LITTLE ROCK — The United Auto Workers, trying a third time to organize Nissan Motor Co.’s U.S. workers, accused Japan’s second largest automaker of threatening to shut its Canton, Miss., factory.
“At Nissan in Mississippi, they’re threatening workers there that they’re going to close the plant and that’s baloney,” UAW President Bob King said Tuesday. Nissan workers are “being lied to by the American management. The American management violates workers’ rights every day.”
Organizing the U.S. factories of Asian and European automakers is critical to the future of the union, where membership has fallen by three-quarters since 1979. The UAW has twice failed to win votes to represent workers at Nissan’s Smyrna, Tenn., factory.
“We’ve got very aggressive campaigns going on at the transnationals,” King said. “We know that’s key long term to the success of our membership and the long-term security of our membership.”
Nissan denied that it’s threatening to close its Mississippi factory where it hired 1,000 workers last year, helping bring employment there to more than 5,000. The plant builds the Altima sedan, Titan pickup, Armada sport utility vehicle and the NV commercial van. The company said last year that it was adding production of the Sentra sedan, Frontier pickup and Xterra SUV. The Murano SUV is to be added in 2014.
“This is simply not true,” Camille Young, a spokesman for Nissan’s Canton plant, said in an e-mail. “Threats of job loss are not part of our communications with our employees and intimidation of any kind will never be tolerated. Nissan follows the letter and spirit of the law.”
King said he’s disappointed with how the union’s organizing drive is going at Nissan and is seeking the involvement of the Yokohama, Japan-based automaker’s senior management.
“There’s a lot of integrity with Japanese management in Japan,” King said. “I’m hopeful that top management will soon realize and will then step in and correct the violations of worker rights that are going on.”
King accused Nissan’s U.S. executives of violating labor standards established by the United Nations Global Compact, the International Labor Organization and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The Detroit-based union has sought help from Nissan’s Japanese unions, King said.
“We’ve had tremendous support from the Japanese autoworkers saying to their management, ‘You aren’t understanding the truth,’” King said. “‘American management is violating your principles, they’re violating your commitments and they’re violating workers’ rights.’”
King said the union is accelerating a public relations campaign “to expose the violations of human rights that are going on at the Nissan facilities in both Mississippi and Tennessee.” Actor Danny Glover spoke out for Mississippi workers outside the Detroit auto show in January.
The UAW’s membership peaked at 1.5 million in 1979. At the end of 2011, the figure was 380,719.
The UAW lost votes at Nissan’s Smyrna factory in 1989 and 2001 by 2-1 margins.
Information for this article was contributed by Alan Ohnsman of Bloomberg News.
Business, Pages 29 on 02/13/2013