Organizing German automobile plants in the USA: An assessment of the United Auto Workers' efforts to organize German-owned automobile plants

Over the past three decades, all three German automobile producers (BMW, Daimler, and Volkswagen) have built production facilities in the United States. Despite the similarities among the firms when it comes to collective employee representation in Germany, the employee-relations practices of each firm differ markedly in the United States. In all three cases, however, the UAW failed to achieve union recognition. The Volkswagen case, in particular, illustrates the considerable challenge involved in trying to reconcile two quite different national systems of collective employee representation.