Despite the UAW’s landmark deal with Volkswagen AG adding momentum to the union’s southern organizing drive, it’s unlikely to be a silver bullet to combat stark cultural and political hurdles.
The much-watched first contract for United Auto Workers at VW’s plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., secured 20% across the board wage increases and job protections for about 3,000 workers. Employees at the plant initially voted to join the UAW in 2024.
While still subject to ratification by members next week, the Feb. 5 deal provides a needed boost for the union that has sought to expand its footprint following years of membership decline and organizing defeats.
However, the delayed contract win reflects the adversarial environment organizing in the South presents, and is potentially unlikely to be replicated any time soon, according to labor observers. It took the UAW about 650 days from the VW election to negotiate a contract, a 40% increase from the national average of 461 days, according to Bloomberg Law data compiled from 553 first contracts from 2005-2025.
“It’s just kind of a double edged sword, on the one hand this is quite historic and union and leadership deserve real credit,” said Jake Rosenfeld, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
But on the other hand, “it’s another indication, at least when it comes to the private-sector, that organizing and delivering contracts in the United States is slow grinding work.”
Workers are set to begin voting on the tentative agreement Feb. 18.
Building Momentum
The UAW will use the win as a launching pad to reinvigorate its efforts to organize the South, observers said.
“I have one simple message from the UAW in 2026, from the West Coast to Detroit to DC to the South, at the bargaining table, in the ballot box, we are going to continue to move mountains,” UAW President Shawn Fain said at the union’s community action program conference Feb. 9.
Fain doubled down on efforts to organize southern plants, long seen as politically hostile to unions, after the UAW won record contracts against Detroit’s big three automakers in 2023.
The southern organizing drive is in part an attempt to address attrition in its ranks. UAW membership has fallen from its peak of about 1.5 million in the 1970s to about 400,000 today, according to its website.
The effort has had limited success, however. The Chattanooga plant is the union’s biggest organizing win since it began the southern campaign in 2024. The UAW lost a closely watched election of a Mercedes-Benz Group AG facility in Alabama soon after the VW victory.
In addition to the wage increases, the UAW won a freeze on health care rates and plant closure restrictions for the duration of the four-year contract.
“There are aspects of the Detroit Three contracts that are superior, that’s not surprising given the relationship with the companies over so many years, but this is in that ballpark and most important of all it sets the stage for improvements in the future,” said Harley Shaiken, labor professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
The deal could increase workers’ interest in joining a union, particularly at locations where the UAW had previously tried to organize.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if we see increased organizing activity among some auto workers who don’t have a union, especially those who have already gone through the process like at Mercedes in Alabama,” said Lane Windham, associate director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University.
Environmental Headwinds
While the contract, if ratified, will give the UAW a tangible win it can point to when organizing new workers, the lengthy negotiation process underscores how difficult it can be to build momentum off of contract negotiation successes.
“The broader momentum that we saw coming out of the successful UAW strike, the Boeing strikes of the last couple of years, and the settlement at UPS, that kind of excitement and ferment within the labor movement has waned pretty substantially,” Rosenfeld said.
The union will also be confronted with additional political and cultural challenges as it tries to expand beyond Volkswagen, experts said.
Southern politicians and the business community used a variety of techniques to dissuade workers from unionizing, said Harry Katz, director of the Scheinman Institute on Conflict Resolution at Cornell University.
Those tactics include advertisements urging against organizing, or anti-union politicians and other community leaders warning of plant closures if workers unionize.
In 2014, then-Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam helped kill the UAW’s first shot at organizing the Volkswagen plant by telling workers that voting to unionize would lead to the automaker investing outside of Chattanooga.
The UAW ultimately lost that vote 53% to 47%.
Other Challenges
Aside from political and economic factors, unions just aren’t as common in the South as they are in other regions of the country, Katz said. That can make it difficult for workers to trust that unions are acting in their best interests.
“There’s a lot of cultural factors too, people in the South aren’t as familiar with unions,” Katz said. “They’re more conservative and suspicious. They don’t have family members who were in unions, that matters in the North.”
Moreover, current economic factors are creating a difficult national environment for organizing, and are giving employers more leverage as workers prioritize job stability over collective bargaining.
Last year, the number of new workers organized via National Labor Relations Board elections sank nearly 40% to just 65,542, the lowest level since 2021, according to Bloomberg Law data.
“I think that the UAW has a lot of work to do in terms of trying to get its message across,” said Marick Masters, a management professor at Wayne State University. “And I’m not certain that this contract, even if it’s ratified by overwhelming numbers, is going to be enough to move the needle.”
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