UAW Rejected at Nissan Plant in Major Defeat
The labor movement’s prospects for organizing the rapidly expanding Japanese manufacturing presence in industrial America suffered a major setback Thursday when workers at a Nissan plant here overwhelmingly rejected United Auto Workers membership.
In one of the nation’s most closely watched union organizing campaigns, Nissan workers voted 1,622 to 711 against joining the Detroit-based union. Nearly 2,400 production workers were eligible to vote in the federally supervised election, which had been expected to be close.
In an early morning press conference, relieved Nissan executives hailed the results and vowed to reunite the work force in the wake of the tense and divisive election campaign.
Election ‘Disruptive’
“We’re glad this election is over . . . it’s been somewhat disruptive,” said Jerry Benefield, president of Nissan’s U.S. manufacturing operations.
UAW officers, visibly upset by the results, refused to talk with reporters early Thursday. Instead, the union vowed in a statement that it will continue trying to organize Nissan for “as long as it takes” to win.
But Benefield added that the election results had left him “more convinced than ever before that the UAW will never organize Nissan.”
The UAW’s loss here means that the union still has not won a contested organizing election at any of the new American assembly plants of the Japanese auto makers, which are now perhaps the most visible Japanese manufacturing operations in this country. The union abandoned a 1985 organizing drive at Honda’s Ohio plant before a vote was taken.
The UAW does represent workers at three Japanese-managed assembly plants, but the Japanese firms have a unionized domestic auto maker as a partner in each of those plants. Those affiliations allowed the UAW to use its leverage with the American Big Three to win representation of workers at the plants without a fight.
Yet the union has so far been unable to gain a foothold at the U.S. plants owned and operated by Japan’s Big Three--Honda in Ohio, Toyota in Kentucky and Nissan here. In addition, a non-union joint venture between Subaru and Isuzu will be opened in Indiana this fall.
Industry analysts agreed Thursday that the surprisingly large margin of victory represented a significant defeat for the UAW.
‘Convincing Victory’
“I think it’s clearly a serious blow,” said Harley Shaiken, a labor specialist at the University of California at San Diego. “This doesn’t finish the UAW at Nissan, but it was a pretty convincing victory for the company, and it will make the union’s job tougher at Honda, Toyota and Subaru-Isuzu,” he added. “It is also likely to stiffen the resolve against the UAW of many of the Japanese auto parts suppliers opening plants here.”
The voting, which continued from Wednesday morning until early Thursday morning to accommodate workers on the plant’s midnight shift, followed weeks of aggressive campaigning by both the Japanese auto maker and the million-member union. The two sides had put their reputations on the line in the campaign, and the work force had become deeply split.
As the high-stakes election began to take on international significance in recent weeks, the work force came under heavy media scrutiny; Japanese reporters and television crews packed Thursday morning’s press conference in Smyrna.
Long Organizing Drive
The UAW has been vowing to organize Nissan since the plant opened here in 1983, but only this spring did it gain enough worker support to push for a vote. In May, the UAW petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to hold an election at the plant.
Many workers switched to the UAW side in recent months because of what they charged has been a mounting injury rate caused by speedups on the assembly line and increasing job loads.
Pro-union workers complained that Nissan’s Japanese-style “team concept” labor policies had been abused by Nissan’s American managers in a push for greater productivity.
The union’s charges about a high Nissan injury rate seemed to have been aided in the last few weeks when Nissan was cited by the state of Tennessee for failing to publicly release injury data.
Both the company and union had mounted intense, last-minute drives to sway undecided workers. The UAW brought in 30 organizers to Smyrna and aired pro-union radio and television commercials. The company announced a major expansion of the Smyrna complex, and, in the final days of the campaign, managers met repeatedly with small groups of workers.
In the end, the union apparently had not convinced a majority that it could offer any more benefits than management.
In fact, wages and benefits were not a central issue in the election, because workers’ pay here already approaches that of union workers at the Big Three. Nissan workers even have a few benefits--a leased car program and a 401-K retirement plan, for example--not available to production workers in the domestic industry.
As a result, the union was forced to concentrate on the injury and speedup issues, which were not enough to sway many workers who had not been injured.
“There’s going to be injuries in heavy industry wherever you go,” Danny Smythia, an anti-union worker, said after the election results were released. “The problem isn’t any worse here than anywhere else.”
Anti-union workers agreed with Nissan’s Benefield that the vote will allow the company to maintain the “team concept” approach to labor relations that it contends it needs to remain competitive.
“We don’t need two teams in the company,” Sheikh Faye, a production worker, said. “Now, we can unite in one team again to build the highest quality cars in America.”
DECLINING UNION VICTORIES Fiscal years ended 9/30/1979 No. of NLRB union representation elections: 6926 Proportion of elections won by unions: 47.2% Fiscal years ended 9/30/1980 No. of NLRB union representation elections: 7225 Proportion of elections won by unions: 47.9% Fiscal years ended 9/30/1981 No. of NLRB union representation elections: 6554 Proportion of elections won by unions: 45.5% Fiscal years ended 9/30/1982 No. of NLRB union representation elections: 4247 Proportion of elections won by unions: 43.7% Fiscal years ended 9/30/1983 No. of NLRB union representation elections: 3483 Proportion of elections won by unions: 47.7% Fiscal years ended 9/30/1984 No. of NLRB union representation elections: 3561 Proportion of elections won by unions: 46.5% Fiscal years ended 9/30/1985 No. of NLRB union representation elections: 3749 Proportion of elections won by unions: 46.5% Fiscal years ended 9/30/1986 No. of NLRB union representation elections: 3663 Proportion of elections won by unions: 47.5% Fiscal years ended 9/30/1987 No. of NLRB union representation elections: 3314 Proportion of elections won by unions: 48.5% Fiscal years ended 9/30/1988 No. of NLRB union representation elections: 3509 Proportion of elections won by unions: 49.5% SOURCE: UCLA Institute of Industrial Relations / NLRB
