Inside UAW’s latest Alabama Mercedes-Benz plant union push: Vote set for workers to decide

In 2014, the United Auto Workers abandoned a publicized push to unionize at Alabama’s Mercedes-Benz plant in Tuscaloosa County.

The union did so at the request of the employees.

Pro-union workers, burned out by a campaign that was going nowhere, were waving a white flag.

But Thursday the National Labor Relations Board announced voting will take place May 13 and 17 on whether workers at Mercedes-Benz U.S. International will join the United Auto Workers union. Vote totals are expected May 17.

That’s after the most successful, and one of the fastest campaigns, the union has ever had, signing a supermajority of the plant’s more than 6,000 employees in less than five months.

Alabama has only been producing automobiles for less than thirty years, but the state is already the leading exporter of vehicles in the U.S. Yet at the same time, it is grappling with the first serious foray by organized labor into this major sector of its economy.

What happened?

For Jeremy Kimbrell, a Mercedes-Benz worker involved in the UAW push, it’s simple.

“Everybody knows what a Mercedes is,” he said. “Why should a worker, just because he lives in Alabama, be paid less and be treated worse? That’s old timey thinking.”

Retracing the steps, from that last, unsuccessful attempt at unionizing, shows how several factors - at home and elsewhere - are shaping this latest chapter.

Planting the seeds

Michael Innis-Jiménez is a professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama.

He said the seeds of what’s happening now at Mercedes were planted during that union drive 10 years ago. Just months after the union abandoned the campaign, it opened a local in Tuscaloosa.

“They kept the pieces in place, and they kept talking,” Innis-Jiménez said. “This kind of process takes a while. It’s a difficult thing to do. You have to be agitated enough about conditions and wages and everyday work life.”

But Mercedes was still a high-paying, sought-after job. Then the company made the announcement in 2017 that it would invest $1 billion into its Alabama operations, expanding the plant to manufacture electric SUVs. That included construction of a parts hub and an electric battery plant in nearby Bibb County, creating 600 new jobs.

Workers began to notice changes on the floor - such as two tiers of pay and temp workers. Kimbrell, who has been at Mercedes since 1999, said the introduction of tier pay “opened the eyes” of the older workers.

“They did it just to pay workers less,” he said. “Newer workers wondered, why am I being paid less to do the same work?”

Mercedes executives, in the midst of the electric expansion, began to express concern about filling positions. State officials focused efforts at increasing workforce participation numbers.

The rapid expansion brought by EVs also came during the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, when workers suddenly found themselves adhering to a lot of changes on the factory floor dictated by management.

“People began to say, this isn’t the company I went to work for,” Kimbrell said.

From the company’s perspective, it was responding to where the market is expected to go, while also dealing with increased demand, supply chain disruptions and other factors.

That meant it - and its workers - had to maintain flexibility.

Narrow is the way

Labor activity is not new to Alabama.

As Innis-Jiménez noted, the state has a long history of labor union organizing for the Deep South, though membership has never been on par with states in other regions. However, COVID procedures were one of the reasons that sparked the still-unsettled campaign to unionize Amazon’s Bessemer fulfillment center, a highly publicized vote that attracted celebrities and the attention of the Biden Administration.

The results of a second election are still unresolved, two years later.

And as Amazon workers voted last time on union membership, the longest strike in Alabama history began at Warrior Met Coal, and ended with contract talks still stalled.

Nationally, 2023 saw the largest number of strikes in two decades, and more Americans joined unions last year than in any year since 2000.

Still, union membership remains low - 7.5 percent of wage and salary workers in Alabama in 2024, compared with 7.2 percent in 2022, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Lane Windham is a labor historian with Georgetown University. She said an uptick in union activity has been taking place nationwide since the pandemic, as ideas about work changed.

The demands of the job, the idea of essential workers, and what people were willing to do for minimum wage or higher all erupted in fights, such as the push to organize Starbucks.

But union membership nationwide still accounts for a tenth of the total workforce. Agitation hasn’t exactly translated into membership, and there’s a reason.

“U.S. labor law remains extremely weak,” she said, “especially compared to labor law in the developed world. At Starbucks, you’ve had something like 300 stores supporting a union, but you don’t have a single union contract. And you don’t get counted as a union member unless you have a contract.

“The doorway workers can enter to become union members is narrow, and that’s because labor law is weak,” she said. “Employers routinely violate it and don’t face penalties.”

‘This wasn’t business as usual’

But change didn’t just happen in the auto industry. It also happened with the union.

Last March, Shawn Fain became the first UAW president directly elected by the union’s members, running on a platform of ending corruption and tiered pay systems. He also embraced a more combative style, which workers took note of.

“They had always been about looking out for workers,” Kimbrell said, “But they were a little too friendly to management.”

Fain’s style became apparent last year during the UAW’s historic six-week “Sit Down” strike, where the union for the first time took on the Big Three U.S. automakers simultaneously.

The union publicly stated it was out to recoup losses from the 2007-09 economic crisis, as well as ending tier pay. Using a series of strikes at different plants, steadily escalating pressure, the UAW last October won wage increases, bonuses and cost-of-living adjustments.

“That was an historic strike,” Windham said. “I think it took the automakers a while to understand this wasn’t business as usual...Fain is very important in terms that...he’s reacting to demands to push harder coming from among the membership.”

It was also momentous for the UAW, which feared that automakers push for electric vehicles might encourage American companies to shift jobs South, where union drives had ended unsuccessfully. Organizing efforts inevitably gravitated South.

Workers in Southern plants, though, took notice of what happened with the Big Three. Tuscaloosa had its own version on a smaller scale. At the same time as the Sit Down Strike, the UAW led a successful monthlong walkout against Mercedes-Benz supplier ZF, seeking better healthcare and wages.

‘This is big time’

Kimbrell said pro-union workers at Mercedes began encouraging co-workers to sign union cards the weekend after Thanksgiving.

But strategy this time had changed, he said. In previous union drives, the UAW had charted a course of aiming for a 65% threshold of the workforce. The union had also encouraged employees not to be signed up others on the factory floor.

Now, the union was letting workers on site run the campaign, he said.

“As we started calling each other and talking, we realized we already knew what we wanted to do to organize the plant,” Kimbrell said. “Within two weeks, we had signed up, like, 700 people. Within two more weeks, we’d signed 500 more. We’d never seen anything like that before. We were like, this is big time. This may not take long.”

By early January, the UAW announced it had signed 30% of the workforce, with a goal of 70% before petitioning for a union election. This came at the same time as a push at Hyundai in Montgomery, and an effort at Volkswagen in Chattanooga that is in the midst of an election this week.

The UAW earlier this year committed $40 million over the next two years to organizing efforts in plants without unions, with a concentration in the South.

Business and government leaders in Alabama have responded, with Gov. Kay Ivey calling the union drive a sign that Alabama’s “model for economic success is under attack.”

The Business Council of Alabama CEO Helena Duncan announced a website, Alabama Strong, online advertisements, and a campaign to “provide Alabamians with a full and thorough picture of the economic dangers that unionization presents.”

This week, Ivey joined governors of five other Southern states in a statement blasting the UAW’s efforts.

Kimbrell said the comments are “disappointing,” and that Alabama’s politicians are “misreading the climate.” In the governors’ statement, for example, they accused the UAW of being “more focused on helping President Biden get reelected than on the autoworker jobs being cut at plants they already represent.”

Yet the workers’ demands are driven by more than partisan concerns, he said.

“She’s talking about an outside party coming in,” Kimbrell said. “We’re the workers. We don’t know what she’s talking about. Let us worry about our business inside our plant.”

‘The best path forward’

Since the union drive began, Mercedes has responded with promises to end two-tier pay and increases for topped-out workers, Kimbrell said.

“The union drive let them know they’d really messed up,” he said. “They offered some pay perks, but we still kept growing.”

In comments this month, the automaker said it looks forward “to participating in the election process to ensure every Team Member has a chance to cast their own secret-ballot vote, as well as having access to the information necessary to make an informed choice.

“Our primary focus at MBUSI is always to provide a safe and supportive work environment for our Team Members, so they can continue to build safe and superior vehicles for the world. We believe open and direct communication with our Team Members is the best path forward to ensure continued success.”

Mercedes employees in Germany are covered by a union contract, have representatives on the company’s board, and elect members to a works council.

Innis-Jiménez said workers understand they have more power than in years past because employers are still seeking workers to fill spots in many sectors. Younger workers, Windham said, who have grown up in an era of low union activity, are among those making the strongest demands.

What once seemed like a life-time job with good benefits now looks to some like a good deal for employers, who can quickly shrink a workforce if needed by using temporary employees, Innis-Jiménez said. Employees also are more aware of CEO pay and have their own ideas of what companies can afford.

Arguments that unions are automatically in lockstep with Democratic politicians may persuade some workers, he said, but the fact that so many signed union cards means many of those workers probably still consider themselves conservative red staters even though they’re seeking collective bargaining.

“All of that makes for a less fulfilling work space and leads to agitation,” he said. “It’s not about politics - it’s about the workplace.”

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