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 in April 2024. But its momentum was halted when the union, faced with a major union-busting campaign, narrowly lost another election at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama.

Jeremy Kimbrell from Gordo, Alabama, worked at the Mercedes plant and played a central role in the UAW’s organizing efforts there. This year, Mercedes fired Kimbrell, and he has worked as a temporary organizer for the union since. Writer and activist Daniel Kopp spoke to Jeremy last month about the fight for a union at Mercedes, the effects of global competition in the auto industry, and the importance of transnational worker solidarity.