UAW photo
UAW President Shawn Fain was on a hot streak. He landed solid contracts for his members in the auto industry not long ago. Then last month the UAW got workers at the Volkswagen AG plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to vote overwhelmingly for union representation.
Then came the setback on Friday.
The UAW's efforts to organize Alabama's Mercedes-Benz complex went down in defeat by a vote of 2,642 to 2,045.
"It is not a fatal setback," Marick Masters, a business professor at Wayne State University, tells the Detroit News. "The UAW will have to take measure of the situation and analyze the reasons why they were turned back at the Alabama plants. But I think that it will stiffen, rather than weaken, their resolve to go forward. And they will have to be more savvy about the approach that they take."
