Evidently, for the United Auto Workers, desperate times call for desperate measures.
Little else can explain its attempt to unionize a small group of maintenance workers at Chattanooga's Volkswagen automobile plant and its agreement to link arms with a German trade union in an attempt to promote labor issues at German automakers and suppliers in the South.
Overall union membership, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fell to 11.1 percent of United States workers in 2014, down from 11.3 percent in 2013. Membership declined in 27 states and the District of Columbia and was virtually unchanged in five states.
Among all unions, membership has fallen by more than 3 million workers since 1983, when 20.1 percent of the workforce was unionized. Membership in the UAW, meanwhile, has fallen from 1.5 million members in 1979 to 403,500 at the start of 2015.
In the Southeast, the UAW has been shut out in its attempt to unionize foreign-owned automotive plants. However, despite an election loss in an attempt to unionize blue-collar workers at the VW plant in February 2014 and VW's denial of the union's request to represent workers by the number of cards members signed earlier this year, the UAW sniffs an opening here.
Evidently, enough of the 164 maintenance workers are members of the union's Local 42 that the UAW believes it can win an election in that small sector of the plant. And the National Labor Relations Board has sanctioned just such an election beginning Dec. 3.
However, Volkswagen, which publicly remained neutral in the February 2014 vote but privately did all it could to encourage the union, has not been in favor of this attempt and argued as much in the NLRB hearing.
With the automaker reeling from revelations that it rigged many of its diesel engines to mask the pollution they emitted and facing millions of dollars in repair costs, a lack of unity among workers is about the last thing it needs.
The UAW "is taking advantage by driving a wedge between VW employees," Maury Nicely of the American Council of Employees, a competing group to the UAW, told the Times Free Press.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for German union IG Metall said its presence together with the UAW can help exert influence among workers in the U.S. for a similar approach to organized labor as that in Germany.
With these desperate moves, the UAW seems to acknowledge its lack of success. But, in the end, it just looks desperate.