Stacking the Union-Organizing Deck in Tennessee
Mark Mix: Shawn Fain has been UAW president for barely over a year. But he has already shown he is completely…
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.
Mark Mix: Shawn Fain has been UAW president for barely over a year. But he has already shown he is completely…
Petoskey, MI Brown Motors case to vote out Teamsters follows string of other legal actions by workers opposing forced payments to union bosses in wake of party-line Right to Work law repeal
Big Labor bosses will eagerly advance agendas that lower real incomes and destroy jobs if they simultaneously fatten union coffers. But neither rank-and-file union members nor union-free workers share that perspective!