Until Friday, the phrase "union victory at Chattanooga" could mean only one thing: the defeat of a Confederate army by forces under U.S. Grant at the Battle of Chattanooga in late November 1863.

No longer. On Friday, the United Auto Workers scored a decisive victory at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, as workers voted overwhelmingly to organize with the UAW.

The vote looks like a milestone. It was the UAW's first victory at an auto plant in the Deep South, following two defeats — in 2014 and 2019 — at the same plant. It comes on the heels of the UAW's success in negotiating impressive new contracts with the Big Three domestic automakers in October.

The vote opens the door to further votes and organizing drives across the region, where political leaders have kept unions weak in part through anti-union right-to-work laws — all 14 Deep South states, as well as 12 others, have those laws. Next on the schedule is a vote by 5,000 workers at a Mercedes plant in Alabama, scheduled to take place May 13-17.

"The real importance of this election is not just the organizing of this factory," says labor historian Erik Loomis. "It's that it announces the South is open to unions. ... This has been the greatest struggle for the American labor movement for more than a century. A serious breakthrough in the South is now possible."

The vote also represents a strong rebuke to the GOP political establishment in the South. Indeed, it turns the history of regional auto worker organizing on its head. In 2014, it may be remembered, Tennessee's GOP establishment pulled out the stops to discourage workers at the Chattanooga plant from organizing with the UAW.

VW was willing to accept unionization, with an eye toward replicating the labor-management "works councils" common among manufacturing companies at its home in Germany. ("Volkswagen considers its corporate culture of works councils a competitive advantage," a member of VW's board had told the Associated Press.)

In response, then-Gov. Bill Haslam threatened the company with retribution, declaring that Tennessee would withdraw incentives for Volkswagen if the UAW was voted in.

Then-GOP Sen. Bob Corker, a former Chattanooga mayor, flew down from Washington to voice an almost certainly specious claim that VW executives had "assured" him that the company would open a new SUV manufacturing line at the plant — if the workers turned the UAW down. A local VW executive disputed that.

With shocking cynicism, Corker co-opted the language of political resistance to discourage workers from voting in the union, stating that if the UAW won the vote, "it's going to be something we can overcome — we will overcome."

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