The southern auto belt from South Carolina to Texas, home to eight German, Japanese, or Korean plants (plus three more under construction), is right-to-work country. In these states, workers can't be compelled to join a union or pay dues, and not many are inclined to sign a union card anyway. The result: The UAW has failed miserably to organize workers. No Mercedes, VW, Honda, Toyota, Hyundai (KIA's parent), BMW, or Nissan plant in the South is unionized.

There's a simple explanation. It's what I call the progressive anti-unionism of the transplants. It consists of one factor: They pay well. Workers not only make far more than the prevailing wage in the rural areas where most plants are located but also considerably more than every state's average wage. With overtime, they can earn $70,000 or more a year at some plants. Average pay and benefits: roughly $45 an hour.

Unlike the timid auto executives, politicians in the right-to-work states are quite candid in crediting the enormous appeal of their non-union status. "If you don't have right-to-work laws, you end up like those guys [the Big 3] are today" in Detroit, Corker says. "Right to work," says another top state official, "is a huge issue."

"We don't have a culture that values union organizing," says Haley Barbour, the Republican governor of Mississippi who persuaded Toyota to locate a Prius plant in Blue Springs in northern Mississippi. "Our workers like overtime and pay for performance. They feel like they get a better deal without the union."

The UAW, of course, is partly responsible for lofty non-union wages, though the threat of a successful UAW organizing drive is remote. A union workforce doesn't fit the business model pursued by the transplants. They dislike inflexible union work rules, grievances, an adversarial relationship between management and labor, indeed any intermediary between plant managers and workers at all. And they especially hate strikes.

Michigan, though a union state, made an aggressive bid for the Volkswagen plant that wound up in Tennessee. It was one of three finalists. But when a VW site selection team made its final visit in May, a UAW local in Michigan was striking against a Big 3 supplier. "Fear of the UAW probably drove the final decision," a local business leader told the Detroit Free Press.

In truth, the transplants don't have much to worry about from organized labor. The UAW has been able to force only three elections at the foreign-owned plants. The union lost overwhelmingly at Nissan's Tennessee plant in 1989, failed in another election there, and lost at the Mercedes plant in Alabama. The UAW might fare better if "card check" is approved by Congress next year, allowing organizers to succeed without the need to win a secret ballot election. But the transplants should still have little trouble thwarting UAW organizers.

The UAW's problem is that it has little to offer. High pay? The workers have that. "If you're making $50 an hour, what do you need a union for?" says Randle. Job security? Workers tend to rate a successful company as a better security bet than a union whose members are losing jobs by the tens of thousands. A voice on the assembly line? Transplant workers have that, just not through a third-party like the UAW.

So the UAW is left with a handful of weak arguments about on-the-job accidents, overworked employees, and sweatshop conditions. "Why would a worker in Alabama or Texas making far and away the best wages he ever could want to join the UAW?" says Washington attorney Richard Wyatt, who specializes in labor issues. "The UAW has no story to tell these people that makes any sense."