Jeremy Kimbrell was fired from his job at an Alabama Mercedes-Benz factory after playing a leading role in the UAW’s failed effort to unionize the plant in 2024. Jacobin spoke to him about his experience and the union’s ongoing fight to organize the South.

In 2023, the United Auto Workers (UAW) gave much-needed inspiration to the declining US labor movement. Under Shawn Fain’s progressive leadership, autoworkers waged a historic strike to wrest historic contract gains from the unionized Big Three carmakers: Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis. On the back of this victory, the UAW launched an ambitious campaign to organize nonunion auto shops across the United States, many of them located in the South.

The union saw early success when it won an election at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee

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