What a long strange trip it has been for the United Auto Workers. The UAW, the pride of the labor movement during the New Deal order, has gone from the great sit-down strike at the 45,000-strong GM plant at Flint in 1937 — which ratified the concept of industrial organizing of all wage workers at a plant (even if it took years for a majority to join) — to the small, but perhaps significant, victory of 164 skilled-trade workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, TN.

In the election last week, 71 percent of these workers voted to join the union. Together they represent only 11 percent of the facility’s 1,450 workers. But a win is a win, and this is the first one the UAW has had at any of the current “transplants” — foreign car companies with manufacturing operations in the US — that, together, employ about a third of the employees in the American automobile manufacturing sector.

Early last year, the union lost an all-unit vote at the plant by a 53 to 47 percent margin, despite the ostensible support of VW’s top management in the Germany of the shaky, but still somewhat functional, “social market” constructed following the Second World War.