By Christopher Otts

United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, one of the nation's most prominent and provocative labor leaders, has hit new roadblocks in his efforts to expand the union, and faces a political environment that has rapidly become less friendly to organized labor.

A year after Fain notched historic labor deals with Detroit's Big Three automakers and pledged to expand to new factories, the union isn't close to securing enough worker support to call for votes at U.S. plants owned by Toyota Motor, Hyundai Motor and other foreign carmakers, according to people familiar with the efforts.

While Fain scored an early win this past spring at Volkswagen, he hasn't succeeded in other campaigns and the UAW is now shifting away from its aggressive strategy to recruit new members at nonunion automakers.

"We're in a different phase now," Fain said in an interview last week.

Fain became an overnight labor-movement sensation with his fiery rhetoric while landing record contracts last year with General Motors, Ford Motor and Jeep maker Stellantis. Those wins coincided with an upswing in public sentiment toward organized labor, following a decadeslong decline in private-sector union jobs in the U.S. Surveys in recent years have shown Americans approve of unions at levels not seen since the mid-1960s.

The deceleration in the UAW's organizing drive, though, shows how difficult it can be to sustain momentum and break down regional resistance to labor unions in places like the South. The election of former President Donald Trump -- whom Fain relentlessly bashed during the campaign -- could also slow labor's momentum. One of Trump's closest allies, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, has been hostile to the UAW.

The union hasn't pushed for recognition at a new automaker since it lost a unionization vote at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama a few weeks after its VW victory.

A UAW campaign to organize workers at a Hyundai Motor's assembly plant in Montgomery, Ala., "hit a brick wall" earlier this year, with only about 40% support for the UAW, said Landers "Gator" Cook, one of a dozen Hyundai production workers who voiced support for a union in a UAW video in February.

"In my opinion, it's dead. They're not going to get a union," said Cook, who has been advocating for a union there since 2016.

The expansion drive has cooled in part because nonunion automakers gave workers raises and bonuses, according to workers and organizers involved in the efforts. And while Volkswagen remained neutral on the UAW campaign, other automakers haven't, seeking to convince their workers that a union isn't needed.

Organizing the U.S. factories of foreign automakers has been a decadeslong, elusive goal for the UAW, and is among Fain's top priorities. The UAW's membership, which has steadily dwindled to around 370,000 workers, about one-third of its 1970s peak.

"When we return to the bargaining table in 2028, it won't just be with the Big Three, but with a Big Five or Big Six," Fain said in October 2023.

His lofty expansion goals reflected the most resurgent labor movement in decades. The UAW and the Teamsters capitalized on the tight postpandemic labor market to win rich contracts. Workers at the U.S. ports and Boeing also landed big gains this year following strikes.

Strategic clash

Fain and a cadre of UAW outsiders he recruited initially emphasized a fast approach that sought to ride the momentum from the Big Three contracts and build excitement among new workers. But in a rush to rack up wins, the new tactics proved counterproductive, according to some veteran UAW organizers.

Fain said the campaign still has momentum, while acknowledging that the environment has shifted from a year ago, when there was "a ton of interest" from nonunion workers in the wake of UAW's successes in Detroit.

"It doesn't happen all at once," he said. Thousands of people who expressed enthusiasm for joining the UAW in the aftermath of the strikes remain enthusiastic, he added. Now the union needs to build on that interest to reach levels sufficient for successful votes to unionize.

An influx of new union officials helped Fain orchestrate a hard-nosed, media-savvy approach to collective bargaining last year, including the use of surprise factory strikes to keep the companies off-balance. That effort led to record wage and benefit gains, including pay raises that push hourly wages beyond $40 an hour by 2028 for many UAW members.

Even before those contracts were signed in November 2023, union leaders had been laying the foundation for expansion drives, hoping to harness the buzz emanating from the wins in Detroit. The union said 10,000 workers at nonunion facilities across more than a dozen automakers, from BMW and Toyota to Tesla, had signaled support for unionizing.

At the time, the union said one of its strongest campaigns was at Toyota's biggest U.S. factory in Georgetown, Ky. But the Japanese automaker gave workers a substantial raise, damping enthusiasm for unionization, and the UAW withdrew its on-the-ground organizers in February, according to people familiar with the move.

UAW organizing chief Brian Shepherd, one of the outsiders brought in by Fain, deployed tactics aimed at swiftly moving to votes at factories. "We think there's an opportunity to really push this year to organize and kind of go [at] a way bigger scale," he said on a webinar with other union organizers last December.

For example, workers could sign online cards to pledge support for the union, and organizers placed less emphasis on traditional in-person consultations.

Under past UAW practices, a factory worker would sign a card formally pledging support for union representation after one-on-one meetings with paid organizers or other workers. Those conversations are meant to ensure that workers know what joining a union entails, and to help them to understand how their employer could try to dissuade them.

This past spring, a few weeks after the breakthrough at VW, Shepherd's team pushed for a vote at the Mercedes factory in Alabama, even though the union was uncertain whether it had the support of a majority of workers, according to several organizers.

The move tested the limits of the new, momentum-based strategy.

In the weeks leading up to the Mercedes vote, the UAW discovered that some workers who had pledged their support didn't know basic facts, such as belonging to a union means paying dues, which amount to about 1.5% of pretax pay, according to two people involved in the campaign.

The final vote, in May, was 44% in favor of the UAW to 56% against.

It often takes multiple tries to win over a factory, and Fain said the UAW isn't done at the Mercedes plant.

"It wasn't like we got annihilated there," Fain said. "That was a very, very close election."

Fain said the UAW is still making progress at nonunion automakers by building core groups of supportive workers "at different places all across the country."

He also said the union is negotiating the first labor contract for its members at Volkswagen in Chattanooga, which could spark more interest. "We won in a place where no one said we could win," Fain said. "Now, the argument is, 'We're not winning fast enough,' when initially it was, 'We can't win.' "

Write to Christopher Otts at christopher.otts@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 13, 2024 05:30 ET (10:30 GMT)

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