Thursday, February 20, 2014

Senator Bob Corker's anti union voter manipulation scheme may have just f**d the South for good

So it looks like the joke's on Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) and the workers at the Volkswagon plant that voted down a measure to join the UAW last week.

Germany has a co-determination model that mandates workers councils, which are similar to unions in that they represent worker interests.

The head of Volkswagon's "Works Council" told a German newspaper that Volkswagon would now be hesitant to expand in the South as a result of the union vote.

"I can imagine fairly well that another VW factory in the United States, provided that one more should still be set up there, does not necessarily have to be assigned to the South again," said works council leader Bernd Osterloh.
"If co-determination isn't guaranteed in the first place, we as workers will hardly be able to vote in favor" of building another plant in the right-to-work South, Osterloh added.
The vote was influenced by Corker and others who misled workers by telling them that if they voted down the union, Volkswagon would add new production at the plant, a claim that Volkswagon vehemently has denied.

Corker's interference is against the law and gives the National Labor Relations Board every reason to void the vote. However, it's not likely that the NLRB will do that because it's afraid of incurring the wrath of Congressional Republicans as they have gone after the NLRB in the past and have attempted to defund it and shut it down.

But the vote was definitely influenced illegally despite the fact that Volkswagon, the company, was IN FAVOR of unionization.

Hopefully with Corker's help the South has just fucked itself and we start to see a backlash and a  migration of manufacturing jobs back up to the unionized North.

2 comments:

John Zelnicker said...

Corker and all the rest don't care about the NLRB or the law or the company or the truth. "There ain't gonna be no damn unions around heah!" Full stop.

Unknown said...

I dislike saying this, but, the South, whenever presented with an opportunity to vote against it's own best interests ------ does just that.

The GOP actively campaigning against the individual right of association for American workers, some even labelling a vote for union representation as "un-American" is reprehensible.

It's an indictment against the US public education system that people in general have no sense or understanding of labor history in the US.

At the end of the day, right or wrong, those with the franchise chose their own path.