Workers at Alabama Hyundai plant announce union as UAW drives deeper into Southeast

Saul Elbein
Thu, February 1, 2024


Thirty percent of the workers at the sole Hyundai plant in the U.S., in Alabama, have joined the United Auto Workers (UAW).

The announcement marks the third such public union drive at an automaker in the Southeast.

And it marks another step in the UAW’s push to make inroads into the region, where big business and state governments have worked together for decades to keep unions out.

In statements to the press, Hyundai workers argued the job was breaking down their bodies and quality of life for inadequate pay.

One worker complained of being written up for taking a scheduled absence to see her son’s basketball game, while others recounted being repeatedly pushed to work with debilitating chronic injuries.

“I’m getting close to retirement and the company has literally broken me down,” said Drena Smith, who has spent nearly two decades in the paint department.

“We need compensation for that when we retire. Not just a cake and a car discount for a car we can’t afford to buy because we won’t have any income. We need a real retirement, we need to win our union.”

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) has portrayed the organizers as opportunistic “out-of-state special interest groups.”

“Alabama has become a national leader in automotive manufacturing, and all this was achieved without a unionized workforce. In other words, our success has been home grown — done the Alabama way,” Ivey wrote in a piece posted in early January on the state Department of Commerce site.

“Unfortunately, the Alabama model for economic success is under attack,” she added, referring to the upcoming union elections.

The Alabama announcement from UAW comes amid a broader campaign as the union seeks to build on its victory last year in a simultaneous strike against three major automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis.

That campaign won wage increases and workplace reforms from the big players of America’s old automotive heartland — something Shawn Fain, UAW’s combative leader, has argued he can bring to the rest of the country.

Just a week after the deal, the union declared its intent to move into new territory: the 150,000 car workers at foreign-owned factories in the nonunion South.

In December, the UAW drive at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., hit 30 percent of the workforce — a threshold that took their fight to organize the plant public.

Then in January, workers at a Mercedes-Benz facility in Tuscaloosa, Ala., followed suit, complaining of stagnant wages and chronic injury at a company that was experiencing soaring profits.

In public statements put out by the UAW, workers at those plants foreshadowed the complaints given on Thursday by Hyundai workers: That they had been barred from taking time with their families, that their wages had not kept up with the cost of living and that their jobs had led to repeated injury.

The UAW claims that more than 10,000 workers at nonunion plants have signed union cards “in recent months” — which they contend has happened in the face of anti-union campaigns by management.

Workers at the Hyundai plant have complained to the National Labor Review Board that management has been “threatening, restraining and coercing employees from exercising their rights” to organize.

At Hyundai, the workers contended that their managers had banned them from distributing pro-union literature in break rooms, confiscating union pamphlets.

They also argued Hyundai had polled workers about their support for a union — which the NLRB bans in most circumstances.

Those complaints echo similar ones at a Tennessee Volkswagen plant and an Indiana Honda plant.

In January, more than 30 Democratic senators called on Southern carmakers to stay neutral amid the worker push to unionize.

One Hyundai worker told the press he was pushing for a union for the sake of the next generation.

“My oldest son works at the plant, over on General Assembly [GA],” said Dewayne Naylor, who works in quality control at the body shop.

“I went through 14 years in GA and I know what it’ll do to your body over there,” Naylor added.

“I don’t want the younger generation to go through what we did.”