Looming over the United Auto Workers strike: Automakers’ continued migration to the anti-union South.

Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, the auto industry began shifting South, a region long characterized by hostility to labor unions and by low wages.

Since then, assembly lines of higher-paid UAW workers at Detroit’s Big Three – Ford, General Motors and Stellantis – have shrunk. And automakers such as Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Toyota and Hyundai have steadily hired nonunion autoworkers, who make less money for substantially the same work, in the South.

  • Flying Squid
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    2910 months ago

    The really sad part is that they don’t even have to astroturf. They have an army of useful idiots who will post all kinds of anti-labor propaganda and not even realize it’s all a lie.

    • snooggums
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      10 months ago

      Those people exist because of the decades of anti union propaganda.

      • bluGill
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        -310 months ago

        And unions doing foolish things that make them a bad option.

        • snooggums
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          510 months ago

          Thanks, but we did not need an example of someone who has fallen for the anti-union propaganda.

          • bluGill
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            -310 months ago

            Why not? We have a number of examples here of someone who has fallen for pro-union propaganda.

            • norbert
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              010 months ago

              Yeah workers organizing for mutual benefit and negotiation is totally dumb.

              • bluGill
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                210 months ago

                You are putting words in my mouth that I never said. Unions as an idea are not bad. However their implementation over the years has done a number of things that are bad.

                • norbert
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                  110 months ago

                  And unions doing foolish things that make them a bad option.

                  • bluGill
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                    -110 months ago

                    @norbert

                    Just because the unions do it does not mean it is for the mutual benefit of union members. They often have policies that are for the benefit of the worker who has been there for a long time against the younger workers. They often have policies that are against someone who wants to leave the union for a management role at some time.