Are Honda, Hyundai, And Volkswagen Ready To Face The Wrath Of Shawn Fain And The UAW?

We do not think they are!

Shawn Fein, Wonkette’s Sexiest Man Alive, 2023

Back in October, after helping workers at the Big Three auto manufacturers — GM, Ford, and Stellantis — secure historic new contracts with raises and benefits and all kinds of good things, Shawn Fain and the United Auto Workers union announced that they would not be stopping there, and that they would push to get all of the auto manufacturers in the US unionized.

That was not just talk. Since then, the union has been meeting with interested workers at auto plants across the US, and yesterday filed charges of unfair labor practices with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on behalf of workers at Honda in Indiana, Hyundai in Alabama, and Volkswagen in Tennessee over the union-busting they allege the companies have been doing.

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More Perfect Union put out a video Monday about workers at Honda’s Indiana plant who want to unionize, why they want to unionize, and the antagonism they have faced from the company thus far.

When workers first started wearing UAW pins and stickers, they immediately faced pushback from managers who claimed, wrongly, that they couldn’t do that and also claimed, ridiculously, that the UAW just wanted to come into Honda and “fuck shit up.” Because they just love chaos and want everything to burn, I guess?

One of the biggest complaints they have is that there are “people being injured, almost on a daily basis,” which seems like a very reasonable thing to take issue with. Susan Thompson, a worker interviewed for the piece, said that after she was injured on the job, management came to her to tell her that she needed to be more careful, and that this could have happened while she was talking or not paying attention. When she turned to them and said “You know what? This is not my fault that I got hurt,” they shrank back and swore they weren’t implying that, but she said they absolutely were, that they were implying that she was at fault and not the fact that she was “rushing because the processes were overloaded.”

"We are filing an unfair labor practice charge against Honda because of management illegally telling us to remove union stickers from our hats, and for basically threatening us with write-ups,” said Honda worker Josh Cupit. “It's essentially to show Honda that we know what our rights are and that they're not gonna bully us and we're not gonna back down from 'em. And we know that they are in the wrong.”

Honda is notoriously anti-union. A 2020 write-up in Briarpatch detailed some of the absurd lengths they went to to keep their Canadian employees from unionizing, including setting up bi-weekly meetings, creating heat maps of work areas where grumbling and possible union activity was afoot, and being particularly concerned about newer workers who might not have understood the company’s rich history of … not having unions.

We don’t know, of course, that Honda is spying on its workers in the United States the way they did in Canada, but given the fact that we have far fewer worker protections than they do, I wouldn’t be too surprised if they are doing the same thing here.

At Volkswagen, which publicly claims to be “neutral” on the subject of unionization, the company has also been accused of intimidating workers behind the scenes.

“We’ve done handbilling at that gate before and the company has never done anything like this,” said Volkswagen worker Dave Gleeson. “We were just getting ready to hand out flyers and security came up and told us we couldn’t. I asked if this was his decision, and he said no, this is coming from way over my head. Our campaign caught the company completely flat-footed, and they overreacted. We’re not going to be intimidated. We know our rights and we’re going to keep standing up and keep speaking out.”

Workers there also allege that they have been threatened and harassed for discussing unionization and that many of their organizing materials have been illegally thrown out by management. That being said, they also got 1000 union cards signed in under a week.

The same thing is happening at Hyundai, where workers report that management has been illegally confiscating and destroying pro-union materials and also, quite illegally, telling them that they are not allowed to distribute them — even as they dole out anti-union T-shirts in the cafeteria (would kill for a picture of one of these).

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“These companies are breaking the law in an attempt to get autoworkers to sit down and shut up instead of fighting for their fair share,” said UAW President Shawn Fain in a statement. “But these workers are showing management that they won’t be intimidated out of their right to speak up and organize for a better life. From Honda to Hyundai to Volkswagen and beyond, we’ve got their back. The auto industry’s record profits should mean record contracts for these workers, too."

Of course they should! And in the meantime, these companies need to get hell from the NLRB for violating their workers’ rights.