Volkswagen Election Was Labor’s Biggest Factory Flip in 16 Years

The United Auto Workers’ successful organizing campaign at Volkswagen AG’s Tennessee plant is a big deal for many reasons. The decisive April 20 election at the National Labor Relations Board has been heralded as both the first sign of a potential wave of unionization across the South and a key turning point in the UAW’s recruiting fortunes.

But it’s also a big deal for an even simpler reason: because it was such a big election. In fact, we haven’t seen a union win involving this many manufacturing workers in quite some time, based on an analysis of Bloomberg Law’s database of NLRB election results.

Volkswagen is the site of the fourth-largest union win in the manufacturing sector since Bloomberg Law began tracking all NLRB election results in 1988.

Pending NLRB certification, the election result has converted the VW plant’s workforce of 4,326 production and maintenance workers into a UAW-represented bargaining unit. The last time a manufacturing-industry union organized more workers in a single election was in 2008, when 4,524 workers at a Smithfield Packing Co. plant in North Carolina gained representation by the United Food and Commercial Workers.

New bargaining units of this magnitude are rare sights in the manufacturing industry these days. Since 2020, for example, 17 of the 20 largest worker groups organized via NLRB elections have been in the service sector—at either universities or health care workplaces.

Although the Volkswagen election stands alone atop the manufacturing sector, it may not hold that title for long: The UAW’s next organizing target in the South, at an Alabama Mercedes-Benz factory, covers 5,200 workers.

GENERATE THE DATA

To replicate the research that was used for this article:

1. Visit Bloomberg Law’s Labor Relations & Collective Bargaining page. (Bloomberg Terminal subscribers: Run BLAW OUT <GO> and search for “Labor Relations & Collective Bargaining”.)

2. Under Labor PLUS Records: Search & Track, select the “NLRB Petitions & Elections” tracker (highlighted below).

The “NLRB Petitions & Elections” tracker contains details of more than 140,000 NLRB petitions and elections from 1988 to present, updated on a daily basis. The scope of the results can be controlled by using the filters on the left side.

3. Find the “Number of Workers” filter and check the boxes for the two largest worker groups. (Click “Show More” if these worker groups are not seen in the filter list.)

4. Select “Representation” in the “Election Type” filter.
5. Select “Labor Win” in the “Election Outcome” filter.

6. Download the records into a spreadsheet format by clicking the download icon above the list of results, and selecting “CSV results.”

The resulting spreadsheet file can now be used to:

• filter the records based on their industry codes (“Industry Naics” or “Industry Sic” columns); and
• sort the records based on number of workers (“Total Workers” column).

Because Bloomberg Law’s research tools are regularly updated, users’ results when following these instructions may differ from the results generated for this article.

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