Mercedes-Benz workers in Alabama voting on whether to join UAW
CBSN
Alabama is front and center this week as the United Auto Workers looks to build on recent victories in the South, a region long hostile to organized labor.
More than 5,000 Mercedes-Benz workers began voting Monday at a manufacturing factory in Vance as well as at a battery plant in nearby Woodstock. The balloting, which continues through Friday morning, comes on the heels of an overwhelming win at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee after two failed attempts since 2014.
"It is potentially a milestone event. What the UAW stands to gain is an acceleration of momentum for organizing the other 11 nonunion automakers," Harley Shaiken, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, told CBS MoneyWatch.
Ashley White received her earliest combat action badge from the United States Army soon after the first lieutenant arrived in Afghanistan. The silver military award, recognizing soldiers who've been personally engaged by an attacker during conflict, was considered an achievement in and of itself as well as an affirming rite of passage for the newly deployed. White had earned it for using her own body to shield a group of civilian women and children from gunfire that broke out in the midst of her third mission in Kandahar province. All of them survived. She never mentioned the badge to anyone in her battalion.