Max everyone I know who is in any way involved with unions is absolutely losing their minds this week.

Oh yeah, the Volkswagen thing.

It's the great, it's the greatest feeling that I felt like in a long in 13 years. Okay? This is wonderful.

Those are workers at the VW plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee who just voted to form a union.

Right, this is a really big deal and not just for auto workers.

In a way to have a union form at an automotive plant in the south is a big deal kind of for

anyone who works in America. Yeah even if you're not a line worker at a

southern auto factory this could matter for you. I have a feeling that most people listening are not line workers at Southern Auto Factories,

but it's not going to be obvious why this is a big deal unless you understand why the

South as a rule doesn't unionize and what that has to do with the entire rest of the U.S. economy.

But once you see it, you might end up sharing like those folks in the video too.

I'm Aaron Ryan and I'm Max Fisher. This is how we got here a new series where we explore a big question behind the week's headlines and tell a

story that answers that question. Our question this week, why are unions finally

breaking into the notoriously anti-union American South? That's going to bring us to

some bigger questions too, like why have unions been in such severe decline in the US?

And could that maybe start changing?

The story we want to tell you is how and why the South became so anti-union in the first place.

Because this is not peripheral to that bigger story of Union Decline in America.

It's actually pretty central to it.

All right, let's get into it.

Okay, so you might say that there are three big chapters to this story and the first of those

chapters starts all the way back in the late 1800s. In other words for as long as

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