Southerns Continue to Reject Unions at Alarming Rate

Another nugget from the union trends report a few months ago is that unionization rates in the South are stagnant at 4.5%. This is more than 8% below the national average.

And this is a time when support for unions is at the highest level in over 50 years, employees have leverage during a tight labor market, and the NLRB is trying everything possible to make union organizing easier.

Southern workers simply don’t want unions.

Unions say Right-to-Work laws are to blame for southern employees not being in unions. These laws allow employees to reap the benefit of collective bargaining agreements, but not pay union dues.

Why should employees be forced to pay for something they:

1. didn’t vote for
2. don’t want to be part of
3. disagree with, and/or
4. don’t believe is worth paying for?

People pay for what they value. Make your southern union valuable to workers, and they will join.

The recent Nissan micro-unit election is proof of this concept. The whole plant rejected the union a few year ago. The NLRB re-wrote the rules on who can vote. And a small unit of workers rejected the union, again.

Southern employees have rejected union membership thousands of times in similar fashion.

I’m interested to see what happens with the new electric battery facilities being built in Tennessee. They are co-owned by the Big 3 automakers.

The NLRB’s soon-to-be-released joint employer test will likely make those facilities union (if the Big 3 doesn’t invite the union to organize their workers like GM did at its Ultium electric battery facility in Lordstown, Ohio).

I’m also interested to see if a small union parts supplier to the foreign-owned, non-union automakers in the south is enough to satisfy the Board’s new joint employer rule. If so, it could be just what unions need to jumpstart organizing in the south.

Until then, unions are wasting their time – and their members’ dues money – trying to organize workers in the south.