The United Auto Workers (UAW) have staggered from one defeat to the next for many years. Three years ago, the union got a punch in the gut when it was defeated in a recognition vote at Volkswagen (VW) in Tennessee. Friday’s defeat at Nissan was nothing less than a knockout punch ending for the foreseeable future of any efforts by the UAW to organize the large, predominately foreign-owned auto assembly plants in the South.

News of the defeat trickled in on Friday night through friends who were present at the vote in Canton, Mississippi, where Nissan’s sprawling, nearly-mile-long assembly plant is located. More than 60 percent of Nissan’s approximately 3,500 eligible workers voted over a two-day period against the union. Most of us hoped to wake up on Saturday morning to better news, but Nissan — one of the world’s top automakers — beat the UAW hands down. It wasn’t even close.

“It was certainly disappointing news,” Scott Houldieson, the vice-president of UAW Local 551, told me over the phone during his lunch break on Sunday. Houldieson is a twenty-eight-year veteran of Ford’s Torrence Ave. assembly plant on Chicago’s far South Side. “A lot us are disappointed. We had high hopes.”