UAW suddenly abandons quest for Chattanooga do-over

What the United Auto Workers learned from the devastation it helped to wreak on the hapless Detroit automakers was - well, not much, really. Rather than realize their combination of outlandish demands, political pressure and individual intimidation had created cost structures that no company could sustain, the union decided it could only survive by heading south and attempting to wreak the same devastation on transplants operating auto plants in the south.

This was seen as pretty good news by the Detroit Three, who would love nothing more than to see their foreign competitors saddled with the same ridiculous overhead the Detroit Three accepted years ago instead of hanging tough in labor negotiations. But there was one problem: Southern auto workers can read the news, and they know what happened in Detroit. They want no part of it in their plants. So when the UAW attempted to organize the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, they got their heads handed to them in a 712-626 vote of workers saying no thanks, we're fine without the union. Now if you know anything about the UAW - and being from Detroit I sadly know far too much about the UAW - you know they don't accept defeat, even when the defeat is completely legitimate. So when they lost the Chattanooga vote, they did what UAW watchers expected them to do. They ran to the National Labor Relations Board - which has been packed by President Obama with union-friendly cronies - seeking to have the vote overturned and a do-over ordered. That was the UAW's position - until yesterday, when the union suddenly dropped the appeal and walked away from Chattanooga entirely. What happened? As the Wall Street Journal explains, the only thing worse than losing is being humiliated with a second loss, and it was becoming increasingly clear that even if the NLRB gave the UAW what it wanted, there would not be the votes among Volkswagen workers to let the UAW organize:

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Mr. King also blamed Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam and Senator Bob Corker for fighting the union's attempt to organize the plant and refusing "to participate in a transparent legal discovery process." But the two politicians had merely exercised their First Amendment rights in publicly noting the threat to business in the state if the UAW prevailed. The likelier explanation is that the UAW concluded it would lose a second election if the NLRB had ordered one. Volkswagen makes Passat sedans in Tennessee and is considering where to award a second production line to make SUVs. The German auto maker has an alternative in Mexico if costs get too high in Chattanooga.

The union may also have feared a federal lawsuit filed by anti-union workers at the plant alleging that Volkswagen violated Section 302 of the Taft-Hartley Act, which prohibits employers from giving a "thing of value" to a union seeking to organize its employees. In Chattanooga, VW gave the union free run of the plant that it denied to union opponents. The Supreme Court last year dismissed as improvidently granted Mulhall v. Unite Here Local 355, which challenged neutrality agreements like Volkwagen's with the UAW. By withdrawing its complaint, the UAW hopes to moot the lawsuit, which the AFL-CIO fears it could lose. If you're wondering what could make UAW President Bob King and other union leaders so delusional as to think they could organize southern workers after what they did to Detroit, I guess the best way I can explain it is to tell you this: All of the Detroit-based auto industry lives in its own little delusional world. My Detroit News colleague Daniel Howes calls it the "Detroit auto bubble." In this little world, every Detroit product is flawless, every worker is dedicated to excellence, every penny of overhead is justified and every foreign competitor is like Emperor Hirohito bombing Pearl Harbor. The UAW is part of this mentality too. They see every worker as one step away from 16-hour days in sweat shops working for 12 cents an hour, but for the heroic intervention of the union - and they think they can sell that vision to workers anywhere in the world. They really believe the crap about the Detroit Three and the UAW having "built the middle class," and I think they were completely blindsided by Volkswagen employees' ability to see past their nonsense. You'd think the Detroit Three would welcome this setback, but you'd be wrong. GM, Ford and Chrysler long ago accepted accommodation of their union overlords, so much so that 20 years ago when Gov. John Engler asked them how they would feel about Right to Work legislation, they said they didn't want it because it would upset the UAW. Rick Snyder 1, John Engler 0. Michigan is now a Right to Work state whether the auto industry and the UAW like it or not. Now that the UAW has to reconcile with the fact that its "organize the South" strategy is going nowhere, the Detroit Three have to deal with the reality that they will continue to be at a massive cost disadvantage compared with their southern counterparts. And it's all because the culture of the southern auto companies is based on economic reality and rationality. In other words, there are people making cars who don't live their entire lives in the delusional Detroit Auto Bubble.