they would only respond to charges filed in Germany.
A spokesperson for Mercedes-Benz said the company had not received a complaint in Germany and therefore could not comment further.
“At the Mercedes-Benz Group we recognise the right of our employees to form employee representatives,” the spokesperson said, adding that the union’s allegations regarding the union supporter were inaccurate.
That sounded a lot like a challenge to the UAW, led by my future husband Shawn Fain (sorry to Shawn Fain’s actual fiancée!), which then immediately filed charges in Germany, accusing Mercedes-Benz of violating Germany’s Act on Corporate Due Diligence Obligations in Supply Chains, which bars the company from, well, being jerks about unions.
Via UAW:
The UAW’s charges are an important early test of the act, which took effect on January 1, 2023, and applies to German-headquartered firms with more than 1,000 employees. The UAW is the first American union to file charges under the act, which is also known by its German acronym LkSG.
The law sets standards for global supply chains that German-based firms must adhere to, and it clearly prohibits companies from disregarding workers’ rights to form trade unions. Workers at Mercedes-Benz’s sprawling assembly and battery plant in Vance, Ala., are organizing to join the UAW and have faced fierce backlash from company management.
It would be a lot more believable that the company hadn’t actually done any of this union-busting activity were there were not actual video footage, obtained by More Perfect Union, of said union-busting talk. Whoops!
Germany is not the United States. They have actual labor laws that companies are supposed to follow, as opposed to just kind of being allowed to do whatever they want until someone sues them for it. This will not go over well there!
Germany also has a policy called Sozialpartnerschaft, which requires companies of a certain size to have board representation from actual workers from the floor, which you may recall from when Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were going around talking about how that sounds like the kind of thing we should do here. Boy, wouldn’t that be nice? Personally I’d consider it a magical piece of proposed legislation whether it would be possible to pass or not, as it would put the GOP in the very awkward position of trying to explain why workers don’t deserve a seat at the table — but no one ever listens to me about these kinds of things.
Again, a majority of workers have signed union cards. There is almost nothing that Mercedes-Benz can, legally, do to stop the union from happening. They may as well accept it now and knock it off or get in trouble with both the NLRB and the entire country of Germany and see it happen anyway. I know which one sounds better to me!
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