On Valentine’s Day 2014 Volkswagen offered a sweetheart deal to the United Automobile Workers (UAW) union: Please come represent workers at our assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Pressured by its German unions, Volkswagen offered its American workers a German-style works council through which workers could participate in decision-making at the plant. Volkswagen executives reassured their workers that unionization would not affect the future of the plant and quietly but clearly supported a pro-union vote.

The Chattanooga workers voted no by a margin of 712-626.

Clearly, unions are not very popular in Tennessee. Still, the UAW and the American union movement have some reason to be hopeful. Unions polled better in Tennessee in 2014 than President Obama did in 2012. Obama won just 39% in the state’s votes in the 2012 election, whereas the UAW managed 47% of Volkswagen workers’ votes in 2014. Maybe that’s not so bad for a bunch of out-of-towners from Detroit.

The really strange thing about the UAW defeat is not that it lost the union representation vote but that in the union representation campaign it faced many of the same opponents as President Obama faced in the general election. Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, Tennessee’s junior US Senator Bob Corker, and ubiquitous Washington insider Grover Norquist all vociferously opposed the unionization of Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant. After the UAW’s defeat, Tennessee’s senior US Senator Lamar Alexander weighed in to remind everyone that Tennessee workers “have decided in almost every case that they are better off union-free. The UAW may not like this, but that is the right of employees in a right-to-work state like Tennessee. Tennessee’s political establishment played a full court press against union representation in Chattonooga.

Why are big-time, nationally prominent state politicians like Haslam, Corker, and Alexander getting involved in a local workplace decision about the union representation of a small number of workers at a single automobile plant? Politicians don’t usually try to influence other private workplace decisions at private companies. Their involvement is even more (rhetorically) mysterious considering that Tennessee is, as Senator Alexander says, a “right-to-work” state. You would think that the right to work would include a right to be left alone in your workplace to make your own decisions about union representation. Sadly, no. Living in a “right-to-work” state doesn’t even give you a right to work.