Sunday Focus: The UAW's nearby foothold.

    
     I'm sure the management of Alabama's car assembly factories took notice this week when the hated UAW opened a chapter up the road at the massive VW plant in Tennessee...and did so "with the tactic approval of VW".

The unions have been working to represent the employees at car assembly plants in the South for years. Legislatures approved so-called "right to work" laws to make it more difficult for them to do so.
     The companies can not legally oppose unionization efforts, but there is no shortage of groups willing to represent that anti-union sentiment, even though it was largely unions that rescued a generation of Alabama workers from the low paying dangerous industrial and factory jobs of the early 1900's. 
  

Pell City, Ala mill workers, 1910

   As with virtually all developments in Alabama, race played a part in that unionization effort and in the opposition to it. Read the Encyclopedia of Alabama entry for a fuller understanding of the forces at work in the Business/Union struggle that continues today.