Second Southern EV battery plant joins UAW

Workers at a Tennessee battery plant have voted to join the United Auto Workers (UAW) — marking a significant victory in the union’s ongoing campaign to organize both the Southeast and the electric vehicle (EV) industry. 

“Southern workers are ready to stand up and win our fair share by winning our unions. And when we have a free and fair choice, we will win every time,” Trudy Lindahl, a worker at the Ultium plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., said in a statement. 

General Motors (GM), the Detroit-based automaker that runs the plant as a cooperative venture with South Korea-based LG Energy Solution, voluntarily recognized the union, which is the second at an Ultium facility. 

The Spring Hill plant is the second in the country made to turn out the Ultium “skateboard,” a combined, modular battery-and-drivetrain system that allows GM to mass produce trucks and SUVs — forming the base platform of vehicles from the GMC electric Hummer and Cadillac Lyriq, as well as joint projects with Honda like the new electric Acura.

Spring Hill is also the second Ultium plant to vote to join a union, after the first, in Lordstown, Ohio, voted to join the UAW in 2022 and signed an agreement with GM in June.

That deal gave Lordstown workers added safety measures and a near twofold pay hike. Both wages and safety have been particular concerns for workers in the region, where a former GM conventional auto plant was replaced in 2019 by an Ultium plant in which workers told The Hill that they had to work with caustic chemicals labeled in Korean for half the pay they had received when they built internal combustion engines.

UAW President Shawn Fain has railed against the prospect of EV manufacturing jobs — which involve assembling less mechanically complex vehicles — becoming a “race to the bottom.”

“The Big Three automakers: Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, are taking billions of dollars in government subsidies to go electric,” Fain said last year, as UAW members went on strike across the three companies. 

“But those benefits aren’t trickling down to UAW members.”

As part of a pivotal UAW strike in 2023, the union won the right for Ultium workers at Lordstown to be treated as GM employees, rather than Ultium ones — clearing a path for the wider unionization of the company.

That victory preceded a major $40 million UAW organizing effort in the Southeast, a region where union membership is among the lowest nationwide and where companies like Tesla and Toyota have sited their EV manufacturing push. 

In April, that unionization campaign won a major victory when workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., voted to join UAW. 

But a May vote at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama failed even after a majority of workers had signed union cards. The UAW has charged in a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board that the result followed a union-busting campaign from the company. Mercedes said in May that it “sincerely hoped the UAW would respect our Team Members’ decision.”

A UAW campaigner leading the push into the Southeast on Wednesday argued that a unionzed Spring Hill was the model of future manufacturing in the region.

“The UAW members at Ultium and VW are proving that the new jobs of the South will be union jobs,” Tim Smith, director of UAW Region 8, which stretches from Georgia to New Mexico, said in a statement. 

“In the battery plants and EV factories springing up from Georgia to Kentucky to Texas, workers know they deserve the same strong pay and benefits our members have won. And we’re going to make sure they have the support they need to win their unions and win their fair share.”