{"id":177780,"date":"2019-06-12T18:09:00","date_gmt":"2019-06-12T23:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/06\/12\/remember-when-vw-used-slave-labor-and-killed-thousands\/"},"modified":"2019-06-12T18:09:00","modified_gmt":"2019-06-12T23:09:00","slug":"remember-when-vw-used-slave-labor-and-killed-thousands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/06\/12\/remember-when-vw-used-slave-labor-and-killed-thousands\/","title":{"rendered":"Remember When VW Used Slave Labor and Killed Thousands?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>It turned out that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/volkswagens-nazi-era-blood-crimes\/\">VW corporate management was more brutal than the Wehrmacht and SS<\/a> during WW II.<\/div>\n<p>It turns out that <a href=\"https:\/\/labornotes.org\/2019\/06\/eve-union-vote-chattanooga-vw-workers-describe-rampant-workplace-injuries\">the unionization effort at the Chattanooga VW plant is largely by management trying to work their employees to death<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This does seem to be a tradition for the boys from Wolfsburg: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cI\u2019m only 33 and I can\u2019t see myself working here for another 10 years,\u201d said Ashley Murray. \u201cI would be disabled by then. We need a union because they are a multibillion-dollar company and they treat us like shit.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>Murray is a production employee at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, one of 18 hourly employees there I interviewed for this story. Comments like hers were almost universal. <\/p>\n<p>According to these workers, on-the-job injuries are among the top issues at the sprawling plant nestled in the Appalachian mountains of East Tennessee. The union authorization election runs Wednesday through Friday this week; 1,700 workers are eligible to vote. <\/p>\n<p>Many workers told variations of the same story. For the first time in their lives, they\u2019re making good money\u2014but they\u2019re trapped in a job that\u2019s chewing them up.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy co-workers are getting hurt, I\u2019ve been hurt, there is constant threat of injury, and if it doesn\u2019t change, none of us will survive,\u201d said one worker who\u2019s been at Volkswagen for eight years but asked to remain anonymous for fear of management retaliation. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cI shouldn\u2019t have to give Volkswagen my body in exchange for the house that I live in and the lifestyle I try to provide for my family.\u201d Workers described a plant where high turnover and dangerous conditions lead to serious injuries, most commonly in the hands and shoulders. Some of the workers I met now suffer from lifelong disabilities. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Yeah, that whole, &#8220;Foreign workers in German factories,&#8221; thing?<\/p>\n<p>Not good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It turned out that VW corporate management was more brutal than the Wehrmacht and SS during WW II. It turns out that the unionization effort at the Chattanooga VW plant is largely by management trying to work their employees to death. This does seem to be a tradition for the boys from Wolfsburg: \u201cI\u2019m only &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[473,364,465,442,403],"class_list":["post-177780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-auto-industry","tag-evil","tag-labor","tag-union","tag-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177780"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177780\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}