The once-great city of Detroit has seen its industry

and economy decimated thanks to the United Auto

Workers union

Chattanooga…

the Next Detroit?

Photo by Becky Stern/sternlab.org

Did You Know…?

The United Auto Workers is trying to

unionize the Chattanooga Volkswagen plant

The UAW is desperate; since 1979 its

membership has declined by 74%, and it has

already failed to organize other foreign-

owned plants throughout the South

The Big Three Detroit auto companies have

shed over 200,000 jobs in the last 12 years

alone, thanks in part to high labor costs

caused by UAW unionization

In fact, “almost every job lost at U.S. car

factories in the last 30 years has occurred at a

unionized company” (The UAW’s Last Stand,

Reuters, 12/29/11)

Meanwhile, non-union plants, like VW, are

creating thousands of jobs in Tennessee and

throughout the South

Detroit’s is not the only economy the UAW has

left in ruins. Read the sad story of New Stanton,

PA and its unionized VW plant NEXT

“Those supposedly high wages

were, of course, what the UAW had

demanded and which helped make

the plant financially unsustainable.”

Union Invasion: UAW Targets Tennessee Excerpted from the Chattanooga Times-Free Press 05/18/13

By Matt Patterson and Julia Tavlas

Citizens of Chattanooga should be aware that the UAW already

successfully organized a Volkswagen plant, and the results were

disastrous.

In 1978 Volkswagen opened its Westmoreland Assembly Plant

near New Stanton, PA. The facility employed some 5,700

workers, producing

1.15 million vehicles

until it closed in

1988. As the New

York Times reported

in 1992:

“The one [foreign-owned] plant that had U.A.W. representation,

Volkswagen A.G.'s ill-fated plant in New Stanton, Pa., began

with a strike and lurched from problem to problem before

closing...”

The problems, including these recurring strikes, forced the plant

to halt production on numerous occasions—within the first 20

months of operation workers staged 6 walk-outs protesting for,

among other things, higher wages. It was too much even for

some of the workers. Ex-plant employee, Kenneth Cramer, Jr.

was quoted in the Pittsburgh Tribune saying that the UAW

agitations had left him with “a bad taste for unions.”

Volkswagen, too, had a bad taste in their mouth after their

Pennsylvania experience. This is one of the reasons why when it

came time to open another American facility 20 years later, the

company chose right-to-work Tennessee, where union power is

not so nearly entrenched.

Back in Pennsylvania, the town of New Stanton, was devastated

economically and psychologically after the union forced VW out.

Lloyd Marker, former assembly line worker, recalled the plant’s

closing as “a disaster":

“It was tough. People didn't want to hire us [after we lost our

VW jobs]. They thought we wouldn't work because we were used

to high wages."

Those supposedly high wages were, of course, what the UAW

had demanded and which helped make the plant financially

unsustainable, leaving Marker and thousands like him with no

wages whatsoever. And the job losses triggered a host of social

pathologies. In the wake of Volkswagen’s shutdown, New

Stanton experienced a spike in alcoholism, divorce and

hopelessness. The Pittsburgh Tribune reported in 2008:

“Depression rendered some workers unable to cope with the

shutdown. Former workers still talk about a string of suicides,

including a single mother who hanged herself and a man who

shot himself on the road leading to the plant.”

No wonder Hamilton County Commissioner Tim Boyd warns

that unionization “will be like a cancer on [Chattanooga’s]

economic growth.” Indeed it would be, though perhaps an

infection is a more apt metaphor, an infection borne by an

invading union force from the North.

The UAW kills jobs, companies, and towns. Find out

more at WorkplaceChoice.org