TUSCALOOSA, Alabama. After 20 years at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama, Brett Garrard said he is “no longer falling for the lies” and will vote for a union.
The company has repeatedly promised to improve pay and conditions, but Garrard said these promises have not materialised.
“Mercedes says we are a family, a team, a fight. But over the years, I’ve learned one thing: That’s not how I treat my family,” Garrard said.
A month after workers at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee voted overwhelmingly to unionize, the United Auto Workers are aiming for a major victory at Mercedes-Benz in Alabama. More than 5,000 workers at the Vance facility and a nearby battery factory will vote next week on whether to join the union.
A Mercedes victory would be a big boon for the UAW, which is trying to break union resistance in the Deep South, where states have attracted foreign automakers with big tax incentives, lower labor costs and a non-union workforce.
Garrard, 50, and other workers who support the union told The Associated Press that their concerns include stagnant wages that don’t keep up with inflation, insurance costs, irregular work shifts and a feeling of being disposable in a factory where they assemble. luxury vehicles that can cost more than $100,000.
“Yes, we are Southern auto workers, but we deserve auto workers’ pay,” Garrard said.
Mercedes currently advertises a starting wage of $23.50 per hour for full-time production members, with salaries rising to about $34 over four years, according to a state worker training website. Several workers said the company recently raised wages just to try to avoid union pressure.
Jacob Ryan, 34, has worked for Mercedes for 10 years, starting as a temp worker for about $17 an hour for “the exact same job” before being hired full-time. Ryan, who says inflation is affecting employee wages, said he pays about $1,200 a month for his son’s daycare and his daughter’s after-school care.
“None of this goes to the employees. We’re stuck where we were, paying a lot more for everything,” Ryan said.
Ryan said the union push is gaining more momentum this time after the UAW won more generous wages for workers at Detroit’s three automakers.
After a bitter series of strikes against Ford, General Motors and Stellantis last fall, UAW members made major economic gains under new contracts. GM’s top production workers, for example, now earn $36 an hour, or about $75,000 a year, excluding overtime, benefits and profit sharing, which exceeded $10,000 this year. At the end of the contract in 2028, GM’s top workers would earn $42.95 an hour, about $89,000 a year.
Mercedes-Benz US International Inc. said in a statement that the company expects all workers to have the opportunity to vote secretly “as well as have access to the information necessary to make an informed choice” about unionization.
The company said its focus is “providing a safe and supportive work environment” for workers.
“We believe that open and direct communication with our team members is the best path forward to ensure continued success,” the statement states.
Worker Melissa Howell, 56, said that when she votes next week – voting begins on Monday and ends on Friday – she will vote against the union.
Howell, a quality team leader who has worked at the Mercedes factory for 19 years, is suspicious of the UAW after a bribery and embezzlement scandal that landed two former union presidents in prison. She grew up in Michigan and heard relatives employed by automakers speak negatively about the union.
Mercedes, she said, treated workers poorly for a few years while helping the union’s organizing efforts. But the company began improving conditions after the UAW began recruiting in recent months, she said. The company ended up with a lower salary range for new hires. The factory’s old CEO has been replaced with a new one who walks the factory floor and listens to workers, she said.
“I feel like the improvements the company is making are making people think long and hard,” Howell said.
Wearing a “Union YES” button at a rally outside a Tuscaloosa church, David Johnston, 26, said he believes momentum is shifting in the union’s favor.
“Everyone is confident. Everyone knows we’re going to win,” Johnston said.
Organizing workers at Mercedes will be more difficult than it was at the Volkswagen plant in Tennessee, in large part because the UAW had not previously recruited enough workers to win a vote at the Mercedes plant, said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University.
But Volkswagen’s landslide victory in the third plant-wide vote since 2014 gives the union a huge boost heading into next week’s elections, Wheaton said. At Volkswagen, the union had experience recruiting at the factory and knew workers from previous organizing drives that ended in narrow losses, he said. A UAW victory at Mercedes would be a bigger victory than at Volkswagen because it would come on the first try.
Wheaton said he wouldn’t be surprised if the UAW won at Mercedes, “but it’s harder if you don’t have the same infrastructure in place.”
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey and five other southern governors urged workers to resist the union, saying it could threaten jobs and impede the growth of the region’s auto industry.
Ivey said in a statement that Mercedes has “positively impacted” tens of thousands of Alabama families since the plant opened in 1993, but the union’s interest here is to ensure that Alabama’s working families’ money ends up in the UAW’s bank account. .
The Alabama vote comes on the heels of two high-profile labor fights in the state — an effort to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer and the end of a nearly two-year strike at Warrior Met Coal, where miners said they accepted pay cuts. and benefits for several years to keep the mines open, but has not seen these benefits restored with the company’s recovery.
Former U.S. Sen. Doug Jones, the last Democrat to hold statewide office in Alabama, said unions have a long history of helping build the state’s middle class.
“This vote could be a turning point for Alabama, for organized labor, which is already seeing a surge in membership,” said Jones, the son of a steel worker and grandson of a coal miner.
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