Auto Workers Try a New Angle at Volkswagen

[unhappycamper]

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/19772-auto-workers-try-a-new-angle-at-volkswagen

Auto Workers Try a New Angle at Volkswagen
Saturday, 02 November 2013 11:30
By Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes | Report

~snip~

When Volkswagen began building its VW Passat in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 2011, and union organizers began talking with workers, UAW President Bob King also sought help from the metalworkers union in Germany, IG Metall.

IG Metall members on VW’s plant-level and global works councils began pressuring top management. The only big VW assembly plant without a works council was in Tennessee, they noted. VW should set one up there, too. The UAW sent local workers to a meeting of the VW Global Works Council.

But U.S. labor law—what’s left of it from the National Labor Relations Act of 1936—says management may not “dominate” a labor organization nor “contribute financial or other support to it.” Works councils operate with company money.*

A works council would be legal under U.S. law only if the workers involved also had their own independent representative: a union. So top VW executives, acceding to the pressure from around the world, told managers there not to stand in the way of a union.

[90-percent]

1. Germany

Unions and Management in Germany are a lot more cooperative. They both have the best interests of the company foremost. And most German execs are content to earn 40X their average workers, not the obscene 400X American norm.

German companies tend to be a lot more involved with the interests of their communities, also.

-90% jimmy