Organised labour in the US suffered a major setback on Wednesday when more than 4,500 workers at a Nissan assembly plant in Tennessee voted resoundingly against being represented by the United Auto Workers union.
Had the UAW succeeded, it would have been the first time the union had managed to make inroads into a US plant wholly owned by a foreign automaker.
Some workers at the plant had suggested that the vote would be close. But 3,103 votes of the 4,589 cast rejected the idea of union representation.
The result mimics a similar effort at the same plant by the UAW in 1989, which was defeated by a 2-1 margin.
The UAW is still a powerful force at plants run by General Motors, Ford Motor and Chrysler, which is now part of the DaimlerChrysler group, effectively setting wages and conditions for more than 300,000 employees.
It also represents workers at some plants where both Japanese and US automakers are involved - such as a General Motors/Toyota joint venture plant in California and a Mazda plant in Michigan. Mazda Motor is affiliated with Ford.
But the union faces a big problem because foreign-owned automakers are taking an increasingly large share of the North American market, while the "Big Three" US automakers are trying to drive down their cost structures to compete, partly through labour attrition. The number of UAW members totaled about 672,000 last year, compared with about 1.5m in the late 1970s.
The result at the Smyrna, Tennessee, plant followed a day of voting, which continued until the early evening on Wednesday. The plant - which makes Altima sedans, Xterra sports utility vehicles and Frontier pick-up trucks - has one of the highest rates of labour productivity in the US.
However, union supporters had argued that UAW representation could deliver higher pension benefits, better job security, and improved health and safety safeguards, and had drawn adverse comparisons with the GM/Toyota joint venture plant, in an effort to support their case.