The autoworkers, Volkswagen and the new, new South

There is delicious irony, along with a generous dollop of hypocrisy, in the desperate efforts of business leaders and free-market conservatives to prevent 1,500 blue-collar workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., from forming a union.

For decades, these same elites have been busy telling American workers about all the benefits they’ll get from more cross-border trade and investment. But now that Volkswagen has overruled its American executives and decided to export its union-friendly German management style to a state that markets itself as a union-free zone, their enthusiasm for globalization has waned. To Bo Watson, the Republican president pro tempore of the Tennessee state senate, it’s downright “un-American.”

For decades, Southern companies have beat back union organizers by denying them access to plants and forcing workers to sit through daily indoctrination sessions for weeks on end as they are instructed on the evils of union “bosses” and the near-certain prospect of losing their jobs if they chose to bargain collectively. But now that Volkswagen has agreed to remain neutral and let the UAW in to make its pitch, the anti-union forces outside the factory gates are suddenly outraged by the lack of equal access.

And because Volkswagen refused to make the usual corporate threats that the plant will close and its work will be shipped to Mexico if workers vote to unionize, that responsibility has now fallen to the Volunteer State’s Republican politicians. Just as VW workers began voting last week, U.S. Sen. Bob Corker claimed to have been told by an unnamed top company executive that a vote against the union would guarantee that Chattanooga would be chosen as the production site for a new line of SUVs — a claim quickly denied by VW. Then there was the warning from the aforementioned Watson that if the plant were unionized, the Republican legislature would refuse to appropriate an estimated $700 million in state subsidies necessary to win the SUV expansion and the several thousand new jobs it would generate.

<snip>

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/will-a-new-new-south-emerge-from-the-showdown-in-chattanooga/2014/02/14/9a1d4bd6-9362-11e3-83b9-1f024193bb84_story.html

Might I just add that I hope for plagues of biblical, epic proportions to be visited on each and every one of these pig pukers. fuck them one. fuck them all.