I’m being paid about half of what I’m worth. All of us are. So when the company complains about how this contract may double their labor costs, well that’s only because they’ve been cheating us out of half of what we’re owed anyway.
Robert Soderstrom works in the body shop of the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and is both a member of the United Auto Worker’s Volunteer Organizing Committee. And he joined us this past Saturday to talk about how things have been at the shop since an overwhelming majority of the workers voted to unionize with the UAW nearly a year ago in April 2024.
While the workers won a major victory in organizing, the battle is far from over, and Soderstrom was able to give us some insight into what exactly has been going on at the plant since the election.
“The excitement carried us for a while, but you can only sustain a high for so long and then you get back to your regular life,” Soderstrom explained. “And then we started talking about the contract process, we had some interesting meetings, electing our bargaining committee, that kind of thing, getting a little taste of what union life will be like down the road.”
“But really, I think for most folks, other than the chatter of what this contract might bring, life has sort of gone back to normal,” he went on. “We’re not a union yet, officially. Technically we’re part of the UAW, but we don’t have a contract, we don’t have an [Executive] Board, we don’t have monthly meetings, we don’t have representatives per se. So our day-to-day lives are no different now than they were before the election.”
Part of the reason for this lull in energy is because the company itself, Volkswagen, has been stubbornly disagreeable within contract negotiations, and the unionized workers have found the process to be lengthy and unnecessarily tedious. Though, Soderstrom explained that there is still plenty of “optimism, there is hope now; we are going to get this contract!”
It has been a few weeks since the company’s last attempt at a contract proposal, which the unionized workers found to be not only lackluster but also ridiculous. According to Soderstrom, Volkswagen used one of the oldest tricks in the book by attempting to put forward a conditional offer that claimed to be not just their “best offer,” but the only offer they believed they could reasonably give workers.
While this “best offer” did include raises, the wages are only a fraction of the issues workers were trying to address, but the company’s offer was conditional on the workers letting go of a considerable chunk of their other demands.
“They wanted us to take off [Paid Time Off] — we wanted more vacation time, we need more family time, and they said ‘No, we can’t do that,’” Soderstrom explained, highlighting just a few of the demands that the company wanted off the table. “They wanted us to take away our right to strike over grievances. We’re not going to do that.”
“It was nonsense,” said Soderstrom. “Nobody really gave it any serious consideration. I think the bargaining committee took all of five minutes to say this was not a good deal.”
According to Soderstrom, the list of demands the company wanted the workers to withdraw far exceeded the list of demands they were willing to agree to.
“With our medical insurance, if you had family, I think over the course of four years it would cost you somewhere around $45,000 if you needed to reutilize your medical insurance, and Volkswagen was ‘gracious’ enough to reduce that to $37,000,” Soderstrom said, with not a little sarcasm, as he explained some of the companies counter-proposals. “And what we’re asking for is that a company that makes $20 billion in profit every year pay for our insurance, that’s the industry standard, that’s not a big ask.”
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how recent contract negotiations have gone. Watch our full interview with Robert Soderstrom to learn more about what the newly organized workers are up against: