Discontent Spurs UAW Chances in Key Nissan Vote
When Charlie Holt first hired on at Nissan’s massive auto assembly complex in this small town just outside Nashville, he was virulently anti-union.
Like most of Nissan’s young employees, he had never worked in an auto plant before, and he saw the Japanese company as a benevolent employer offering pay and benefits unavailable anywhere else in middle Tennessee.
“I was one of the most anti-union people you’d ever want to meet. I guess we all were,” the 29-year-old Holt said. “When I started, I thought I was in a utopian-type plant. Growth was imminent, jobs were there for the picking.”
But now, after six years on the line at Nissan, Holt has become one of the most ardent supporters of the United Auto Workers’ drive to organize the Japanese plant, which has 2,400 hourly workers.
He and hundreds of other workers who initially saw a union as an unnecessary intrusion have become disillusioned by what they contend are line speedups, increasingly heavy workloads and a soaring injury rate in the plant.
They plan to vote in favor of representation by the United Auto Workers in Wednesday’s federally supervised vote at Nissan, which promises to be one of the most closely watched organizing elections in the recent history of the American labor movement.
Impact Could Be Widespread
Many observers believe that the election’s impact will be felt far beyond Smyrna; they contend that it could help determine how successful the labor movement will be in organizing the rapidly expanding Japanese industrial presence in the United States.
“This is a high-stakes election, with consequences not only for the auto industry but for manufacturing in general,” Harley Shaiken, a labor specialist at UC San Diego, said. “Given Nissan’s size and visibility, this could be a bellwether for union-organizing in the future.”
The election has forced both Nissan and the UAW to lay their reputations on the line.
For the UAW, a victory at Nissan would mark the first time that the 1-million-member union has won a contested organizing election at one of the new Japanese auto plants in the United States, and it could help the UAW organize the big U.S. operations of other Japanese auto makers, including Honda and Toyota.
Three other Japanese-managed U.S. auto assembly plants--all of which are affiliated with the unionized domestic auto makers--have already agreed to UAW representation without elections. But Nissan, Honda and Toyota, as well as some of the smaller Japanese car companies setting up operations here, seem philosophically opposed to negotiating with their U.S. employees through American-style unions.
Indeed, Nissan’s objections to the UAW are not based on a fear of much higher labor costs; pay and benefits at Nissan already approach those received by workers at the Big Three.
Firm Wants Flexibility
Instead, Nissan executives seem intent on keeping the union out in order to ensure their ability to retain the broad flexibility in labor matters that they contend they need to remain competitive. The company has already announced expansion plans for the early 1990s that should add 2,000 jobs and make Smyrna the nation’s largest auto assembly operation under one roof, and management doesn’t want to have to deal with rigid union work rules during a period of such rapid growth.
“Our company’s success in this very competitive industry is based on teamwork, everyone pulling together,” said Gail Neuman, vice president for human resources at Nissan. “The union’s efforts are creating an adversarial environment within the company that will hurt our team effort. We at Nissan need to take on the competition, not each other.”
As a result, both sides have pulled out all the stops in the campaign leading up to Wednesday’s vote.
The UAW, which has vowed to organize Nissan ever since the plant was opened in 1983, has brought a team of 30 organizers into Smyrna for the final push. In recent days, the organizers have been going door to door to talk with Nissan workers at home and have set up in-plant committees of union supporters in every part of the Nissan complex to pass out handbills and target undecided workers.
Media Campaign in Plant
The company, in turn, has mounted a media campaign in the plant, using television monitors stationed throughout the complex to air anti-union videos. Managers have also been taking small groups of workers off the line to discuss the company’s position and view still more videos.
With no polls having been released by either side, it is difficult to forecast the outcome of the election; both the company and union claim the support of a majority of the workers. But it is clear that the plant’s work force is badly split over the union vote.
Support for the union has grown among assembly-line workers such as Holt who maintain that an increasingly fast work pace in the plant has brought on a rash of work-related injuries. Nissan’s recent refusal to publicly release injury data--for which it has been cited by the state of Tennessee--has also brought more support for the union.
“Injuries are rampant in the plant,” Holt, who tore muscles in his shoulder when working on the line, contends.
“The injury problem is a moral issue that affects us all. If you can’t provide for your family, it’s degrading. I’ve seen 23-year-old men crying because they don’t know how they are going to provide for themselves,” Holt said.
“At first, I was really happy and I had good feelings about Nissan,” added 37-year-old Dale Spaulding. “But then they sped up production, and it kept getting worse, and I realized that I couldn’t keep up this pace for the rest of my life.”
But Nissan executives deny that injuries at Nissan are any worse than at other auto plants and say they carefully calculate the job loads of their workers.
“At Nissan, safety is a top priority,” Neuman said. “When we built the plant, we thought through every process from a safety standpoint, and we continue to review jobs to see if there are safer, less taxing ways to perform them.”
Workers who support the company in the election agree that their jobs are hard but say their high pay more than offsets such problems.
‘We’ve Got the Money’
“Why should I (support the UAW)?” asked 26-year-old Barry Walker. “We’ve got the money, we’ve got everything. It’s hard work, but we get paid for it.”
Added 34-year-old Gary Maddox: “The UAW just doesn’t have anything to sell me.”
Still, the fact that so many Nissan workers--who were overwhelmingly against unionization when the Smyrna plant opened--have switched their support to the UAW represents a significant setback for the company.
Although Nissan has always denied that it located in Tennessee, a right-to-work state, in an effort to avoid unions, most industry observers believe that that was a factor in the company’s decision. Yet, even after carefully selecting a young Southern work force with little experience with unions, Nissan has been unable to keep the UAW at bay.
“Management’s denial of the brutal line speed and the high injury rate,” UAW spokesman Maxie Irwin charged, “has done more to organize that plant than anything else. Management has been our best organizer.”
