Here's one potential winner from the UAW strike: Non-union auto workers in the South
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
The United Auto Workers strike is happening in the places we traditionally think of as the center of U.S. car-making, places such as Michigan and Ohio. Their biggest competitors are foreign automakers, which have spent the last three decades opening their factories not in the North, but the South. Stephan Bisaha of the Gulf States Newsroom reports on how an anti-union reputation built the South's auto industry.
STEPHAN BISAHA, BYLINE: Even at a car factory 700 miles south of Michigan, the Motor City still sets the standard.
MORRIS MOCK: We had that Detroit dream mindset. You know what I'm saying?
BISAHA: Morris Mock's been working as a technician at Nissan since the company opened a plant just north of Jackson, Miss., 20 years ago. That Detroit dream is based on the great pay and benefits unions negotiated at places like Ford in the past. But Mock's Nissan plant is not unionized. And, yeah, while he's making good money for Mississippi, he says it's still less than workers in the North, something he sees across any industry.
MOCK: If you work here in the South, in Mississippi in general, you're underpaid.
BISAHA: The thing is that cheap and, just as importantly, not unionized labor is how Southern states attracted the foreign automakers. Since the 1990s, they've opened well more than a dozen plants.
A J JACOBS: All capitalists want that, you know, right (laughter)? I mean, they make more money if they don't have any trouble with the labor.
BISAHA: A.J. Jacobs is a sociologist who wrote a book about foreign automakers opening plants in America. Japanese automakers are especially unprepared for workers walking off their jobs. They operate lean factories, and they don't keep a stockpile of cars like American companies do that help them weather a strike.
JACOBS: You know, I used to drive through Michigan. And you'd see the Ford and General Motors factories with cars everywhere, as far as the eye can see. You don't see that - Japanese car factories, the footprint is tiny.
BISAHA: Now, it wasn't just the Southern anti-union mindset that attracted foreign automakers. The Southern states have also dangled incentives. Georgia, for example, promised Hyundai nearly $2 billion in the form of things like tax breaks and new roads for a new electric vehicle plant. Those deals are a big reason why nearly all foreign auto plants have come South - BMW in South Carolina, Kia in Georgia, Volkswagen in Tennessee, Hyundai and Mercedes in Alabama. These plants are almost exclusively nonunion, but the workers here are closely watching the UAW strike. Morris Mock, the Nissan technician in Mississippi, is one of them.
MOCK: Workers feel that they're going to get the same thing that the UAW is going to get.
BISAHA: That's because Southern plants try to be competitive somewhat with pay. But the North-South tug of war over wages goes both ways. The smaller paychecks in the South make it harder for the UAW to win more money for their members.
MOCK: The Big Three, they're using language like, we must stay competitive. So the more you draw our wages down, the more you can draw their wages down.
BISAHA: Of course, money is not the only issue here. There's also the transition into electric vehicles that is underway around the world. Yes, EVs will mean new jobs building things like batteries, but it will also mean the loss of other jobs. Car companies don't need workers trained to build engines for an EV that doesn't need one, says Mock.
MOCK: Everything's going to be ran off a battery. We have a whole department about to go away. But we need to think about, how do we as workers transition?
BISAHA: Job security and retraining workers to fit in with the EV future is a big part of the UAW's fight for its members and, indirectly, for Southern autoworkers, too.
For NPR News, I'm Stephan Bisaha in Birmingham.
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