It's the Same Old Story

UAW tries to unionize a Mercedes plant in Alabama, Daimler Benz engages in a scorched union busting campaign, which includes a promise for increased pay and benefits, and once the UAW loses the election, the carmaker reneges on its promises of increased remuneration.

I'm totally not shocked:

On Thursday, an email from United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain to the leadership of the Mercedes-Benz General Works Council and IG Metall was posted to X by Luis Feliz Leon of the labor news publication Labor Notes. The General Works Council represents over 100,000 German Mercedes workers and IG Metall is a German metalworkers’ union.

In the email, Fain wrote that Mercedes “management is telling workers that they are unable to follow through on promised increases to wages, benefits, and working conditions because the UAW filed objections to last month’s union election.”

He specifically stated that Rolf Wrona, a MBUSI vice president of human resources, “told several Group Leaders that MBUSI could not pay workers for an upcoming plant shutdown because they were still in ‘status quo.’”

“Status quo refers to a specific legal standard in U.S. labor law that requires unionized employers to notify the union prior to making any changes to wages, benefits, or working conditions and bargain with the union over any proposed changes prior to implementation,” Fain said. “However, MBUSI is not currently unionized, so no status quo condition exists” [emphasis in original].

………

Fain’s email follows the union filing several unfair labor practice charges against Mercedes during the months before the weeklong union election in May, which the UAW lost by a few hundred votes. At the end of May, the UAW also filed a petition asking the National Labor Relations Board to rerun the election.

If you believe your that employer is a bunch of contemptible greed-heads who think that their workers are worthless, lazy, and defensible, you need to unionize to protect yourselves from those bastards. 

If you believe that your employer is a benevolent group of people interested in your well being, you need to unionize to protect yourselves from the next group of managers who rotate in and are a bunch of contemptible greed-heads.

Any questions?