2012 will be key to future of UAW

«It really is ultimately up to the companies,» King told Reuters after the meeting.

Whatever the outcome, King’s march through the South will be a milestone in U.S. labour history. Famous for winning hard-fought campaigns at General Motors Chrysler and, eventually, Ford between 1937 and 1941, the UAW was once one of the mightiest unions – and political forces – in the country.

But its membership has fallen 75 per cent in the past three decades, and it started dipping into its strike fund in 2006. If it fails to boost its ranks, the richest union in the United States will hit a cash crunch.

A decade ago, King led a campaign to organize a union at a Nissan plant in Smyrna, Tennessee.

As part of the campaign, Nissan employee Chet Konkle recalls visiting hundreds of workers in their homes. He sat in their kitchens, shook their hands and asked for signatures on union cards. «Sometimes I felt like I was a Baptist preacher trying to win over the heathens,» he said of his efforts as a labour evangelist in a southern state.

In October 2001, Nissan workers rejected the union by a two-to-one vote, with hundreds defecting from the UAW cause. For Konkle, that was an epiphany. «The UAW in its current form is on its deathbed,» he said.

Now 47, Konkle leads a team that cuts waste at the plant and which is credited with saving over $10 million for Nissan.

Tennessee is once again a union battleground. At the geographical midpoint of a band of foreign auto factories stretching from Texas (Toyota to Ohio (Honda, the state has worked hard for its piece of the U.S. auto industry.

In 1979, Gov. Lamar Alexander flew to Tokyo to meet with Nissan executives, showing them a picture of the United States with the Eastern seaboard lit up. When they asked where Tennessee was, Alexander recalled pointing to a relatively dark spot «right in the middle of the lights.» Tennessee looked like an industrial blank slate within a short ride of a big market. Nissan also liked the state’s law preventing mandatory union membership, he said.

A quarter century later, when VW was looking for a place to build a new plant, Alexander again made the case for Tennessee, this time as a member of the U.S. Senate. As part of the charm offensive, the state’s junior senator, Bob Corker, invited VW executives to his home, where Alexander serenaded them on the piano.

The offensive worked. In July 2008, VW announced that it would invest $1 billion to build a plant near Chattanooga, the city where Corker had been mayor until 2005.

That plant is now at the top of the UAW’s list. King travelled to Chattanooga himself in late November to meet with workers sympathetic to the union.

«The German companies have a better history of recognizing workers’ rights around the world,» King said.

But in a state with nine per cent unemployment, the task is daunting. For 2,500 jobs paying $30,000 a year, VW turned away 83,000 hopefuls at Chattanooga, which started up this year. Statistically, an applicant to Harvard University had a better chance of admission.

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