"How Fear Beat the UAW in Tennessee"

[applegrove]

How Fear Beat the UAW in Tennessee

by Joshua Holland at Bill Moyers

http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/16/how-fear-beat-the-uaw-in-tennessee/

"SNIP.......................................



On Friday, a three-day election process ended when Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tenn., voted against joining the United Auto Workers (UAW) 712 to 626.

Coming into the vote, both sides knew what was at stake — the union drive was a direct threat to the low-wage economy on which the South’s manufacturing base has been built.

Deep-pocketed union-busters mounted a coordinated campaign against organized labor. They even told Tennesseans that the union wanted to take their guns. And Stephen Greenhouse reported for The New York Times that “Grover Norquist, the anti-tax crusader, helped underwrite a new group, the Center for Worker Freedom, that put up 13 billboards in Chattanooga, warning that the city might become the next Detroit if the workers voted for the union.”

What’s more, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam said that a ‘yes’ vote would result in the company losing its tax incentives. A powerful state lawmaker called the union drive “un-American,” and Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) said that he’d been secretly assured that a ‘no’ vote would win the plant the production of a new SUV — a claim the company flatly denied.





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[applegrove]

1. That why the GOP has been fighting stimulous or infrastructure spending. They

knew union membership would continue to go down if people were desperate.

[okaawhatever]

2. Yep. And Grover Norquist is on record saying that the reason he wants to bust up the unions is

because they vote for Democrats. His campaign strategy is not to come up with a winning platform, it's to just take down whoever votes for the opposition. Now, if the unions supported Republicans it probably wouldn't help because he gets too much money from big business, but that's his goal. Not to stop unions, but to stop the opposition from getting elected.