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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    3210 months ago

    The Big Three still depend on the UAW for work. Unlike some people claim, they don’t have the capacity, the time or the workforce to move production somewhere else. I doubt the UAW is all that worried.

    • @MagicShel
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      4010 months ago

      Yeah, we’re about to be flooded with stories about how bad the UAW/ strike is for workers, business, the economy, and your Aunt Ethel. It’s all bullshit.

      • 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.

      • Flying Squid
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        610 months ago

        …or those factories see what being unionized gets them and vote to unionize.