Last week, the United Auto Workers (UAW) notched a historic victory when workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted decisively to unionize. This is the first triumph in the UAW’s ambitious new campaign to organize over a dozen nonunion auto plants across the U.S., especially in the South.
Now the focus moves to Vance, Alabama, where 5,000 Mercedes-Benz workers will vote on a union in mid-May. The UAW also says that over 30 percent of autoworkers at the Hyundai plant in Montgomery, Alabama, have so far signed union cards.
The bosses of Alabama are waging a desperate anti-union blitz to prevent a UAW victory. At the statewide level, a key actor behind this is the Business Council of Alabama (BCA), composed of the state’s most powerful corporate interests. The BCA started an anti-UAW website and has been publishing anti-union op-eds while allying closely with state politicians, especially Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey.
The BCA is more than just a business group. A Truthout analysis found that it is a coordinating nexus for Alabama’s ultra-wealthy corporations whose owners and executives run the state. The small group of leaders who oversee the BCA’s day-to-day governance represent Alabama’s most powerful corporations, from its biggest utility company to its biggest health care provider and its biggest bank. Some of these BCA officers and executive committee members rake in tens of millions in CEO pay and represent corporations run by billionaires, all while the BCA tries to prevent autoworkers from simply having a union.
The BCA exerts influence through political and interpersonal networks, campaign donations, lobbying efforts, corporate philanthropy and schmoozy gatherings with politicians. Top elected officials, like Governor Ivey, are firmly in the BCA’s pocket. Alabama Sen. Katie Britt is the former CEO and president of the BCA.
In taking on the BCA and its union-busting campaign, autoworkers aren’t just fighting for themselves. They’re taking on the state’s organized ruling class — an interlocked web of powerful automakers, utilities, banks, and more — that has kept Alabama one of the poorest states in the U.S.
The BCA sees the autoworker union drive as an existential threat to its own class rule and its decades-long campaign to maintain Alabama as an anti-union fortress.
Corporate power has always formed and mobilized associations that unite bosses to fight the working class when it strikes or tries to unionize. The BCA was founded in 1985 to advance the interests of the state’s corporate class through a well-funded influence operation aimed at shaping legislation and politics.
The very corporate interests that want to stop Alabama workers from unionizing are also profiting from the high utility bills paid by autoworkers and their communities.
The BCA is Alabama’s “exclusive affiliate” with two powerful national corporate associations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers, both committed to opposing unions and crushing pro-worker legislation.
Today, the BCA is the key vehicle through which the state’s ruling class — including its various metropolitan business groups and major corporations — coordinates........