Looming over the United Auto Workers strike: Automakers’ continued migration to the anti-union South.

Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, the auto industry began shifting South, a region long characterized by hostility to labor unions and by low wages.

Since then, assembly lines of higher-paid UAW workers at Detroit’s Big Three – Ford, General Motors and Stellantis – have shrunk. And automakers such as Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Toyota and Hyundai have steadily hired nonunion autoworkers, who make less money for substantially the same work, in the South.

  • Bruisedback@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    One of these plants is right off an interstate and I drive past it frequently. Within a few weeks of this news breaking, there were “NOW HIRING” billboards put up for miles in either direction. Ignorance is a virtue in the American South.