The UAW said Friday night that it made history with its biggest organizing win in decades when workers at the Volkswagen Chattanooga plant in Tennessee voted to join the union.

The UAW declared victory around 10:25 p.m. EDT Friday, despite the National Labor Relations Board saying it was still tallying results.

The voting started at 4:45 a.m. Wednesday and ran until 8 p.m. Friday. According to the UAW’s unofficial tally online, the union had 2,268 “Yes” votes and 985 “no” votes at around 10:30 p.m, giving it 73% approval.

“In a historic victory, an overwhelming majority of Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, have voted to join the UAW,” UAW spokesman Jonah Furman wrote in a media statement. “While votes continue to be tallied, the outcome is clear: Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga are the first Southern autoworkers outside of the Big Three to win their union.”

The win is big for relatively new UAW President Shawn Fain because the UAW tried twice before and failed to unionize the plant. This is also the first plant in the U.S. South that the union has ever organized as it looks to unionize 13 other nonunion auto plants.

“Fain has been able to pull off what some other union leaders have failed to do with big contract victories,” Richard Bensinger, a veteran union organizer who helped lead the Starbucks union campaign and the former national organizing director of the AFL-CIO, told the Free Press. “He has dramatically pivoted from the strikes to organizing. Exciting. Workers I know at both plants say there’s overwhelming support, and the politicians are more reticent this time around, I think, afraid of alienating so many Southern union supporters.”

Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, said the Detroit automakers played a role in the union’s victory too.

“By having Ford, GM and Stellantis, after the ratification of the new contracts, immediately go to their stockholders and say, ‘It’s no big deal, we can still be very profitable,’ meant Chattanooga workers didn’t have to listen to the Republican governors who said that a union will shut them down,” Wheaton said. “Ford, GM and Stellantis showed that (a rich contract) does not dramatically damage their bottom line and they can still afford to give stock buybacks, give their CEOs big pay checks, and now the workers can afford to buy groceries.”

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An attempt to thwart the union

On Tuesday, just hours before the voting was set to start, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee and five other Republican governors in Southern states with nonunion automakers issued a lengthy letter in an attempt to thwart a union at VW Chattanooga. It said they were “highly concerned” about the UAW’s unionization campaign, which is “driven by misinformation and scare tactics.”

“Companies have choices when it comes to where to invest and bring jobs and opportunity,” the governors’ letter argued. “We have worked tirelessly on behalf of our constituents to bring good-paying jobs to our states. These jobs have become part of the fabric of the automotive manufacturing industry. Unionization would certainly put our states’ jobs in jeopardy.”

The letter did not dissuade workers at the VW plant. The drive behind VW workers signing cards on the UAW’s website seeking to join the union followed the UAW’s big contract wins against the Detroit Three last fall after a 46-day strike. The union won members a cost-of-living-adjustment, the elimination of wage tiers and bonuses for retirees. Right after the UAW won wage gains of 25% across 4½-year contracts with the Detroit automakers, Nissan, Honda, Hyundai, Toyota and Volkswagen all offered raises of 9% to 14% to their U.S. workforces.

‘I want a union, tell me what to do’

Renee Berry, 58, is pro-union. Berry’s job at VW Chattanooga is to deliver vehicle parts to the assembly line. She’s worked there for 14 years. She said she voted “yes” to unionize because having had three surgeries since starting there, she wants improved plant safety. She also wants a pension, better health care and to not have to use paid time off days during mandatory plant shutdowns if she wants to get paid during those shutdown weeks.

Berry believes the only way to get those improvements is with a union. The UAW provided Berry to the Detroit Free Press for comment. Berry was part of the volunteer organizing committee and she helped staff the voting center. She said when she looked out at the lines this week, “All I could see in the line was red T-shirts in support of the union.”

Still, having lived through the votes in 2014 and 2019 only to be disappointed at the loss, Berry knew to be cautiously optimistic.

“It’s a lot different this time,” Berry told the Free Press. “Third time’s a charm. The people who were on the fence, the things that happened to us earlier, has happened to them now. So now … they can get on board. Now, they say, ‘I want a union. Tell me what I need to do.’ “

VW spokesman Michael Lowder addressed the PTO issues Berry raised, saying summer shutdown week usually occurs during the Fourth of July holiday. So employees would need to use only four PTO days because July 4 is a paid holiday. For the December holiday shutdown, he said the company pays for that time off as company holidays and no PTO is required.

“We understand that PTO is a significant issue and priority for employees. We want them to have work-life balance and are constantly looking for ways to bolster our benefits on this front,” Lowder said. “We recently announced a policy change to increase emergency PTO days. Direct feedback from employees via the Engagement Committee helped inform this decision.”

Berry spoke to the Free Press earlier in the evening, saying that if the union won the vote, she will “shed tears. It’s going to be emotional, but it’s going to happy.”

And if it fails, Berry said, “We are going to keep on trying. We’re not going to give up. Those who voted against it, something will happen to them to change their mind.”

Up next: Mercedes Benz

The workforce at VW Chattanooga was one of the first nonunion automakers in the country to launch its public campaign to unionize, with 30% of the workers at the plant signing the cards in December. But that didn’t guarantee a win.

The UAW has a history of trying to organize but failing in the South, particularly at the Chattanooga plant, which is VW’s only plant in the United States. In 2014, the union was confident it would win a vote at the VW plant because it had a majority who had signed cards in favor of a union.

But on Day One of a three-day vote, the Republican leadership of Tennessee mounted a campaign to vote no. The GOP’s campaign worked, in part because the former mayor of Chattanooga insinuated that VW would not allocate future products to the plant if it unionized. In 2019, the UAW again narrowly lost a vote at the plant.

Up next will be the workforce at Mercedes-Benz plants in Alabama. Both Mercedes-Benz and the UAW agreed to an election, according to the National Labor Relations Board. The vote is set for May 13-17 at the Mercedes-Benz plants in Vance and Woodstock, Alabama.

The vote comes after what was said to be a supermajority of Mercedes-Benz employees at the plants filed a petition earlier this month with the board’s Region 10 office in Atlanta seeking to represent about 5,200 production workers.

Fain last month told the Free Press he expects to organize at least one new automaker plant in the country this year, possibly more. Fain said all he needs is one plant to take it to a vote and win to provide the momentum to win more, he said.

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Contact Jamie L. LaReau: jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. Read more on General Motors and sign up for our autos newsletter. Become a subscriber.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: UAW claims historic win in organizing an automaker in the South