Martyred labor minstrel Ella May Wiggins celebrated in Gastonia

I’ll never forget my first encounter with the story of mill worker-labor minstrel Ella May Wiggins and her last words, “Lord a-mercy, they done shot and killed me.” Why, I wondered, was I never taught this in my history classes?

Wiggins uttered those words in the fall of 1929 when she was shot down by vigilantes for supporting a strike at a textile mill in Gastonia, N.C. No one was ever convicted for the murder of the 29-year-old mother of five.

Martyred labor heroes like Wiggins are the great “disappeared” in most U.S. history books because they all too clearly demonstrate the dark underside of class in the American story. Many would rather that part of the story never be told.

A group in Gaston County, N.C., is bound and determined to tell it, however, and to make sure that Wiggins and her fellow workers will be remembered.

The Ella May Wiggins Textile Heritage Council, composed of artists, scholars, and historians, sponsored a poetry reading in Wiggins’ honor at the Poor Richard’s Book Shoppe in downtown Gastonia Saturday (Jan. 28). Poets from around the area came to read and discuss poetry inspired by the textile experience in the South.

Over the past four months, the group has made much use of social media in telling the Wiggins story, contacting folks around the country to spread the news. Some 500 have joined the discussion, including donors and others who are helping the group attain nonprofit status. During Gastonia’s “Celebrate Gaston” festival in October, the council recruited Gastonia resident Margaret Smith to portray Wiggins in a dramatic presentation.

The council hopes to educate people to the full story about Wiggins and the other Southern textile workers who stood up for their rights and commanded the nation’s attention in the late 1920s and 1930s.

“Our goal is to show that there is support near and far for a memorial for our Ella, which is long overdue,” said council member Amy Sifford in a recent e-mail conversation.

After earlier strikes in German-owned mills in Elizabethton, Tenn., in March 1929, workers at the giant Loray Mill in Gastonia went on strike that April. The protest later spread to mills in Marion, N.C. Violent confrontations with state and local authorities led to the wounding of dozens of strikers and several officers and the deaths of Wiggins and Gastonia police chief O.F. Aderholt.

A full-page ad in the Gastonia Gazette declared the purpose of the strike to be the “overthrowing of this Government and destroying property and to kill, kill, kill.”

Yet Wiggins and other Southern workers like her were striking against 12-hour days, pay that ranged from $8 to $10 a week, and filthy, unsafe working conditions “amid a terrible din of machinery in temperatures near 85 degrees,” according to historian Irving Bernstein. They also had to deal with the notorious "stretch-out," a common practice at the time that forced workers to double and triple their output at breakneck speed.

Wiggins was a single mother who had lost four children to whooping cough and struggled to rear her other five after her husband John Wiggins abandoned them. According to writer Beth Crist in an article for the North Carolina Museum of History, Ella May, who was white, and her family lived in a rented shack in an African American neighborhood called Stumptown. She earned $9 a week as a spinner at her textile plant.

Despite a furor in the town against labor organizers and amid claims they were all communists, Wiggins became committed to the labor movement and the National Textile Workers Union (NTWU). Perhaps her best-known contribution was as a balladeer to striking workers. She would serenade the families of strikers in the tent colony they established after being evicted from company housing. Here are a few lines from her “A Mill Mother’s Lament":

We leave our homes in the morning
We kiss our children goodbye
While we slave for the bosses
Our children scream and cry

But understand all, workers
Our union they do fear
Let’s stand together, workers
And have a union here

Crist writes that Wiggins not only stood up for workers but also crossed the racial divide and recruited African Americans for the union. She once “stepped over a rope separating African American and white workers at a union meeting and sat with the African Americans.” With her help, the NTWU voted to allow African Americans to join the union.

That outspoken advocacy ultimately cost her her life. She was killed as she and other union members were returning home in a truck after a confrontation with an angry mob. Although five men were arrested and charged with the killing, they were quickly acquitted in a March 1930 trial.

Five years later the textile industry was rocked by a general strike that idled 180,000 workers in the South and 400,000 nationwide. Seven striking workers were shot to death in Honea Path, S.C., as local, state, and regional authorities aligned together with industry leaders, the press, and local hooligans to stop the Southern labor movement dead in its tracks.

You can’t kill an idea, however, and that’s why the spirit of Ella May Wiggins refuses to fade away even if the modern-day versions of those same forces that killed her wished she would just simply disappear.

Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, a review

(To the left is Billie Holiday, a 1947 photo from Down Beat magazine)

MEMPHIS - Billie Holiday rocked America when she first sang “Strange Fruit” back in 1939. Radio stations banned the song, Southern politicians fumed, and black people nodded their heads with admiration at a black female singer who had the guts to tell the true story of the evil of lynching in the U.S. South.

So when jazz singer Joyce Cobb sang “Strange Fruit” during her performance Thursday night as Holiday in the Hattiloo Theatre production of Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, I was struck by the power that a great protest song can have 70-plus years after it was conceived.

Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill is a rich and intimate experience for those who come to the tiny theater near downtown Memphis, just a stone’s throw from the Sun Records studio. The Hattiloo offers black repertoire theater and is becoming one of the cultural treasures in the city on the bluffs of the Mississippi River.

Written by Lanie Robertson and directed by Emma Crystal, the play features Cobb in the lead role backed by Gerald Stephens on piano and 17-year-old Philip Andrew Joyner III on stand-up base. The scene is the Philadelphia, Pa., nightclub where a broken Holiday sang just months before she died in July 1959. Years of heroin and alcohol abuse had cost her a year of freedom in a West Virginia rehab center and the loss of her license to play in New York’s jazz clubs. When she took to that stage at Emerson’s, she was a shadow of the star with the gardenias in her hair who had performed at Carnegie Hall and with Count Basie, Benny Goodman, and Artie Shaw.

Cobb, a nationally known jazz singer who lives in Memphis, is a natural in this role even though she sings in her own voice and doesn’t try to mimic Holiday. On stage, she magically becomes Holiday, damaged goods and all, a pretty wreck you want to rescue but know you can’t. It’s too late. You see it when Lady Day returns from her break, another shot in her veins, voice slurred, her will fighting, however, through the fog to finish what she started.

Stephens plays her lover as well as her pianist, and he’s good on both counts. Holiday always had a lover, usually to her detriment. You hear that, too, when Cobb does “Don’t Explain”, a classic that’s still a bit scary, even masochistic, in its utter submission to a lover’s will.

Stephens’ piano does occasionally overpower Cobb, but maybe that’s something that happened at Emerson’s, too, back in 1959. I’ve got a copy of Holiday’s last album, “Lady in Satin”, the once-great voice trembling, sometimes breaking up. Wasn’t much needed to overpower it.

I also have a tattered paperback copy of Holiday’s 1956 autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, which she wrote with William Dufty. Some say you can’t believe everything she writes in it, but it has one of the greatest openings of any book ever written: “Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three.”

Holiday’s life was indeed a tale worth telling. Born in Philadephia in 1915, she grew up in Baltimore, was raped by a neighbor at the age of 11. Her mother worked in a series of brothels, taking her daughter along. After Holiday got her start in music, she rose quickly, getting her nickname “Lady Day” from Mississippi-born saxophonist Lester Young. A boyfriend and fellow musician turned her on to heroin in the 1940s, and she was never the same. When she died in 1959, 3,000 attended her funeral in New York.

Hers was a tough, scary, hardboiled way to live a life, and Cobb admitted during a conversation with the audience after the production that playing the singer with truth and honesty takes a lot of commitment and lots of practice. For Holiday, that was just life, and a lot of times she wasn't very successful at it.

Bill to propose: Either abolish Miss. Workers' Compensation Commission or fix it

(This is a follow-up to my earlier posting on a recent report that was highly critical of the Mississippi Workers' Compensation Commission, an agency charged with handling cases of workers injured on the job. This blog has followed this story more closely than any other publication in the state. It's an issue that reaches far beyond Mississippi, however, as leading regional and national politicians like presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich have expressed disdain for the very concept of workers' compensation.)

A bill will be filed in the Mississippi Legislature either to abolish the state Workers’ Compensation Commission or change it to require better legal training of commissioners and that it do a better job explaining its handling of worker injury cases.

“The issue here is transparency,” Joint Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review (PEER) Director Max Arinder said about the commission. “They don’t explain their actions.”

In a long-awaited report released this month, PEER, a bipartisan state watchdog agency, said the commission failed to provide "clear, principled legal grounds for reversal or modification of orders" from administrative law judges, and that it failed to adopt "rules and practices to ensure statutorily compliant and efficient operations."

The commission’s review of administrative law judge rulings in compensation cases, including its penchant to modify or reverse them, adds an estimated 57 days in getting cases resolved, the report said. An earlier study ordered by Jackson, Miss., attorney Roger Doolittle showed a clear pro-employer tilt in commission decisions.

Lack of transparency about commission decisions is one of its problems, the PEER report says. “We don’t know what their motives are,” Arinder said. “A good appellate record would say why they are going against administrative law judge rulings.”

The report “pretty much confirmed what my and other claimant lawyers’ perception was,” Doolittle said last week. “These (commission) actions, by and large, were to the detriment of injured workers in Mississippi.”

John Jones, another Jackson attorney who handles workers’ compensation cases, said the report shows “we’ve lost touch with the history and purpose of the (workers’ compensation) act.” The law says close cases should actually tilt toward the employee rather than the employer because the injured worker, in seeking compensation, is surrendering the right to future legal action.

Commission Chairman Liles Williams, recently re-appointed to a six-year term by then-Gov. Haley Barbour, and fellow commissioners John Junkin and Debra Gibbs issued a sharp rebuke of PEER’s findings, claiming that PEER “blatantly contradicts itself” and makes “a gross mis-characterization” of the commission’s role and in assessing the commission as if it were roughly equivalent to an appellate court. They also take PEER to task on its description of several compensation cases cited in the report.

In an unusual move, PEER filed a written response to the commission response to the report and said PEER doesn’t accuse the commission of violating the law but instead “points out … that the adjudicative process could be carried out more efficiently and with greater transparency.”

PEER’s investigation revealed that prior to 2007 the commission approved administrative law judges’ decisions without modification in 70 percent of cases. That dropped to 58 percent after 2007. January 2007 was the point when Republican Gov. Barbour assumed control of the majority of appointments to the commission.

PEER offered two options for remedying the situation: (1) eliminate the commission altogether and create an office administered by an executive director appointed by the governor and allow administrative law judge rulings to be appealed directly to the Mississippi Court of Appeals; (2) revise the commission to "reflect the need for members to have extensive legal training"—at present, only one of the three commissioners must be a lawyer--and to require the commission to "review the appeals brought before it entirely on the record."

Arinder said PEER committee members, which include seven state senators and seven representatives, will sponsor legislation regarding these options. “To what extent it will gain traction remains to be seen,” Arinder said.

Commission senior attorney Scott Clark, speaking on behalf of Chairman Williams, said the commission “will not become involved in the legislative process in any way” in connection with the PEER report.

If the commission is left in present form, the PEER report said, it needs to provide administrative law judges with "necessary clerical and editing support" and to make sure its rules conform with existing statutes.

“We knew something was just not right with the workers’ compensation commission,” said former state Rep. and PEER committee member Dirk Dedeaux, who initially asked PEER to undertake the review. “You want a process that is consistent, fair. We’ve got the administrative judges, the appellate courts, and this hole in the middle.”

Mississippi, the last state in the nation to adopt a workers’ compensation law, is perennially at the bottom among states in what it pays injured workers. Most states award 100 percent compensation for weekly wages. Mississippi workers receive two-thirds of their weekly wages. Jones estimated approximately 13,000 workers are injured on the job each year, and many more may go unreported.

What's up in 2012? Immigration demagoguery's pay-off, UAW's new Southern campaign, and more Walmart image-building

The year 2012 promises to be an interesting and potentially pivotal one for workers in the South and nation as politicians on the national level vie to steer voter disgust with Wall Street excess to their own advantage, state-level politicians wrestle with the ramifications of their demagoguery, and unions and protesters seek to keep the “Occupy” momentum going. Let’s look at some of the developments unfolding.

“We want our immigrants back!”

In the South, the states of Georgia and Alabama are already paying the price for the racist, anti-immigrant ranting of their political leaders, ranting that led to Arizona-style legislation in both states and a resulting disaster on the farm.

The irony is that illegal immigration is down in this country. The New York Times reported this month that arrests along the U.S.-Mexico border are the lowest since 1972. Immigration continues because poverty continues to push workers away from home in search of jobs. However, the poor economy and the anti-immigrant backlash in the United States is forcing many Latino workers to those places in Mexico, Chili, Argentina and Brazil where there are jobs waiting.

Up in Georgia, meanwhile, “millions of pounds of watermelons were left to rot in the fields” last summer, “along with peaches, blackberries and cucumbers” because of a new anti-immigrant law that scared farm workers away, wrote Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) co-founder Greg Asbed and Sean Sellers in The Nation magazine.

Asbed and Sellers say the same is happening in Alabama, which went a step beyond Arizona and passed what many consider the most draconian anti-immigrant law in the nation. A Mercedes manager, visiting the state where the German automaker has built a huge plant, was even arrested and taken to jail for failing to have his papers, an offense under the new law.

Small towns dependent upon immigrant labor are drying up across the South, fruit is left to die in the fields, and now politicians have to figure out how to undo the mess they created. It’s not that easy. For example, the watermelon picking so necessary to the farm economies of Georgia, Florida and other states is actually skilled labor. Latinos who’ve done it for years know the intricacies of distinguishing various levels of ripeness among watermelons. Replacement workers have made crop losses even worse because of the lack of such knowledge, Asbed and Sellers say.

Republican politicians brought this about, yet they still hope they can pull a rabbit out of the hat. On the national level, they’re touting conservative Latinos like U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida—a potential vice presidential nominee--in an effort to prove the party’s credibility. However, Rubio comes out of the comparatively small and very conservative Cuban community in Florida and thus is hardly representative of Latinos as a whole.

Mississippi’s newly elected Republican governor, Phil Bryant, earned his political stripes in part by his demagoguery of the immigration issue, pushing, for example, a discredited study showing the alleged high cost of illegal immigration to the state. As a result of the elections, Mississippi now also has a GOP-controlled House and Senate. Will the state learn by Alabama and Georgia’s example regarding immigration? State Republicans like Bryant signed a lot of IOUs to their Tea Party constituencies, and the pressure will be on to deliver.

The UAW targets the South … again

(To the left is a photograph of workers at the Flint, Mich., sit-down strike in 1937, a pivotal event in the creation of the modern-day United Auto Workers. The photograph was taken by Sheldon Dick for the U.S. Farm Security Administration.)

The struggling United Auto Workers, its membership down 75 percent from 30 years ago, is hoping to gain traction in the U.S. South by targeting German-owned automakers in Alabama and Tennessee for organizing drives.

According to Reuters, the UAW sees the Volkswagen plant near Chattanooga, Tenn., and the Daimler-owned Mercedes plant near Tuscaloosa, Ala., as potentially easier to organize than the Japanese and Korean-owned plants in the region. UAW already represents workers at Daimler’s Freightliner trucks plants in North Carolina and other states.

UAW President Bob King apparently believes the German-owned companies are more likely to allow union elections without a major fight than Nissan, Toyota or Hyundai. In recent years, UAW operatives have been working closely with the giant German union IG Metall in hopes of developing joint strategies.

Automative News reports IG Metall “wants to keep the United States from becoming a cheap-labor alternative to Germany” and thus is also working with the United Steelworkers in its efforts to organize a ThyssenKrupp steel plant in Alabama.

UAW tried unsuccessfully to organize workers at Nissan's Tennessee plant and did preliminary work for a possible campaign at the Japanese automaker's Mississippi plant as well as at Toyota's plant in Kentucky. None of these efforts has borne fruit yet, however.

Mini-editorial: The UAW and other major unions have to rediscover their fighting roots, and that means dumping the term “middle class”. Like Barack Obama, Democrats in Congress, all Republicans, and most mainstream media types, union leaders love to talk about the “middle class”, that oh-so-comforting way to describe working people in this country, a term that tells them they’ve climbed a notch or two in our supposedly classless society and which separates them from the lumpenproletariat. No one every fought a revolution or even started a movement with a euphemism meant to mollify rather than inspire. We’re working class, and so is the UAW’s targeted constituency. Call them that, Bob King!

Walmart: Reform or image-building? Oh, come on. You know the answer

After winning its day in court with the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of the Dukes class-action sex discrimination suit, Walmart apparently decided its public image needed some more sprucing up. Thus we now have the Global Women’s Economic Development Initiative, a Walmart Foundation creation that supposedly seeks female empowerment through training centers for retail and garment workers in India and Bangladesh and by encouraging women entrepreneurs.

According to The Nation, Walmart President Sylvia Matthews Burwell will head the project, yet she will report to Walmart Corporate Affairs Executive Vice President Leslie Dach.

Hmmmm. Is this one of those wait-and-see, the proof-is-in-the-pudding situations?

I’m not encouraged by the fact that Walmart, after responding to earlier criticism and improving its poor benefits to employees, announced in October that it was cutting back health care coverage significantly for part-time workers as well as raising premiums for full-time employees. Just as discouraging is the fact that Walmart fired 22 workers in Chili for taking part in a nationwide general strike to promote tax reform, new labor laws, and other social justice issues.

Walmart was the only company in Chili that fired its workers for joining the nationwide protest.

Bi-partisan watchdog agency takes Mississippi Workers' Compensation Commission to task for failing injured workers

(To the right is labor attorney Roger K. Doolittle in his office in Jackson, Miss.)

The Mississippi Workers’ Compensation Commission is failing workers who’ve been injured on the job as a result of their work, according to a report by a bi-partisan government watchdog agency in the state.

In a long-awaited report released Tuesday (Jan. 3) and revealed here for the first time, the Joint Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review (PEER) said the state Workers’ Compensation failed to provide "clear, principled legal grounds for reversal or modification of orders" from administrative law judges, and that it failed to adopt "rules and practices to ensure statutorily compliant and efficient operations."

The report also pointed to the comparatively long time required in Mississippi to resolve worker compensation cases. PEER’s investigation revealed that prior to 2007 the commission approved administrative law judges’ decisions without modification in 70 percent of cases. That dropped to 58 percent after 2007. Commission modification of rulings rose from 8 percent before 2007 to 12 percent after 2007.

“Ultimately, reversals or modifications can impact the amount of time it takes claimants and other parties to resolve their workers’ compensation claims,” the report says.

The commission’s review of administrative law judge rulings adds an estimated 57 days to the process of adjudication, the report says.

January 2007 was the point when Republican Gov. Haley Barbour assumed control of the majority of appointments to the commission.

A 2005 study by the Workers Compensation Research Institute showed that cases in Mississippi take much longer to resolve than cases in other states. “The average interval from petition filing to a judge’s order was almost 20 months,” the study said.

PEER offered two options to remedy the situation. The state could eliminate the commission and replace it with an office whose executive director would be appointed by the governor and a procedure to appoint administrative law judges whose rulings could be appealed to the Mississippi Court of Appeals. It could also revise the role and composition of the commission to "reflect the need for members to have extensive legal training" and to require the commission to "review the appeals brought before it entirely on the record."

If the commission is left in present form, PEER said it needs to provide administrative law judges with "necessary clerical and editing support" and make sure its rules conform with existing statutes.

More than two years ago, the state House Insurance Committee held a hearing on findings in a study ordered by Jackson, Miss., labor attorney Roger Doolittle that showed the three members of the state Workers’ Compensation Commission—Chairman Liles Williams, John Junkin, and Augustus Collins II (since replaced by new commissioner Debra Gibbs)—siding decisively with the employer in most cases before them, particularly in reversals of administrative court decisions.

For example, 77 percent of the reversals of administrative judge rulings sought by Williams were in favor of the employer. For Junkin, 91 percent of the reversals were for the employer’s benefit. For Collins, 75 percent were for the employer.

Such a record “is unprecedented in Mississippi jurisprudence,” Doolittle said about his study in 2010. “You’ve got judges that collectively have the highest experience rate in the history of the (workers compensation) act, and they are being reversed at the rate of about 80 percent.” He referred to reversals of decisions favoring the employee.

“I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and I’ve never seen a commission this conservative,” said Jackson attorney John Jones at the time. “The irony is that by statute and by history (workers’ compensation) is supposed to be tilted toward the worker. The worker is supposed to get the benefit of all doubt.”

Mississippi, the last state in the nation to adopt a workers’ compensation law, is a perennial bottom feeder among states in what it pays injured workers. It is one of the few states that award less than 100 percent of weekly wages to workers injured on the job. Injured Mississippi workers receive two-thirds of their weekly wages. Jones estimated that approximately 13,000 workers are injured on the job each year, and many more may go unreported.

Williams, recently re-appointed to a six-year term by outgoing Gov. Barbour, and fellow commissioners Junkin and Gibbs issued a sharp rebuke of PEER’s findings, claiming, for example, that PEER is off base is assessing the commission as if it were roughly equivalent to an appellate court. They also take PEER to task on its description of several compensation cases cited in the report.

In an unusual move, PEER filed a written response to the commission response and said PEER doesn’t accuse the commission of violating the law but instead “points out … that the adjudicative process could be carried out more efficiently and with greater transparency.” It also notes that “the additional time the commission expends on reviewing and often modifying decisions of the administrative law judges adds little to the ultimate fairness of the process, but does add time.”

PEER’s 14 members include seven state senators and seven state House members.