VW spokesman Scott Wilson said the company was “disappointed that the NLRB declined to evaluate” Volkswagen’s objections to having hourly workers in a plant separated and not vote on representation as an entire group.
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Volkswagen AG said on Thursday it has filed an appeal of a federal labor board decision on its dispute with the United Auto Workers union in Tennessee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
The NLRB order comes at a hard time for Volkswagen, which is struggling to resolve criminal and civil allegations stemming from its emissions cheating scandal.
In response to Volkswagen’s refusal to bargain with the maintenance workers, the UAW filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, noting that it has been a long accepted practice in the US for unions to represent distinct groups of workers even though their co-workers may belong to a different union or to no union at all.
According to unanimous order released Wednesday, Volkswagen’s rejection of an earlier ruling in favor of the UAW at the plant “constitutes an unlawful failure and refusal to recognize and bargain”.
According to Reuters, Volkswagen said earlier it would go to a U.S. federal appeals court in an effort to keep the UAW union from representing a portion of the company’s plant workers in Chattanooga.
Volkswagen was at one time welcoming to the UAW at Chattanooga but that was before the union lost a closely contested election open to all of the plant’s 1,500 workers in February 2014, Reuters said. It was the first time workers at a plant operated by a European or Asian automaker in the Southeastern U.S. voted to join the UAW.
Republican politicians in Tennessee and across the South have long spoken out against the UAW gaining a foothold among foreign owned plants.
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Volkswagen has been seen as the UAW’s best chance because of the strong labor presence on the company’s supervisory board. That ruling was upheld by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2013. The company’s hardball tactics against the UAW have come as a surprise to many worker representatives in Germany.
