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Auto parts manufacturers hiring at record pace in Chattanooga
In just three short weeks, three auto manufacturing suppliers have announced plans to create more than 1,000 new jobs in Hamilton County.
These supply companies, Gestamp, RemSource USA Inc. and Yanfeng Automotive Interiors, will hire people and inject nearly $250 million into new or expanded plants in our community - all within the next three or four years.
"You'll see more of these," Mike Randle, Southern Business and Development magazine's publisher, told Times Free Press business reporter Mike Pare.
Clearly, the shrill sky-is-falling cries from Tennessee politicians some 18 months ago claiming any presence of the United Auto Workers union at the Chattanooga Volkswagen plant would spell doom for new jobs here and in our state were just that: the clarion bleatings of Chicken Little & friends.
You might recall the blatant political influence U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., Gov. Bill Haslam, state Sen. Bo Watson, Rep. Gerald McCormick and others exerted over the weeks leading up to the UAW vote at VW. The vote was scheduled after the German automaker and UAW announced plans to work together to create a new-fangled-for-the-U.S. works council like those in almost all other VW plants.
On the eve of the vote, Corker loudly implied that if VW workers accepted the UAW, the plant would not get the second automotive line sought here to build the automaker's new SUV.
Now why would he say such a thing? Answer: To cover for the rest of Tennessee's Republican politicians who had already - unbeknownst to the public or apparently to VW - withdrawn the state's incentives agreement after the UAW connection materialized. As the vote neared and it was clear that the vote was close or even likely, state officials apparently had begun to panic that red Tennessee would actually welcome big unions. After all, it's well known that big unions most often contribute to Democrats.
The governor said UAW would scare away other jobs. Watson called VW and the works council plan "un-American," and threatened that the General Assembly would withhold promised incentives for the new SUV line as outlined in package agreements. And yes, the governor actually withdrew the incentives agreement for the second auto line.
But who wants to own closing the door on thousands of jobs? Certainly not politicians. Suddenly the only hope for keeping fallout dust off political shoes was to scare VW workers away from a yes vote. Enter Corker - eyes cast to the sky for falling chickens.
It worked. The UAW worker vote failed by a hair - 712- 626. But the works council idea did not fail.
VW is persistent. And so are Chattanooga's steady blue-collar workers. UAW had already, with card signatures from 45 percent of the plant's blue-collar workers, secured a place to have talks with the automaker. The UAW formed a local here in an office off of the plant grounds and has continued to sign up more workers to reach now at least 55 percent,
The local is going strong. It even has a rival bidder for works council status - a group called the American Council of Employees, or ACE, that claims to have 381 VW members. ACE won't divulge how it is funded. The lawyer who recently filed ACE's overdue disclosures with the U.S. Department of Labor touts his expertise in "union avoidance." Still, ACE claims its group doesn't share close links to another outfit that worked against the UAW election at VW last year: Southern Momentum, which was led by that same attorney.
Wink, wink.
All Republican and conservative and anti-union gnashing of teeth aside, Chattanooga has a new dawn.
We have more than 2,000 new jobs coming from the SUV expansion announced six months ago, and now another 1,000 from suppliers.
Dr. Bill Fox, who heads the University of Tennessee's Center for Business and Economic Research, said that as VW increases the number of vehicles it produces in Chattanooga, that's still more reason for more suppliers to land closer to the factory. And that means still more spin-off jobs and still more money turned over in the local economy.
"The overall impact will much exceed the announcement by VW," Fox said.
Clearly, it seems fair to say the boogie men of big bad unions must not be too scary for anyone other than conservative politicians.