Looming over the United Auto Workers strike: Automakers’ continued migration to the anti-union South.
Looming over the United Auto Workers strike: Automakers’ continued migration to the anti-union South.
Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, the auto industry began shifting South, a region long characterized by hostility to labor unions and by low wages.
Since then, assembly lines of higher-paid UAW workers at Detroit’s Big Three – Ford, General Motors and Stellantis – have shrunk. And automakers such as Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Toyota and Hyundai have steadily hired nonunion autoworkers, who make less money for substantially the same work, in the South.
The Big Three still depend on the UAW for work. Unlike some people claim, they don't have the capacity, the time or the workforce to move production somewhere else. I doubt the UAW is all that worried.
Yeah, we're about to be flooded with stories about how bad the UAW/ strike is for workers, business, the economy, and your Aunt Ethel. It's all bullshit.
The really sad part is that they don't even have to astroturf. They have an army of useful idiots who will post all kinds of anti-labor propaganda and not even realize it's all a lie.
One of these plants is right off an interstate and I drive past it frequently. Within a few weeks of this news breaking, there were "NOW HIRING" billboards put up for miles in either direction. Ignorance is a virtue in the American South.