TROY, Missouri — A Missouri manufacturing plant is the United Auto Workers' latest target in its campaign to organize nonunion carmakers like Toyota, Honda and Tesla.

The UAW said 30% of workers at the Toyota plant in Troy have signed union authorization cards. The site, where about 1,000 workers build cylinder heads out of recycled aluminum, is the first Toyota plant to take its unionization effort public.

The effort is part of a campaign launched last year during the UAW's sprawling, six-week strike against the "Big Three" automakers — GM, Ford and Stellantis. At the time, UAW President Shawn Fain pledged to organize workers at the Big Three automakers' non-union competitors. In November he told GM workers that the U.S. labor movement — which has suffered decades of declining union membership — needed to "get back into fighting shape."

"We aren't bashful or quiet about what our plans are. Our goal is to spend the next few years organizing auto workers across this country," Fain told GM workers in November, as they prepared to approve the company's contract offer. "Auto workers at Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, Hyundai, and Tesla — they deserve record contracts, too."

Toyota, Honda and Hyundai all raised factory worker wages around that time, which labor experts viewed as an attempt to ward off unionization campaigns.

During the strike, GM workers in Wentzville, Missouri, repeated Fain's call to unionize more auto companies, believing it would raise wages and improve working conditions industrywide. And the union and the auto workers have been calling for assurances around wages and job security as carmakers transition to electric vehicle production.

In the months since the strike, the UAW has announced campaigns at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a Mercedes plant in Vance, Alabama, and a Hyundai plant in Montgomery, Alabama. Other facilities — more than two dozen, according to the union — are also organizing, but have not yet publicly announced campaigns.

Though the Troy workers successfully formed an organizing committee and rallied 30% support for unionizing, they aren't guaranteed to win representation.

A group of Amazon workers at the company's St. Peters, Missouri, warehouse have been pushing for union representation since 2022. Starbucks workers have spent years unionizing stores in Missouri and across the U.S., but have yet to secure contracts — though just last week, the company and the union said they had reached a "framework" for contract negotiations.

In the coming weeks, workers at the Troy Toyota plant will aim to gather more support among plant employees. If 70% sign union authorization cards, the union will push the company to voluntarily recognize the UAW as a representative of the plant's workers. Failing that, the UAW would go through the process of a union election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board.

Toyota said in a statement that the company believes a third party's involvement won't lead to better conditions for its manufacturing workers.

"We are confident that with all of the facts, our team members would not choose union representation," the statement read.

The union said in a press release there is more than a $4-an-hour pay gap between workers at the Troy plant and UAW-represented sites.

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