“Abe Walker’s sociological study of the UAW’s failure and triumph in organizing Volkswagen’s Chattanooga assembly plant offers a penetrating exploration of solidarity, internationalism, and militancy in a twenty-first-century context. Relying on numerous interviews and a thorough understanding of the auto industry’s topographies of power, Walker digs deep to explain why the union’s 2014 and 2019 organizing efforts proved so disastrous and how all that history was turned on its head when the UAW won a smashing labor board victory in 2024.”—Nelson Lichtenstein, Research Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and coeditor of Labor’s Partisans: Essential Writings on the Union Movement from the 1950s to Today

“Reassembling the UAW is a riveting account and rigorous organizational analysis of the successful union organizing drive at the Volkswagen assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 2024, among the most important such drives of the early twenty-first century in the United States. A must-read for labor scholars and activists, the book details how a new, insurgent, and militant union leadership transformed a crusty bureaucratic union, whose previous impersonal top-down organizing drives had resulted in union defeats at Volkswagen, into a fighting union, whose bottom-up organizing strategy led to the historic labor victory in the nonunion, foreign-owned automotive sector in the right-to-work U.S. South.”—Daniel B. Cornfield, Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University, and author of Becoming a Mighty Voice: Conflict and Change in the United Furniture Workers of America