PoliticalWanderer
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See here for full video: https://twitter.com/UAW/status/1732762448464162940
For more official news sources and information, see here: https://reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/more-than-1000-vw-workers-tennessee-sign-union-representation-cards-uaw-2023-12-07/
https://www.axios.com/2023/12/07/uaw-vw-volkswagen-united-auto-workers-chattanooga-tennessee
https://local42.org/
Eniff
No such thing as a software engineer union š
rockmanx853000
Hit VW with the blitzkreig of unionization!
stevelite
Thanks for my Jetta. I think it was made in Mexico though.
Munchman347
Tenn. Rep-Cons, 'Hmm, bout time we passed that child labor law! Remember, Half the man, Half the Pay!...'
AnonymousBach
Workers Alone Weak. Workers Together Strong.
SilentShift
"Divided we beg, united we bargain" is one that always stuck with me
michaelfire
Fun fact: the partisan FBI uses 9/11 counterterrorism authorities to conduct asymmetric counterinsurgency warfare against unions, blacks, the Left, immigrants, environmentalists, PETA.... They expire at the end of the year unless the Congress votes to extend them for another 10 years. https://www.axios.com/2023/03/29/sraq-aumf">https://www.axios.com/2023/03/29/sena">enate-re">raq-aumf">https://www.axios.com/2023/03/29/senate-repeal-iraq-aumf https://www.aclu.org/documents/more-about-fbi-spying https://theintercept.com/2019/09/14/fbi-mike-german-book/
Huor
Work-to-rule laws are the only real reason why automakers set up shop in southern states.
Tumescentpie
The answer to his questions is a simple one. Right wing plutocrats. Tennessee is a red state and those morons couldn't figure out their own best interests if Karl Marx paired up with Ms. Frizzle and they spent a year learning.
ICannotSanctionURBuffoonery
Why? Because Tennessee is a Red State, and Republicans will always side with corporations over people. That should be blatantly obvious to every worker. If your state governance won't protect you, the company will abuse you.
sosume
WTF do you think VW put a plant in red-state TN in the 1st place? Tax breaks & cheap land, low wages & anti-union legislation/govt.
AyatollahBahloni
Child of two proud AFTRA/SAG parents. Unions kept food on our table and paid, in essence, for everything I was provided with growing up. Strikes included. Do it. Unionize. Corporations will not give up a ha'penny unless they are required to do so, in fact they will steal from their workers every chance they can get unless they are prevented from doing so.
brassknucklenerd
*nods as the child of two unionized teachers*
TheHolyFatman
Our company has four call centers in separate states. Three of them are Union, one is not. The one that isn't has zero documentation, no internal controls, bleeds money,toxic employees exploit vulnerable people, wage theft, terrible training and awful leadership that plays favorites. I am hopeful that the agents finally organize... because it would make it so much better. Management just complains it would "make it hard to operate"
JinxRocks
Any manager who talks openly, often after they leave/retire, they will tell you: Corporate America will enslave you if you don't fight back. Unions are how you do that. If you aren't in a union, you should be.
paddenstoel
Not all VW employees have it better, they also have a factory in China with Uyghur workers..
HenryLongfellowIII
Fully audited by a German human rights firm. You want them out of work, I suppose.
StaccatoShrimp
We want them out of concentration and reeducation camps. Even using an "audited" plant does not guarantee those workers rights or that it wont immediately change the moment they can get away with it. The CCP (and every other perpetrator of human rights abuses) use audits like these as a skokescreen for the actual horrific activities happening at every other factory and step along the production chain. You want them to be tortured, I suppose.
miked854
I did not know that. Anyone know where we can find out who uses Uyghur labor?
GnomeChompski
Hey, that's my hometown! As an interesting note, when VW first opened that plant, they wanted UAW to have a presence as VW is used to having workers councils in the EU. Local politicians ran a successful smear campaign to stop it.
leodavinci1
So... not "capitalist" Volkswagen, but politicians. Not surprised.
StaccatoShrimp
VW came in willing to work with a union but were willing to sell out their workers if they had local government support. Just shows why we need unions to reprsent us to the companies and cant rely on elected representative or corporate hacks to have our backs.
Cryolith
As a mid to senior-level manager of many years: Do it. Unionize. Organize. These companies spend so much money training their mgmt teams to recognize union activity and nip it in the bud. The last time they sent us all to a resort and gave us (50+ people) a week of resort life during the union busting rhetoric. Few things terrify a capitalist like organized labor.
Jaitch
As a mid level manager this has my vote
GenesisNynja
As a low level manager: fuck yeah, unionize. Iām sick of not being able to hire anyone because our wages and benefits fucking suck. Employees get better pay, and I donāt get stuck doing extra work because we canāt find enough help. Win-win
Reidsb
Unionize while they are at the retreat.
Marsupialmessiah
Im a senior manager for a conglomco and we dont get the resort brainwash. Just the "if they do it you are fired ". Why i left the manufacturing sector, and only do r&d now
nomunnywunnytilugetthebunnyhunny
That's because the US is becoming the cheap labor spot to outsource. Unionize.
gtollie
The US is not a cheap labor spot. Even the non-union sites are 2x to 5x more expensive per hour than setting up shop in Mexico. With few exceptions, the reason why foreign companies āoutsourceā to the US is to avoid tariffs, duties etc and to manufacture for consumption in the domestic market.
HenryLongfellowIII
They put the plant in the US to avoid tariffs. They put the plant in TN to avoid unions and pay less per hour (and maybe they got some sweeteners to subsidize it).
NomadFeetWanderingToes
TN loves to give away what little taxpayer money they collect to rich corpos....as opposed to things like unemployment insurance, Healthcare, etc.
jojoyojimbi
that's because socialism should only exist for the rich, the poor deserve nothing and should have even less for their misfortune of being born poor, because in their stupid fucked up christofascist ideals: if you're rich, god favors you so that means whatever you're doing is correct in gods eyes so fuck over the poors, they're not favored by god
Vermonstrous
Please do Teslaā¦ please?
StaccatoShrimp
The UAW has stated their aim is to unionize Tesla in the US in their new unionization drive they just started.
PoliticalWanderer
Scandinavian unions are giving Tesla a beating over there right now, from what I hear. Hopefully there'll be much more of that to come.
trippingthelightfantastic
walnutbreath
Concise? It's woefully incomplete (word choice matters and it's decidely not "concise"). Without knowing other costs, it's impossible to infer anything about profit. Plenty of industries have huge capital and input costs while requiring very little labor (e.g., power generation). So even if labor was paid its marginal product (i.e., its fair wage) or an even greater sum, you could have the scenario depicted here without labor being exploited. I had higher expectations from my first-year students
ThomasThundersword
yeah. and to put that even more simply. if you are making solid 6oz gold bars. it doesnāt take much time to pour a pot of molten gold into a form. with the right equipment you could crank our hundreds per hour. doesnāt mean an hour of labor should be able to afford those bars.
PostalHeathen
Profit, as always, is stolen wages.
miked854
That is not true. Sometimes it's exploited natural resources. Sometimes both. Sometimes neither.
Flodos
When is it neither?
ehlo326
When I voluntarily sell my body, and I do it for the lulz
miked854
I was thinking of people who own and operate their own businesses, but the other examples people coted work too.
TheBeyonder3191
Certain forms of Entertainment, maybe?
Override9636
Maybe a co-op?
Zeddicuszull
A business run where profits are wholly shared to and by employees is the only ethical form of capitalism. Everything else is a form of theft.
micuu
Then the profit would be the wages.
dendere
...And who paid the machinery, the projectist, the material, etc etc?
MapleSyrupMafia
And it doesn't take long for those things to be profitable, so what's your point?
ballsoutflyer
WE DID. Us. You, me, and everyone who clocked in this morning. WE made that shit happen.
Jarjarthejedi
Do those things cost 2997 of those per hours? How much money would the people working on those things make if this guy didn't make the final parts?
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Jarjarthejedi
Lol what? I was literally responding to the person saying the dude was only owed the value of 3/3000 an hour by pointing out that the other costs were not 2997/3000 an hour, so that argument was stupid. That's the opposite of bootlicking lol. What are you all on about :P.
Jarjarthejedi
"This worker only deserves 3/3000 the value of the item they produce because there are others cost!" -dendere, "Those other costs are are not 2997/3000 and nobody would make anything without this worker" - me, "You're a bootlicker!"
quietwalker
Or if they didn't have a sales team making the sales orders for 200,000 of them.
AyatollahBahloni
Read this and then ask your question again.
dendere
Yeah, produce large scale economy items at your own, comforting pace and sold it in front of your garage. Let's see how viable it is. Problem is that those who are underpaid are the one the needs the items to be cheap, to survive. Again, I'm not saying it's correct, but most of us are in need to pay thing as cheap as possibile. At this point we are so compromised that simply paying more the worker won't resolve a thing (still, worker need to be payed more! I agree on that).
Leithoa
"I'm not saying it's correct. I've just written an essay making excuses for why they should be allowed to do it" if you think it's wrong you might want to reflect on how you're spending your time.
somerandomusernamebecauseididntlikemyoldone
Except we don't pay 'as cheap as possible' since there aren't regulations on margins in most areas. so we are just padding the insane profits of the already ultra rich in a lot of areas. This isn't about reducing economies of scale or getting rid of factories, it's about paying a fair wage and 99% of companies won't do that without being forced because that means losing profits and that is THE drive for any sizable business, nothing else
WaffleSci
the top needs to be ok with taking a smaller cut. i dont entirely disagree with you, up until the top is making more money per hour than the people working for them make in a month.
ReaperCDN
That would also be the people producing everything. A company is nothing without it's labour. That's why strikes work.
dendere
That part can't be made without the work, without the materials, the projects, the idea, the organization, the distribution. I'm just saying that the worth of an item is due to many factor. People should be pay more and not be exploited? Yes. We want thing to be cheap and always available? Also, yes. Owner of big company make to much? Yes. The work of an individual is the only factor that determines a price of an item? No.
Eniff
No. The materials and machines are all a product of human labor.
quietwalker
technically it's nothing without every step along the way. You couldn't do it without machines, you couldn't get machines without a bank or well-running business, no business without investors, no investors without management, you can't get clients without advertising/marketing, you can't get sales without salespeople, and yeah, labor often gets the smallest piece or at least unreasonably small part of the pie.
Youhavinagiraffe
Every element of a supply, production and retail chain has workers doing different tasks. The sum of all their salaries combined will be less than the value the final product brings in (often a lot less) and the excess is stolen labour. No one is arguing that only one task on that chain matters and should receive all the revenue. The "well actually" responses are just needlessly obtuse
ballsoutflyer
machines didn't magically pop out of thin air. We took our hammers, our chisels, our files and we hand-made those parts beforehand. And we demonstrated those machines to other people long before sales, marketing and management came along.
floatationman
It's a good point. I have *zero* doubts that guy is underpaid. But just because he can crank out 3000 an hour doesn't mean he should be paid x1000. There are lots of other costs associated with that final sales price. But probably (90+%) they could pay him 1.5x and still keep the lights on. And 100% probability they could tie his wage to the inflationary index (as should have been done since 1980) so he never gets paid less and still have a viable business.
ReaperCDN
We did do it without machines. Prior to mass production, people did these jobs. Then those people built machines to replace the tedious manual labour, and the business decided that instead of sharing the profit of less work, they'd create more responsibilities for those people or just fire them and make them go do something else. The goals we used to work towards were making less work for us all as a society so we had more free time to enjoy our lives. Somewhere along the line /1
ReaperCDN
work became synonymous with putting in your time instead of accomplishing the task. Now, if you aren't actively doing something for that 40 hours a week, you're not "putting in enough work." Which as anybody with any experience will tell you, is absolute horseshit. The actual work part of work is a rather small part of the day. Most of the rest is made up bullshit that doesn't actually matter to the work. Like in North America, we force people working retail to stand on their /2