A Green Light For Union-Free Job Training?
One of the key goals of the U.S. Department of Labor since President Donald Trump’s second term commenced in January 2025 has been to expand the number of apprenticeships in America to “at least a million.”
Right to Work and the Auto Industry
Over 27 years ago, on February 3, 1981, the Nissan Corporation started, what has become, a mass migration of the auto manufacturing industry away from the stagnation of Detroit and the Midwest’s forced-unionism environs to a new day, and a new way, in the Right to Work South, when it chose Smyrna, Tennessee for the site of its first ever U.S. production plant.
Mealand Ragland-Hudgins of the Tennessean.com chose the 25th anniversary of the plant’s production start to report on how it came about:
The first Nissan vehicles rolled off the factory floor in June 1983, essentially becoming a catalyst for thousands of additional auto industry jobs to follow.
“Nissan led the way for Tennessee’s emergence into the auto industry,” said U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who was governor when the state courted Nissan as a major employer. He said Nissan also considered Kentucky as a location for the assembly plant, but chose Tennessee because of its state’s “right-to-work law” and because of its investment in a four-lane highway system.
What people forget is just how risky any new investment in the auto industry was at that time. But the promise of a brighter future in Right to Work Tennessee made the risks worthwhile.
The Japanese automaker’s decision came as much of the nation was coping with a deep recession.
“Up until that time the automobile companies had all stayed in the Midwest,” Alexander said. In 1981 and 1982, the Big Three automakers — General Motors, Ford and Chrysler — were enduring record high layoffs of full- and part-time employees amid a slow economy. Layoffs totaled nearly 270,000, according to newspaper reports.
Read on to learn more about this historic event.
