The UAW Is Still Fighting to Unionize Auto in the South
Jeremy Kimbrell was fired from his job at an Alabama Mercedes-Benz factory after playing a leading role in the UAW’s failed effort to unionize the plant in 2024. Jacobin spoke to him about his experience and the union’s ongoing fight to organize the South.
Jeremy Kimbrell played a central role in the UAW’s organizing efforts at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama. (Bob Farley / Chicago Tribune / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Daniel Kopp
In 2023, the United Auto Workers (UAW) gave much-needed inspiration to the declining US labor movement. Under Shawn Fain’s progressive leadership, autoworkers waged a historic strike to wrest historic contract gains from the unionized Big Three carmakers: Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis. On the back of this victory, the UAW launched an ambitious campaign to organize nonunion auto shops across the United States, many of them located in the South.
The union saw early success when it won an election at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee in April 2024. But its momentum was halted when the union, faced with a major union-busting campaign, narrowly lost another election at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama.
Jeremy Kimbrell from Gordo, Alabama, worked at the Mercedes plant and played a central role in the UAW’s organizing efforts there. This year, Mercedes fired Kimbrell, and he has worked as a temporary organizer for the union since. Writer and activist Daniel Kopp spoke to Jeremy last month about the fight for a union at Mercedes, the effects of global competition in the auto industry, and the importance of transnational worker solidarity.
You were fired from your job. Are you currently fighting for your reinstatement?
There are two avenues through which we’re dealing with that.
One is, of course, a charge for unfair labor practices, which was filed against the company. That’ll be proceeding through the American courts. They are extremely slow, and American law is not extremely strong — so that’s progressing, but it might take years.
Then, because of the agreements that the European companies have with unions, which commit employers to honor certain social responsibilities around the world, we are also making the case at the Mercedes-Benz Supervisory Board [in Germany] that workers have their rights to form unions respected. The Mercedes-Benz Supervisory Board consists of 50 percent labor representatives and 50 percent shareholders. It’s no majority, but if the German model is functioning properly, the case can be made there. There’s no excuse why the representatives on the board from the business side shouldn’t uphold agreements in less worker-friendly countries such as the United States.
Hopefully one of those two avenues will work in our favor. I should also say that six hundred workers [are no longer] working in the plant since the election. I don’t know exactly how many have been fired and how much of it is turnover.
The campaign to unionize Mercedes-Benz in Vance in 2024 lost narrowly — 44 percent to 56 percent. How did you assess the loss, and what has happened since?
After all the union busting that took place during the campaign, I was surprised that we managed to get 44 percent. Of course, I was still disappointed, and it took me a few weeks to get over it. But we ran an election in a hostile environment with a lot of union busting — an election, by the way, that my coworkers who were less involved expected us to win, because they’re not seeing the full effects of the union busting.
The election loss left a lot of people not trusting their coworkers as much. They were also more afraid of management. At the beginning of the campaign, the company’s language was like: “It’s your choice, but we would prefer you to not have a union.” By the end, it was “Vote no” wherever you looked, and that message was heard loud and clear.
After the election, the company gave workers a substantial raise. They also threw in an extra bonus every quarter. They promised to listen to workers when it comes to shift preferences. Of course, they’ve since gone back on their word, but the general sentiment is that the people who voted for the union are still for the union, and those who were never for it have not changed their minds. There’s some movement among people who are in play, but they’re so afraid that it will be hard to lock them in — as long as the company sticks with the union busting.
What are the issues most widely and deeply felt on the shop floor at the moment?
A specific concern at this time is shift preferences. The workers at our plant work all kinds of shifts — from straight eight-hour-day shifts to straight eleven-hour-day shifts. Then they get a couple of days off during the week. Many have to work Saturdays and nights.
What’s a straight shift?
A straight shift doesn’t rotate. There’s another shift that we work, a shift of eight hours a day plus overtime that rotates days and nights every two weeks. We have a ton of different shifts, and workers want to decide their shift preferences — it’s one of the things the company promised. Now they narrowed down the options, so as to really guide you into the choice they prefer. That’s a big issue.
What else are workers thinking about?
The company promised profit sharing. That sounds really great, because the American auto companies have been making huge profits. But I knew all too well that the German Mercedes plants also have profit sharing, and their profit-sharing formula is based on a much lower payout because the Germans have guaranteed bonuses regardless of profits. When the company told American workers they would have profit sharing just like the Germans, the Americans didn’t know they were limiting themselves. It wasn’t the same profit sharing that the workers in unionized auto companies were getting. That’s also an issue.
Anybody who has worked in a factory and doesn’t have a union knows there’s always favoritism and lack of due process. When you are disciplined, you don’t get to make your case — it’s just whatever the company says. Some people may find it rather strange, but it is common in the US to drug test workers for no reason. Our plant has what’s called a “random” drug test, and I would just say that some people are tested more “randomly” than others. In a plant of 5,000 workers, you’ve got some workers being tested four or five times, while other workers have never been tested. That’s mathematically impossible — it’s not random.
You mentioned the bonuses and profit sharing that German workers get. The UAW has been cooperating with the IG Metall union in Germany to see how you can support each other, given Mercedes is a German company operating in the United States. Can you talk a little bit about the contacts you’ve had with German workers?
In Germany, you have these agreements with companies that are supposed to ensure they not only honor the law in the countries where they do business, but also go above and beyond and voluntarily recognize certain human rights and social commitments. When it comes to union activities, all those companies are — at least on paper — committed to neutrality: the executives and the management should not interfere.
We reach out to the German unions to make sure that we have their support. If there are any instances where the company is not following those agreements, we have a line of communication to the German unions to try to get management to honor them.
In our campaign, we found that the company didn’t honor those agreements at all. There were multiple instructions that came from the German works council at Mercedes to honor those agreements. They were even told in some instances that those agreements were being honored — but it was a lie. They continued business as usual, as if those agreements didn’t apply to factories in the United States.
At the time of your election in 2024, you had a rather supportive National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) under the Biden administration. This is no longer the case, as Donald Trump is starving it of resources. Has that influenced your strategy at Mercedes?
You don’t change your strategy, because organizing is organizing. Workers have to have courage. You have to understand that the risk will never be zero. Inherently, you hope and expect that the risk is limited.
But with the logjams at the NLRB, if there is anything illegal done by the employer, it’ll be years before a complaint or a case may be heard and even longer before you get to a conclusion. You have to take that into account. It will possibly change your strategy a little, but there’s only so many ways you can organize.
During his campaign, Trump pushed some rhetoric about bringing manufacturing back to the US. How does that hold up on the shop floor, and how are workers looking at it several months into his second presidency?
My factory is in a heavily Republican and conservative area in the South, yet we still have union support from those people. They’re pro-union and pro-Trump, which is hard for some to understand — but it exists. Conversely, a majority of our workforce are black workers. They tend to overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. So there, you have a contradiction, with a majority of pro-Democrat black workers and a minority of white, mostly Republican workers.
The discussions on the floor are very delicate when it comes to politics; you tend to avoid controversial issues. People are dug into their political preferences. You have to work in such a way that you can be above it. It’s not easy — it’s actually very hard.
Last year, the UAW published a video featuring you called “Seven Steps to Win Your Union.” What role does communication, and social media in particular, play in your organizing?
I personally don’t participate in any social media; I think it’s the toilet of communication. It lets people hide behind computer screens and be nasty and unaccountable. However, I know that it’s the medium people are using to get some of their news and entertainment. So we put out videos, some less and some more professional, which we share with our coworkers. We also use mass texting and other ways to get the message out.
What the video achieves — if it has the right message — is it gives somebody something to think about after the talking has stopped. It puts them in the shoes of their coworkers, or maybe it lets them step back and look at themselves differently. It can pull at the heartstrings. The UAW was very effective in providing videos along those lines in the campaign, a couple specifically where most workers were like: “Yes, that’s us.” Even if I don’t like it, in this day and age you’ve got to use the videos on social media. There’s no other way.
We see a lot more global competition in the automotive sector, with more affordable, high-quality cars, especially electric vehicles (EVs), coming from China in particular. At the same time, the Trump administration is slapping tariffs on exporters around the world, generating immense market volatility. Is this a live issue on the shop floor?
It totally is. A lot of people have tariffs on their minds.
I don’t know how much tariffs will affect our Mercedes plant in Alabama, but just recently we had a cutback in production because two decisions were made at our plant. We build the SUVs at Mercedes for the whole world, with the exception of the G-Wagon, and were also expanding to build two electric SUV models at our facility. Simultaneously the Chinese wanted a car built by the Chinese for the Chinese. This was a similar version of the two primary models that we build, the GLE and the GLS. The company thought it would give the Chinese the model they wanted, and that the American EV market would fill in the gap and everybody would live happily ever after.
Well, the EV market has totally collapsed in the United States, and Mercedes is selling almost none of its EVs. Meanwhile the gas cars that were transferred to China continue to be produced there. Some workers are being transferred into new areas. We don’t know what the ultimate outcome will be as workers are displaced from their jobs through quitting or retiring, and some being fired. That’s always in the back of our minds.
We are also getting a new model, the GLC, from Germany. This is pitting working people against each other around the world. Of course, Americans don’t want to be the cause of a German worker losing their job. They also don’t want to lose their job to a Chinese or a Mexican worker, especially not a worker who is being taken advantage of.
If you’re moving German-made cars to the United States and you’re exploiting the American worker by threatening to fire them or pay them less money or worse benefits, that’s not the way for a company to make profit. That’s immoral. There’s lots of talk on our shop floor; workers are not ignorant of that. We actually have more respect than you would think for all the workers we are in competition with — those in Germany, who we know have it better, and also those that are being exploited elsewhere who maybe have lives that are not as good as ours. It would be nice to have a world where all workers are respected, and companies compete with ideas instead of with who can treat their workers the worst and profit off of it.