At the end of November the United Autoworkers committed to organization efforts at thirteen non-union automakers: Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Tesla, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Subaru, Volkswagen, Mazda, Rivian, Lucid, and Volvo. Collectively, these companies are huge—they employ around 150,000 workers, and so unionizing them would be a major step toward re-densification of unions.
Today, that goal seems a lot more likely: UAW just announced that over 10,000 of these workers have signed union cards! Since it's been only 61 days since the UAW announcement, this works out to a rate of over 160 autoworkers per day committing to unionization of their workplaces. No doubt UAW's success against the Big Three auto manufacturers has given them credibility in the space.
Keep an eye out here in the months to come—union cards aren't a guarantee of future action, but they mark a significant commitment and can be indicative of a hunger for unionization.
This milestone has been celebrated today with a video linking the current unionization struggle to the history of civil rights activism—a particularly potent point given that Hyundai's plant is based in Montgomery, Alabama.
And Labor Notes has a good piece out this morning about the Hyundai plant, the working conditions there, a previous unsuccessful unionization effort, and more. You can read that here if you'd like to know what UAW is up against—it's a lot of union-busting to say the least: