Nissan’s Workers in U.S. Hold Union Election

In perhaps the most important union organizing election in the recent history of the American labor movement, 2,400 workers at Nissan’s huge U.S. car and truck assembly complex here voted Wednesday on whether to join the United Auto Workers.

The voting continued until early this morning to accommodate workers on the plant’s late shift, so results were not available.

Before the voting, both the company and the union said they were confident of victory.

“We fully intend to stay here (after the election) and negotiate a contract for the workers at Nissan,” Maxie Irwin, a spokesman for the UAW, said Wednesday.

Still, there were no public surveys of workers to indicate which way the election might go.

But union support among the workers has clearly increased over the past year. The UAW, which has vowed to organize Nissan since the plant opened in 1983, only recently gained enough backing to push for a federally supervised vote.

Many workers switched their support to the union because of what they charge has been a mounting injury rate caused by speedups on the assembly line and increasing job loads.

“I’ve worked hard before, but this (Nissan’s assembly line) is exhausting work,” said Gary Grisham, a union supporter who has been injured on the line.

Both sides mounted intense campaigns in the weeks that led up to the vote. Workers throughout the plant were wearing pro-union or anti-union buttons and T-shirts, and most management staffers on Wednesday donned “Vote No” T-shirts over their office clothes.

In its final push, the UAW brought in 30 organizers to Smyrna and sent them to talk to undecided workers at home. In recent days the UAW has also aired pro-union radio commercials and even bought 30 minutes on a Nashville television station last Sunday for a message to workers.

The company, meanwhile, has used an in-plant media campaign to get across its anti-union message.

On Tuesday, for example, the company shut down its assembly line to show a Nissan-produced film. Workers also heard a speech by Jerry Benefield, president of Nissan’s U.S. manufacturing arm, but pro-union workers said some employees interrupted the talk with chants of “union! union!”

Nissan and the UAW devoted so much time and so many resources to the drive here because the stakes are extraordinarily high.

For the 1-million member UAW, a victory at Nissan would mark the first time the union has won a contested organizing election at one of the new U.S. assembly plants of the Japanese auto makers. The victory also would give the UAW a much better chance of organizing the U.S. operations of Toyota and Honda.

The UAW already represents workers at three Japanese-managed American auto plants--the General Motors-Toyota joint venture in Fremont, Calif., the Chrysler-Mitsubishi joint venture in Illinois, and the Mazda plant in Michigan, which builds cars for Mazda and Ford. Those facilities have close ties to Detroit’s Big Three, and the UAW was able to organize those plants without elections by pressuring the unionized domestic auto makers.

Yet three other Japanese plants--Honda in Ohio, Toyota in Kentucky, and Nissan here--remain non-union. In addition, a joint venture between Subaru and Isuzu will open this fall in Indiana without a union.

For Nissan officials, labor costs are not the central issue in the election. Wages and benefits for Nissan workers already approach those paid union workers at the Big Three. Instead, Nissan officials oppose the UAW because they say they won’t be able to maintain the flexibility in labor relations that is needed to remain competitive.

Nissan assembly line workers who oppose the union agree that the UAW would intrude on the “team concept” labor framework at the plant.

“If the union comes in here, there would be three teams here,” instead of one, said Nissan worker Ken Roden.