“If you have any hesitation about the UAW, vote no,” employee Dirk Horvath said in one of the videos. “You guarantee your chance to find the answers and come up with a solid answer for yourself. If you vote yes, it’s done.” Horvath has worked for VW in Chattanooga as a logistics specialist for seven years, according to his LinkedIn page.

The UAW campaign also has drawn political opposition, both in Tennessee and in Alabama, where the union hopes to move its organizing campaign next. Local and state Republican officials have held press conferences near the Chattanooga plant in recent weeks. And six southern Republican governors, including Bill Lee of Tennessee and Kay Ivey of Alabama, issued a joint statement Tuesday saying they are "highly concerned" with the union's organizing campaign, which they said was "driven by misinformation and scare tactics."

"Unionization would certainly put our states’ jobs in jeopardy — in fact, in this year already, all of the UAW automakers have announced layoffs," said the statement from Lee, Ivey and the governors of Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas. "In America, we respect our workforce and we do not need to pay a third party to tell us who can pick up a box or flip a switch. No one wants to hear this, but it’s the ugly reality."

Stephen Silvia, author of "The UAW's Southern Gamble" and a professor at American University, argues that in organizing, unions have to push for support in the workplace, the boardroom and in the political realm.

"It's harder to organize in the South because most of the politicians in office in the South are Republicans and they see the UAW as an organization that could make campaigning for office more difficult for them," Silvia said. "They see the UAW is being supportive of the Democrats."

Outside of party politics, southern politicians have attracted investment to their region by "saying 'we have relatively low wages, and we don't have a very high unionization rate.' And so if the UAW came in, that obviously would run counter to both those things."

Even with the politics at play, Silvia still thinks the UAW has its strongest chance so far to win in Chattanooga.

One reason: the leadership change at the UAW, whose members chose Fain as president last year in the union's first direct election. Fain came to power after the UAW battled through a federal corruption investigation that sent two former union presidents and other top officials to federal prison. It also led to the union being put under the supervision of a federal monitor.

The change at the top "allowed the UAW to turn a page from a period of corruption, and I think Shawn's approach is also allowing the UAW to turn the page from 30 years of exchanging concessions to preserve jobs," Silvia said.

During the union's negotiations last year with the Detroit Three automakers, Fain sent members from Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co. and Stellantis NV to picket lines in what the UAW called a "Stand Up Strike" with different plants selected as targets throughout the talks. The strikes lasted more than 40 days before contracts were reached with all three automakers.

The negotiations brought gains that include 27% general wage increases over the life of the agreements, which expire April 30, 2028; ensured the return of benefits lost during the Great Recession, such as cost-of-living adjustments; and secured pathways for the organization of battery plants under the master agreements.

With reinstatement of cost-of-living adjustments that were suspended in 2009, the union estimated the top wage will rise 33% to more than $42 per hour. The starting wage would increase by 67% compounded with estimated COLA to more than $30 an hour.

In November, like several other nonunion foreign automakers, VW gave Chattanooga workers an 11% pay raise. Top assembly plant workers in Chattanooga make $32.40 per hour.

Darrell Belcher, 54, a 13-year worker at the Volkswagen plant who is voting no, said the economics of union involvement has been a worry.

"I'm not any different than anybody else. Everybody wants to make as much as they can get ... but we gotta be reasonable here. We can't price ourselves out of a job," he said.

Why UAW?

From the sidewalk outside of the employee parking lot along Volkswagen Drive, pro-UAW signs were visible this week across the dashboards of vehicles parked there.

One of the workers proudly displaying the signs was Landon Robinson, 34, a four-year employee who stopped at the local City Café Diner near the plant after his Monday day shift with the signs still on display.

He wants to see three areas addressed with VW: adding profit-sharing, improving safety precautions and revamping the paid-time-off system to include sick days, he said: "I feel like they're trying to stuff as much as they can in a minute and 20 seconds and that's where the safety comes in."

Patricia McFarland, 56, a Michigan native, donned a black "Just a Michigan girl in a Tennessee World" T-shirt at the Sunday picnic. McFarland, who's worked at the VW plant for two years, didn't know coming in that it was nonunion.

"I figured it was like one of the Big Threes, you know, I struck gold getting in," she said, but instead she feels like "every day is my last."

She's pushing for the union "because the work conditions can be a whole lot better, the pay could be a whole lot better, the benefits could be a whole lot better."

Isaac Meadows, a 14-month employee, said he wants to unionize the plant because, time after time, the company has shown "that people are not important to them. The car is really the only thing that's important to them."

Meadows, 40, says there are issues with safety and ergonomics: "We want to come together and have a voice and show them that people are the greatest asset in the plant."

When Meadows started at VW, he said employees talked about the union "in whispers and dark corners." Now, they discuss it freely and even wear UAW gear inside.

"I feel very confident," Meadows said. "The atmosphere is good, the excitement's there. The main question we've been hearing for the last three months is, 'Hey, when are we gonna vote, when are we gonna vote?' Now everybody's excited to vote."

The results of the Volkswagen UAW election should be released Friday night after voting closes at 8 p.m. and the ballots are counted.

The significance of this vote is not lost on the volunteers behind the push to unionize. A few hours further south in Vance, Alabama, workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant are also prepping for an NLRB election to join the UAW.

"We're the tip of the spear right now for this movement for UAW and for all of the other auto manufacturers," Soderstrom said. "This is big, and we're part of it. This is history for us."

Snyder added: "We want to be the ones to send the message: 'If we can do it, you can do it.'"

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