After months of speculation about where the United Auto
Workers was going to focus its do-or-die Southern campaign to organize workers,
the giant 3,000-worker Nissan plant in Canton, Miss., has emerged as
Battleground No. 1.
The $1.4 billion, nine-year-old plant has been eyed by UAW
leaders for several years as a potential prize in its efforts to regain ground
it has lost over the past several decades. UAW membership has dropped 75
percent in the last 30 years, and that decline has been aggravated by the
proliferation of non-unionized foreign-owned auto plants in the South.
Early speculation had the union targeting the Volkswagen
plant near Chattanooga, Tenn., and the Daimler-owned Mercedes plant near
Tuscaloosa, Ala., but it’s Nissan’s Canton plant that’s in the crosshairs.
On May 1, the UAW moved its headquarters from nearby
Gluckstadt, Miss., to the Nissan Parkway directly across from the sprawling
plant. “We can look at them everyday and they can see us,” said Sanchioni L.
Butler, a national organizer now working full-time in Mississippi.
A recent press conference in Canton organized by community
leaders had U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., standing alongside state NAACP
President Derrick Johnson and others pledging their support for the
unionization effort at Canton.
Butler said community leaders were at the forefront in organizing the press conference, not the UAW. Hundreds of workers at the plant have already indicated their support for a union, she said.
The UAW wants to avoid a repetition of its failed 2001
campaign to organize the Nissan plant in Smyrna, Tenn. On the day before the
election, Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn appeared in a video that was required viewing
for workers. “Bringing a union into Smyrna could result in making Smyna not
competitive, which is not in your best interest or Nissan’s,” he warned them.
They got the message.
Nissan and Ghosn have already started to use similar
anti-union tactics in Canton, UAW officials said. “All we want is a fair
election,” Butler said.
The union also won’t find any support among Mississippi’s
conservative Republican leadership. Gov. Phil Bryant, in a speech to business
leaders this week at the University of Mississippi’s Center for Manufacturing
Excellence in Oxford, expressed concern that the UAW was going to try to
organize the new Toyota plant near Tupelo, Miss. “The automobile industry is
very fragile,” said Bryant, as quoted in a Memphis Commercial Appeal article. “That’s what worries me. If the union
involvement becomes active in the Southeastern automobile corridor, what does
it do to industry? And I just don’t see a positive outcome to that.”
Mississippi is a “right-to-work” state, which makes
organizing doubly difficult. In fact, the state embedded “right-to-work” in its
constution during the administration of Gov. Ross Barnett in the early 1960s.
The state invested $363 million in the Nissan plant.
Working in UAW’s favor this go-around is the workforce at
the Nissan plant, which is estimated to be 80 percent African-American, Butler
said. That’s the exact reverse of the Smyrna plant. African-Americans have
traditionally been more inclined to vote unions than Southern whites.
Another favorable factor may be Mississippi's history. It was
here that some of the bloodiest battles of the civil rights movement were
fought. It is here where the idea of a social movement based on social justice
at the workplace can find fertile ground, UAW leaders believe.
Butler said the issue for workers at Nissan is and
will be fairness and respect at the workplace, not money. Although Nissan
workers in Canton have historically earned less than their counterparts at
other auto plants, they still make more than most Mississippi workers.
Over the past several years, the UAW has laid the groundwork
for a future campaign in Mississippi, developing relationships with community, political, and
religious leaders. The test of that work lies ahead.
No comments:
Post a Comment