Workers at Volkwagen's plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., are wrapping the vote on whether or not they will be represented by the UAW.

Workers at Volkswagen’s assembly plant in Tennessee are scheduled to wrap up three days of voting on whether or not they want to join the United Auto Workers today, but the fight over the outcome continues to rage.

The UAW, which has encountered no opposition from Volkswagen of America’s management, suggested its partisans inside the plant are optimistic about the prospects for a historic victory.

“As Chattanooga’s Volkswagen workers finish their first day of voting on whether to join the UAW, news coverage continues to reflect the excitement so many of the workers feel at the prospect of unionizing,” the union said in a statement.

The opportunity to have a voice in decisions inside the plant appears to have emerged as one of the biggest selling point, according to the UAW, which has gotten broad support from the German Metalworkers union, IG Metall.

IG Metall representatives have visited the Chattanooga plant and stressed the importance of worker participation in company affairs though the Works Councils. The Works Councils are mandated by German, European Union Regulation and written into VW’s global human resources charter, which covers the company’s employees throughout the world.

The IG Metall and the UAW, which has struggled to gain a foothold among the transplants in the Southern part of the United States, have used the works council issue to build support for unionization inside the Chattanooga over the past year. The last time the union actually called for a vote in Southern plant was at a Nissan plant in Smyrna, Tenn. in 2001. The UAW lost decisively but blamed the defeat on threats to close the plant by Nissan’s management.

“It’s important for workers to have a voice in their workplace, and unionizing will give that to us. The vast majority of the folks I talk to agree and are just as excited as I am about the prospect of joining the UAW through a fair vote process, ” Richard Isbell, Volkswagen worker, noted in an opinion piece published on Nooga.com.

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The prospects of a union victory, however, has rattled Tennessee’s conservative political leadership, which has mounted an intensive campaign to influence the outcome of the vote inside the plant during the past two weeks.

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The campaigns steadily escalated this week to the point where the Republican leader in the Tennessee state senate has threatened to cut off VW’s access to state subsidies if the workers vote in the UAW. The irony is that over the years the State of Tennessee has given millions of dollars in incentives to General Motors in Spring Hill, Tenn., which has been unionized since the day ground was broken back in the 1980s.

State Sen. Bo Watson, a Chattanooga Republican, said, “Volkswagen has promoted a campaign that has been unfair, unbalanced and, quite frankly, un-American in the traditions of American labor campaigns…Should the workers choose to be represented by the United Auto Workers, then I believe additional incentives for expansion will have a very tough time passing the Tennessee Senate.”

(To see what’s happening with the union vote at VW’s Chattanooga plant, Click Here.)

However, John Russo, founder of the Center for Blue Collar Studies at Youngstown State University, who is now a researcher at Virginia Tech, said the anti-union forces could wind up giving the UAW grounds for demanding the National Relations Board hold a new election.