HUNTSVILLE, Ala.—Undeterred by a recent setback in the Deep South, the Auto Workers resumed their two-year $40 million Southern organizing drive with a scheduled vote today at the International Motors/Navistar engine plant in Huntsville, Ala.
The key issues in the campaign among the plant’s 220 workers, who manufacture diesel engines and vehicle transmissions for Navistar—formerly International Harvester–are respect, overwork and lousy health care, workers said on a video UAW posted on YouTube.
“We’ve worked hard for years, but it just isn’t cutting it. Our health care’s gotten worse,” worker Jeremy Fleming said in the video. “Higher costs, less coverage, more stress on our families,” chimed in his colleague, Tony Bryant.
“We’re doing more with less. Shutdowns, more overtime, no real warning,” Matthew Mathias explained. “We build the engines, but we get no respect.”
“I was here during the last union campaign,” Fleming added. “They asked for a second chance,” he said of management. “We gave it to ‘em and things have only gotten worse.”
The workers, naming themselves HPP Workers United For Change, first sought card-check recognition, according to AL.com, the news website that replaced Birmingham’s newspapers. Bosses refused. The workers then filed for the National Labor Relations Board-run union recognition vote.
Bosses fought back with a video of their own from the Business Council of Alabama, blaming the organizing drive on “union bosses.” Their ad features those two words with a red slash drawn through them. The corporate cabal also played a key role in defeating UAW’s two most-recent organizing drives in Alabama, last year, at Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz.
Just a week before today’s vote, the union was forced to file three unfair labor practices—the formal name for labor law-breaking—complaints with the National Labor Relations Board’s regional office in Atlanta, which also covers Huntsville.
One charge said bosses at the International plant made “coercive statements and promises” to workers to get them to turn against the union. A second added bosses’ “coercive rules,” without specifying what they are. The third was “coercive actions,” such as spying, designed to chill the workers and scare them into voting against the union.
Al.com also reported plant bosses also sent the workers a letter claiming the union is unnecessary and would take their dues and do nothing. Both are common employer themes used in anti-union campaigns.
“Selecting an outside organization like a union to represent you in your dealings with the company (and having to join the union and pay union dues) is not necessary here in Huntsville,” the letter claimed.
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