The United Auto Workers’ organizing victory at Volkswagen AG's plant in Tennessee is a critical early momentum-builder as the union turns to more auto and battery plants across the South, experts say, but further successes aren't a foregone conclusion.

The Volkswagen landslide in Chattanooga, where 73% of voting workers backed UAW representation for 4,300 employees there, is a long-sought triumph for the Detroit-based union. Its power and influence had diminished as the Detroit Three's market share shrunk in the face of increasing foreign competition, it largely failed to add workers of those companies to its ranks and it found itself emerging from a years-long corruption scandal.

The result of that was the rank-and-file voting to institute the direct election of international leaders, ushering in a new administration led by President Shawn Fain that promised greater transparency and vigilance. It came alongside a perfect storm of the COVID-19 pandemic, labor shortages and inflation woes that brought about national sympathies for workers under a Biden White House that vocally expressed its support for unions, even at the picket line. Record contracts at the Detroit Three followed, the enthusiasm from which the UAW sought to bottle and take elsewhere. The VW win, experts said, validated that strategy.

“It was pretty obvious early on we had done really well,” Isaac Meadows, a 14-month employee at VW who helped organize the plant, said about watching the ballot counts come in late Friday night. Early nerves, he said, gave way to excitement as the first few batches showed the UAW was getting about 3-to-1 support.

Still, in some ways, Volkswagen was low-hanging fruit: The UAW knew well the landscape of the Chattanooga plant, having tried to organize workers there twice before and losing by slim margins. It was the only VW plant without some form of employee representation, and the company had pledged not to oppose the campaign. Plus, the UAW already represents autoworkers in Tennessee at General Motors Co.

“It keeps the momentum going,” said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “It helps some of the negative feelings saying, ‘You can’t do that. You can’t do it in the South.’ It’s, ‘No, we can do it in the South. We can do it to a foreign-owned company.’

“But I don’t know that it’s going to be the snowball or domino effect people are talking about,” he added. “It’s still going to be very difficult.”

The union previously had tried organizing Chattanooga. In 2019, VW workers at the plant voted 51.8% against union representation. There also was a narrow defeat in 2014.

The plant was a natural place to try again, especially after the contract gains at the Detroit Three, said Dan Gilmore, a labor attorney who also teaches classes on labor law at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

“It's obvious with the momentum and credibility they established in negotiations in the fall," he said, "they were able to parlay that into some great talking points."

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