The Mercedes emblem seen on the GLE 350 model at the New York International Auto Show at the Javits Center on April 1, 2015 in New York City. The GLE is one of several car models manufactured at Mercedes’ plant in Vance, Alabama, outside Tuscaloosa. (Kevin Hagen/Getty Images)
The United Auto Workers said Tuesday that more than half of the workers at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance had signed union cards, another milestone in an organization drive with significant symbolic importance.
“We haven’t taken this step lightly,” Jeremy Kimbrell, a longtime worker and union supporter at the plant, said in a statement released by the UAW on Tuesday. “For years, we’ve fallen further behind while Mercedes has made billions.”
An email seeking comment was sent to Mercedes-Benz on Tuesday.
Workers at the plant announced the union drive in January, citing stalled wages at the plant. An Alabama Arise report published in November found that while Alabama auto workers on average make more than the median household income in the state ($64,682 v. $59,674), their real wages had declined 11% between 2002 and 2019.
The report also found that state autoworkers’ pay trailed national averages. It also said that Black workers, Hispanic workers and women are paid substantially less in the automotive industry.
UAW said in January that 30% of the workforce had indicated their preference for a union, enough to allow organizers to call for an election. However, the UAW said it wants to sign up 70% of employees before asking for voluntary recognition by Mercedes-Benz or calling for an election, supervised by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
The drive is taking place at a plant widely viewed as laying the groundwork for Alabama’s automotive industry. Mercedes-Benz agreed to build the plant in Vance in 1993 thanks to a large incentive package offered by the state. Since Mercedes’ arrival, Honda, Hyundai and Toyota have opened factories in Alabama.
A major attraction for companies was the relative lack of unions in the state. Prior attempts to organize the workforce at the auto plants failed, but UAW has been active in Alabama and Tennessee in recent months. Workers at the Hyundai plant in Montgomery?have also launched a union drive, citing pay and health concerns.
The union drive has led to push back from the company and state officials. Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, has been sharply critical of the union and called it an “out-of-state interest group” at a speech at the Montgomery Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday.
“We need your efforts to serve as a model to other local areas grappling with this threat from Detroit,” she said. “Alabamians work harder than anyone and make the best automobiles in the world. And we must not let UAW tell us any different.”
UAW has not criticized the work ethic of the state’s autoworkers or the products they make.
According to?the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 7.5% of Alabama’s workforce (156,000 people) belonged to a union in 2023, while 8.6% (180,000 people) were represented by unions. Both numbers are below national averages but are the highest in the South.
Jemma Stephenson contributed to this report.
This story is republished from the Alabama Reflector, a sister publication of the Kentucky Lantern and ?part of?States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and donors as a 501c(3) public charity.?
The J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington, D.C. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan is calling on the U.S. House committee that controls government spending to bar any federal dollars from going towards a long-planned rebuild of the FBI headquarters in the Maryland or Virginia suburbs outside Washington, D.C.
Jordan, instead, wants the federal law enforcement agency to look for locations outside the D.C. region, suggesting the Redstone Arsenal Campus in Huntsville, Alabama as one option and thrusting himself into a years-long battle between Maryland and Virginia for the location of a new HQ.
“We recommend that the appropriations bills eliminate any funding for the FBI that is not absolutely essential for the agency to execute its mission, including as a starting point eliminating taxpayer funding for any new FBI headquarter facility and instead examining options for relocating the FBI’s headquarters outside of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area,” Jordan wrote in the letter.
No other lawmakers signed onto the letter, so it wasn’t clear why several of the paragraphs said “we” instead of “I.”
The language Jordan wants the House Appropriations Committee to add would require the FBI to “submit an operational plan within 90 days to move the FBI Headquarters out of the National Capital Region.”
“The operational plan should also consider the existing resources and infrastructure available at the FBI’s Redstone Arsenal Campus in Huntsville, AL,” Jordan suggested.
An FBI spokesperson pressed back on the proposal, saying in a written statement that the “facilities at Redstone Arsenal cannot accommodate the minimum of 8,500 personnel planned to occupy the new HQ suburban and downtown facilities.”
Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle said in a statement the city is “proud of the FBI presence in Huntsville and will support whatever Congress decides is best for the betterment of our country.”
Huntsville, which overtook Birmingham to become Alabama’s largest city in 2021, has long been a hub for federal investment. The Redstone Arsenal has been a major employer in the area since World War II. The Arsenal hosts NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command.
The FBI moved an explosive analysis center to Redstone in 2016 and has moved thousands of jobs to the area, attracted in part by Redstone’s secure location.
The federal government has invested about $3 billion in the Huntsville FBI facility, according to al.com. About 1,500 employees worked there at the start of the year.
Jordan’s proposal would have the annual funding bill say that “centralization of FBI operations in the National (Capital) Region has led to duplication of activity best left to the respective field offices, contributed to reduced autonomy in local field offices, and allowed improper political influence to taint law enforcement investigations and activity.”
That language is especially partisan and unlikely to pass the Democratically controlled U.S. Senate, assuming it is added to an appropriations measure.
Another hitch is that the annual Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations bill, which includes funding for the FBI and where Jordan suggested the policy riders go, may not be the correct place for such a provision.
The Financial Services and General Government bill is the measure that includes funding for the General Services Administration, which has been working for well over a decade to find a new location for the FBI’s headquarters.
House Republicans released that bill last month after adding $3.5 billion for the GSA to move forward with a “new, suburban Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) headquarters,” according to the GOP summary of the measure.
The GSA has narrowed down the options for a new site to locations in Greenbelt, Maryland; Landover, Maryland; and Springfield, Virginia. The three locations are all just outside of Washington, D.C.
The FBI has said for years it needs a new headquarters since the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building along Pennsylvania Avenue in downtown Washington, D.C., has significant structural and space issues.
Last year’s omnibus funding package, which Congress approved in December, called on the GSA to consult with representatives from Virginia and Maryland to ensure the criteria used to pick a final site “is consistent with Congressional intent.”
The language was part of an ongoing, years-long battle between the Maryland and Virginia congressional delegations to secure the new location within their states.
The Virginia congressional delegation and Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin advocated for their state in February. The Maryland congressional delegation and Democratic Gov. Wes Moore made their case for the new FBI headquarters in March.
An FBI spokesperson said in a written statement on Tuesday that “the FBI continues to work with GSA to undertake a fair and transparent site selection process to include collaborating on the appropriate site selection plan and criteria.”
“The FBI is confident in GSA’s expertise to select a location that will meet the needs of our workforce, meet the mission of the FBI, and will be a good deal to the taxpayer,” the spokesperson said.
Jordan, who chairs the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, has numerous grievances with the FBI, including over its investigations into former President Donald Trump. FBI Director Christopher Wray is scheduled to testify before the committee on Wednesday.
In the 11-page letter, Jordan requests the Republican-controlled spending panel make several other changes to its spending bills. Jordan is not a member of that committee.
Among those requests is preventing the U.S. Justice Department from using any of its funding “to conduct a politically sensitive investigation until the Department of Justice establishes a policy requiring non-partisan career staff to oversee such investigations.”
Jordan also makes suggestions for several other government spending bills, including language for the Financial Services, Homeland Security, Labor-HHS-Education and State-Foreign Operations bills.
It wasn’t immediately clear why Jordan is making the requests directly of the committee, instead of offering amendments when the bills come to the House floor for debate.
The move could signal that House Republican leadership doesn’t have the votes to bring the bills to the floor before the August recess. The House GOP narrowly controls that chamber and can only lose four votes on partisan bills.
The annual government funding bills are supposed to clear Congress and garner the president’s signature by the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1, though that rarely happens.
]]>Bobby Singleton, the Alabama Senate minority leader and a plaintiff in the case, said Thursday he was “surprised” by the ruling but said it was the “right thing to do.” (Photo by Stew Milne)
The U.S. Supreme Court Thursday upheld a lower court ruling that Alabama’s 2022 congressional maps violated the Voting Rights Act, a ruling that preserves a major part of the law and could lead to new congressional maps in Alabama.
A three-judge panel in January 2022 ruled that maps approved by the Alabama Legislature in 2021 that had a single majority-Black congressional district violated Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate based on race, color or membership in certain language groups.
Plaintiffs in the case argued the approach packed Black voters, who tend to vote Democratic, into a single district and made it difficult for those outside the district to elect leaders of their choosing or participate meaningfully in the political process.
The lower court ordered the state to develop a remedy that included a second district with a significant Black population.
Alabama appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that Alabama’s approach to redistricting, which it called “race-neutral,” matched the text of the law. The state argued that it generated millions of potential maps without referencing race, and could glean from that a median number of majority-minority districts.
In a 5-4 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts rejected the state’s argument, as well as arguments from the state that Section 2 did not apply to single-member districts, writing that the state “misunderstands (Section) 2 and our decisions implementing it.”
“A district is not equally open … when minority voters face—unlike their majority peers—bloc voting along racial lines, arising against the backdrop of substantial racial discrimination within the State, that renders a minority vote unequal to a vote by a nonminority voter,” Roberts wrote.
Bobby Singleton, the Alabama Senate Minority Leader and a plaintiff in the case, said in a phone interview Thursday he was “surprised” by the ruling but said it was the “right thing to do.”
“The African-American community is grossly underrepresented in Congress,” Singleton said. “This is something that is quite a victory today.”
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement Thursday that the decision was “disappointing,” but “this case is not over.”
A message seeking comment was left with Rep. Chris Pringle, R-Mobile, who helped lead redistricting efforts in the Alabama Legislature in 2021.
Gina Maiola, a spokeswoman for Gov. Kay Ivey, said in a statement Thursday her office was “reviewing the outcome.”
Abha Khanna, who argued the case for the plaintiffs before the U.S. Supreme Court, said in a statement that the Supreme Court “made the right decision today.”
“Alabama’s current congressional map systematically dilutes the voting power of Black Alabamians, in clear violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,” the statement said. “Thankfully, the Court today identified Alabama’s redistricting scheme as a textbook violation of the landmark civil rights law.”
The plaintiffs in the case Thursday released a joint statement through their attorneys that said the Alabama lawmakers had tried to “shirk their responsibility to ensure communities of color are given an equal opportunity to elect their preferred candidates.”
“Today, the Supreme Court reminded them of that responsibility by affirming the district court’s order that a new map be drawn that complies with federal law – one that recognizes the diversity in our state rather than erasing it,” the statement said. “This fight was won through generations of Black leaders who refused to be silent, and while much work is left, today we can move forward with these reaffirmed protections civil rights leaders fought and died for.”
Alabama has had a single majority-minority congressional district, taking in most of the western Black Belt in the state, since 1992. It is represented by U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Birmingham, the only Democrat in Alabama’s seven-member U.S. House delegation.
Plaintiffs argued that a House delegation that was 14% Black meant Black Alabamians, who make up 26.8% of the state population, were underrepresented.
During the lower court hearing, plaintiffs proposed creating two new congressional districts that would be 41% to 50% Black.
Bernard Simelton, the president of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, said in an interview Thursday that the decision was the biggest since 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder. That ruling struck down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required the U.S. Department of Justice to review changes to voting laws in states with a history of discrimination, like Alabama.
“For Black voters, this means that your voice is still important,” he said. “And that if we continue to work to get more voters out, we will be able to elect more people to positions of our choice.”
In a dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the question was whether the state had to draw districts proportional to the Black share of the population.
“Section 2 demands no such thing, and, if it did, the Constitution would not permit it,” he wrote.
Roberts wrote that the court was only reaffirming prior precedents.
“The concern that Section 2 may impermissibly elevate race in the allocation of political power within the States is, of course, not new,” Roberts wrote. “Our opinion today does not diminish or disregard these concerns. It simply holds that a faithful application of our precedents and a fair reading of the record before us do not bear them out here.”
Ralph Chapoco and Alander Rocha contributed to this report.
Updated at 11:08 a.m. with comments from Gov. Kay Ivey’s office and plaintiffs in the case, and to correct spelling of Abha Khanna’s name; at 12:05 p.m. with comment from the Alabama attorney general’s office and at 1:11 p.m. with comments from Bernard Simelton of the NAACP; and at 11:43 a.m. Friday to correct percentage of Black residents in Alabama from 26% to 26.8% and the proposed congressional district make up by plaintiffs from 41% to 45% to 41% to 50%
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