About one-third of U.S. automobile production is now based in the South, according to the American International Auto Dealers Association. Some 25 car manufacturing or parts plants have been built in the region over the past quarter century. This trend has received new impetus as Asian-based auto makers such as south Korea’s Hyundai and Japan’s Nissan Motors and Toyota compete with their U.S.-based rivals—Ford Motors, General Motors, and the Chrysler Group of DaimlerChrysler AG—for a bigger share of the U.S. market.

Nissan set up a plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, in 1993 and another in Canton, Mississippi, in 2003. Toyota has a plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, and is scheduled to start production at another one in San Antonio, Texas, next year. Three auto manufacturing plants are located in Alabama—Mercedes-Benz in Vance, Honda in Lincoln, and the new Hyundai facility in Montgomery. These manufacturing and parts plants account for some 40,000 auto workers employed in Alabama alone. Despite organizing drives by the UAW at Nissan and DaimlerChrysler-owned Mercedes-Benz over a number of years, the growing number of foreign-owned plants in the South remain nonunion.

Meanwhile, membership in the UAW, as with other industrial unions, has declined—from a high of 1.5 million in 1979 to less than 625,000 members nationwide in 2003. Last year the union membership finally rose slightly, to 655,000. But the increase was mostly due to recruiting members in government, health care, education, and other service jobs, while members in auto plants continued to drop, according to the April 5 Detroit News.

Last November the UAW launched an organizing drive at the Plastech Engineered Products plant in McCalla, Alabama, by asking workers to sign union cards. Plastech makes plastic parts for the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance.

The union tops’ “strategy” was to sign up members while avoiding a serious organizing campaign inside the plant. By the time the UAW got enough cards to gain recognition by the company without an election, a majority of workers at Plastech had signed a petition asking the National Labor Relations Board to have their cards revoked and demanding a vote on representation, the Birmingham News reported May 29.

The fact that workers in the South are much less unionized than in the North is a result not only of the legacy of Jim Crow segregation but of the class-collaborationist polices of the top union officialdom. Despite much-touted campaigns—following World War II, and with the 1955 merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations—the union officialdom has refused to wage a concerted organizing battle in the South. The smashing of Jim Crow by the Black struggle in the 1950s and 1960s opened the way for the strengthening of the labor movement in the South and beyond.  
 
 
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