Reassembling the UAW: Insurgency, Contention, and the Struggle for Unionism in the American South

When Volkswagen’s Chattanooga Assembly Plant opened in 2012, the United Auto Workers were excited by the golden opportunity to organize in the anti-union South, where their efforts had been routinely thwarted. However, it took ten years and several attempts before the UAW was successful in unionizing the plant. Reassembling the UAW explains why.

Abe Walker chronicles the organizing campaign from its origin in 2014 to the union’s breakthrough victory in 2024, illustrating what went wrong—and what went right—along the way. Walker provides a systematic analysis of the strategic challenges and tactical shifts, showing the patterns that persisted across three election cycles while highlighting their differences, from global-level alliances to local labor issues.

Reassembling the UAW also demonstrates how rebel rank-and-file workers ousted the old-guard leadership and transformed the UAW into a militant union to achieve results. Ultimately, Walker offers valuable lessons for organizational strategy, the power of collective action, and the future of the labor movement.

About the Author :
Abe Walker is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Fayetteville State University.

Review :

"Abe Walker's sociological study of the UAW's failure and triumph in organizing Volkswagen's Chattanooga assembly plant offers a penetrating exploration of solidarity, internationalism, and militancy in a twenty-first-century context. Relying on numerous interviews and a thorough understanding of the auto industry's topographies of power, Walker digs deep to explain why the union's 2014 and 2019 organizing efforts proved so disastrous and how all that history was turned on its head when the UAW won a smashing labor board victory in 2024."—Nelson Lichtenstein, Research Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and coeditor of Labor's Partisans: Essential Writings on the Union Movement from the 1950s to Today

"Reassembling the UAW is a riveting account and rigorous organizational analysis of the successful union organizing drive at the Volkswagen assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 2024, among the most important such drives of the early twenty-first century in the United States. A must-read for labor scholars and activists, the book details how a new, insurgent, and militant union leadership transformed a crusty bureaucratic union, whose previous impersonal top-down organizing drives had resulted in union defeats at Volkswagen, into a fighting union, whose bottom-up organizing strategy led to the historic labor victory in the nonunion, foreign-owned automotive sector in the right-to-work U.S. South."—Daniel B. Cornfield, Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University, and author of Becoming a Mighty Voice: Conflict and Change in the United Furniture Workers of America