Stand Up 2.0: UAW’s new wave of organizing

From teachers to nurses, baristas to Hollywood writers, and autoworkers to delivery drivers – workers across industries have displayed historic unity in their demands for dignity in the workplace this year. Hot Labor Summer has transitioned to Solidarity Season and workers in seemingly every sector continue to strike their employers. As we wrap up an active year, the United Auto Workers have made a huge announcement.

On Wednesday, November 29, UAW revealed that they are expanding organizing efforts to twelve new auto companies, including companies in the union-hostile south. With thousands of autoworkers having already signed union cards, this will be the UAW’s largest auto worker campaign since the 1930s. Dubbed “Stand Up 2.0”, these unionizing campaigns will reflect the same bold and innovative strategy used to win big at the Big Three just weeks ago. 

The UAW ‘Bump’

Shortly after UAW workers ratified their contracts at the Big Three - which included major gains in wages and benefits – Honda, Volkswagen, and Toyota offered their non-union workers raises. The corporations thought they were prepared to combat a swell of workers inspired by the UAW ‘Stand Up’ strike. But workers know they’re worth more than second thought raises, and they’re ready to organize together to get what they rightfully deserve.

The UAW’s organizing campaigns are targeting the normal non-union suspects like Toyota, Mazda, Honda, Volvo, BMW, Hyundai, Subaru, Nissan, and Mercedes. But the strategy will also include electric vehicle startups that have names that could be confused with fairytale villains like Rivian, Lucid, and of course, Elon Musk’s Tesla. Many of these private companies are expanding existing facilities and building new operations utilizing public funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law or Inflation Reduction Act. 

An energy revolution

The United States government is slated to inject the domestic electric vehicle industry with $220 billion of taxpayer money by 2031, contributing to the global $1.2 trillion in investments into electric vehicles by 2030. 

While these private companies continue to receive massive amounts of public funds to expand and build new electric vehicle (EV) plants – including electric battery and electric battery cell plants – they are flocking to the American South. Time and time again, history reveals that when corporations look to exploit the South, generations of Black and brown workers are most significantly impacted by dangerous working conditions and low wages. Auto companies that rake in billion-dollar profits believe that our family, friends, and neighbors in the South should work for less money than auto workers in other labor-friendly states. Labor law and anti-worker political leaders make it incredibly easy to get away with this corporate exploitation.

Clean energy is a dirty job

Blinded by dollar signs, politicians like Tennessee’s speaker of the house are eager to welcome these companies to their communities and going as far as to fight against the health and safety measures that unions like UAW are winning for workers. The reckless desire to reap profits over their own constituencies’ safety is especially dangerous in regards to electric vehicle manufacturing. Many EV plant workers are already feeling the dangerous impacts of working on the cutting edge of technology. 

The UAW’s case study of the Lordstown Ultium Cell plant – a joint venture between General Motors and LG Energy Solution – makes the case for prioritizing safety standards at new EV manufacturing plants crystal clear. The Lordstown Ultium plant is one of a handful of large-scale EV battery cell plants in the country. With the upsurge and investment in electric vehicle manufacturing, battery cell plants like the one in Lordstown will continue to see growth. The UAW revealed in their case study that health and safety standards at the Ultium Cell plant are practically non-existent:

“When I grabbed the cell, it went poof right in my face. I was wearing the correct PPE [Personal Protective Equipment], but that is just safety glasses. We really should have a PAP [Powered Air Purifying Respirator] hood for that job, but we don’t. After I was gassed, for a second, I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t say anything, I couldn’t tell the worker closest to me what had happened. I was groggy, dizzy …  I had burns in my throat. I had some burns on my face. I had a bloody nose for a couple days. The thing I worried about more than myself was that they were going to screw over the operators and never fix the machine. It wasn’t effectively programmed to give a warning. And they never properly taught the operators how to work it. The way Ultium breaks down the jobs, they aren’t well-defined. There’s not a good operating procedure.” – Gavin C., Production Maintenance Technician

Electric vehicle manufacturing forces the need for a complex supply chain, including battery manufacturing and recycling processes, where workers at battery plants both create and recycle EV batteries containing extremely dangerous toxins, chemicals, and biohazards with newly built machinery and technology that is far from worker-friendly. This mix of brand new technology and machinery in plants combined with significant amounts of chemicals, additives, and toxins creates an unprecedented level of health and safety issues that are impacting current EV workers and will impact tens of thousands of new EV workers unless something changes. 

As the South goes, so goes the nation

While the UAW campaign stretches from coast to coast, Southern workers may have the most to gain from the organizing drive at non-union auto plants in 2024 – especially Black workers that make up 19% of all southern automaking. Just as the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike inspired a surge of workers organizing across the country, successful unionization campaigns in the South would reverberate across supply chains and industry. This is a historic opportunity to deliver for workers and ensure they have decision-making power in the workplace, while also rectifying past and current harms. Anti-worker laws and politicians have successfully crushed southern union drives in the recent past, and union representation hasn’t always meant equality for Black union members. Despite Black workers holding the highest union membership, they still make less in wages than their white counterparts. 

A few of the southern states significantly expanding or building mega sites in the next few years include:

• Hyundai and Rivian in Georgia (roughly 20,000 jobs)

• BMW, Volvo & Volkswagen Scout in South Carolina (roughly 15,000 jobs)

• Ford and Volkswagen (roughly 10,000 jobs) in Tennessee

• Honda, Mercedes, Mazda & Toyota in Alabama (roughly 14,000 jobs) 

Putting an end to exploitation and ensuring Southern workers have the same job security, safety, and thriving wages as their northern counterparts will not be easy. However, the momentum of the labor movement as a whole is in a particularly advantageous position. 2023 has borne witness to the power of workers and the labor we produce. We must continue to sustain the energy of this moment to ensure critical progress beyond the transition to personal electric vehicle manufacturing. We must imagine a bold future where workers who are also producing publicly-funded fleets of electric buses, delivery vans, and trains will reap the benefits of workplace democracy. 

Ultimately, the billions of dollars of taxpayer money should deliver safe, sustainable, good-paying careers for our families, neighbors, and friends. We’ll just have to show up together to achieve it.

Are you an autoworker? Sign up here to join UAW’s fight: uaw.org/join.