I’m especially discouraged because I allowed myself to become optimistic about the United Auto Workers’ chances of unionizing the Volkswagon plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
I’m feeling downhearted.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Yes, the American people are responsible
The pathetic attempts of Americans to pretend they’re good people and don’t deserve what’s happening to them are just that, pathetic. Yeah, some of them are good, but not enough. It’s just that simple.
Take some goddamn responsibility.
Very depressing. The mayor of one MI town invited VW to move the plant there – maybe they’ll do that. VW wants it unionized.
VW moving to Michigan would be sweet, sweet justice. That justice would be mitigated somewhat by the fact that Michigan is now a “Right-To-Work (for less)” State.
that’s why they should move to a proper state, like Minnesota 🙂
True, but the voters rejected “right to work” it was forced on them by the kochbot gov and a lame duck legislature. Don’t know what’s involved with undoing it though.
I’ll see your downhearted and raise you discouraged. No, better make that depressed.
In the race to the bottom in wages and environmental regulations we are all “the next Detroit”. Detroit represented blue collar workers making a living wage. Conservatives love the pounding that city has taken. Free trade isn’t free.
Maybe it’ll cheer you up to know that Missouri schools are staging active shooter drills. Did me a world of good to read that this morning, to see that we still have our priorities straight despite the VW vote.
Sounds like the new “duck and cover”. Nothing like ducking under your desk and covering yourself to save you from a nuclear attack.
Great. Move to Michigan.
As I recall, VW wanted their employees to have work councils and under American labor law you’ve got to have a union to have a work council.
So VW doesn’t get its work councils.
Unless there’s a challenge to the results in front of the NLRB, since Corker’s talks could certainly be considered prejudicial during the voting.
Not just Corker. The fucking leadership of the State Legislature said EXPLICITLY that VW could/should be stripped of tax benefits if their failure to go scorched-earth on UAW’s organizing effort resulted in the workers voting Union.
I can’t think of an NLRB election which is riper for overturn by the Agency than this one. These powerful politicians’ explicit threats were more coercive and intimidating than anything the employer could have done. That they went so, so far overboard (and needed to, since the vote was so very close), is really telling. Corker and Co. are terrified that their antebellum-era labor relations are under threat.
don’t be discouraged.
when will you learn…
the working class Southern White will ALWAYS vote against his own economic interest.
which is why I continue to say fuck ’em.
The Southern (and much of the Northern) corporate power structure hates any Union, in fact, is looking to end our federal Union in all but name.
Just another example of W. J. Cash’s “Mind of the South.”
Charles P. Pierce ✔ @ESQPolitics
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When people vote to be powerless, even when their employers want to help empower them, there’s really no place to go. #uaw
9:44 PM – 14 Feb 2014
I heard on WCPT Chicago that Obama had endorsed the UAW. Maybe that’s why the sludge-for-brains rejected it. “Gollee, Clem. If Obama wants it, it must be bad!”
I’d love to see VW pack up and move somewhere else where the workers want some say in how things are run.
How great would it be to start a race to the top?
Wait, that sounds like socialism, so nevermind.
We could use that plant here in Chicago, where there is still a reservoir of people who culturally know how to work in manufacturing plants, i.e. show up every day, on time, as well as skills like using tools, using machine tools, driving fork lifts.. But most of all, the factory mindset. Agricultural workers work very hard, but they don’t understand standing in one place for hours until you have permission to leave, the importance of being punctual to the second, essentially being a human machine.
My father worked in a small Grumann plant in Northern Virginia. They made wings for the F-14. Management threatened to fire anyone who failed to show up on the first day of hunting season. When the day came, no one showed up except my Dad and his buddy that had transferred in from Long Island, i.e. the “other” damnyankee (SIC, it IS one word).
I try very,very,very hard not to believe that the South is basically just full of idiots and people who exploit the idiots, enough to constitute a sizable majority.
But they just can’t help themselves. They’re weak.
“Born down in a dead man town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up”
Truly they are a pathetic lot. I feel sorry for the 626 who voted to stand up to the peer pressure.
Nope. It’s not that different. The “south” and the “north” are vastly more like each other culturally and socially than they are like any other culture on earth. It all looks like America. There’s just a small but significant difference in the number of conservative white. But you’ve got the same “idiots” everywhere.
I disagree. It’s like another country. I have more common ground with several friends who came from the UK, than I did with my non-transplant neighbors in Virginia. I’m not saying they weren’t good people. Many of them were, with a personal code of ethics that any Northerner could admire. But they were culturally very different.
I gather you have never lived in the South.
As I posted over at Daily Kos, while it sounds terrible this could be the kind of wake-up call that the voters need – especially if future production lines or plants are established in pro-union, red or purple states with Democratic Governors.
If low-income, conservative voters want to vote against their best economic interest, then that’s fine because it’s how democracy works. However the only way for them to learn that they are voting against their best interest is to see others reap the rewards, and we need to encourage states like Missouri, Kentucky, Illinois, Minnesota to go after these types of projects in a big way.
The only way to learn is to make the contrast very stark: states with Democrat Governors, Health Care exchanges (or some compromised version of Medicaid expansion), and good paying blue collar jobs…or states that serve the plutocrats with a race-to-the-bottom mentality.
This is not how they think. All they think is, “Enjoy your union jobs, Northerners, I’d rather the plant come here to give me a job for half the pay so long as I have the job.”
They’re willing serfs.
Yes, as the gap between MN and WI widens – it’s a gulf at this point – it seems like the right wingers just dig in.
Stupid is as stupid does.
Mean Tennessee, not you.
It could be viewed as a first step in the right direction. Next time, the workers may or may not vote union but the process has started (how will the workers vote next time if Volkswagen decides to build that new model in Mexico instead of Tennessee and there is a perception that the decision to manufacture in Mexico was influenced by the meddling of Tennessee’s politicians in the union vote?). It’s also possible that next time, foreign manufacturers may decide not to build a plant in the south due to concerns that the host state may renege on promised benefits if the company doesn’t conform its business decisions to the political demands of local politicians.