This ran as the cover story for the July 18-24 edition of the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Miss. Related stories also included sidebars on Danny Glover's visit and Mississippi's financial investment in the Nissan plant. The Sidney Hillman Foundation in New York designated this as one of the nation's top stories of the week.
CANTON, Miss. – Michael Carter hardly evokes the Hollywood image of a podium-pounding, fire-breathing labor agitator. With his dark blue “New York” cap, light blue knit shirt, slight build and soft-spoken voice, he looks like what he is: a 38-year-old working man, husband and father of two.
He’s talking with me in the United Auto Workers’ newly
opened office just off Nissan Parkway and within view of the 3.5 million
square-foot Nissan plant. On the wall behind him is a framed, black-and-white
photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. Prominent among the crowd of men close to
King is Walter Reuther, the legendary labor leader who helped found the
modern-day UAW, a man Barry Goldwater once denounced as a “dangerous menace”
and arch-conservative Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger columnist Tom Ethridge blasted in 1964 as “top
labor-fuehrer”.
Carter has never been a member of a union, never thought
he’d ever want or need to join one, but he also never forgot what a union card
meant to his father. “I learned more about it when my dad got injured on the
job. He worked with the railroad. When he hurt his back, they tried to say he
was drinking, and he wasn’t. The union fought for him, and he got his full
benefits and retirement.
(To the right is Nissan worker Michael Carter)
“I kind of began to understand at that point.”
Nine years ago, when Carter landed a much-sought-after job
with the $1.4 billion Nissan plant in Canton, joining a union was the farthest
thing from his mind. “You had good benefits, good pay, … an illusion of
community.”
Today, the Tupelo, Miss., native earns $23 an hour as a
production technician at Nissan. It’s a good wage in a state with the lowest
per capita income in the nation, some $15,000 more a year than the average
Mississippian.
However, Carter is not only thinking and talking union these
days, he’s one of growing number at the 3,300-worker plant who’ve taken a lead
in calling for an election to determine whether he and his colleagues should
join the United Auto Workers.
He tries to piece together for me the path that led him to
want to be a union man, just like his dad.
Maybe it started with the company’s changes in his health
care benefits. “They said too many people were going to the emergency room.” He
soon found his premiums going up and his deductible jump from zero to $2,500.
“I had a spot on my leg, and the doctor wanted surgery in case it was cancer. I
filed for insurance, and they didn’t pay any of the bill. They said, `You
haven’t made your deductible.’ It was $800. I thought they’d pay some of it.”
As for his wages, they’re good, but he hasn’t had a raise in
years-- he feels he’s “topped out” at $23 an hour--and there’s little or no
chance for promotion. Meanwhile, the line speed has increased on the shop
floor, production requirements going up even at times when the workweek is cut
back. “We asked why did it go up if we cut back to four days. They didn’t
really give us an answer.”
And that’s at the heart of the problem.
“You don’t have a conversation. No feedback. No answer. When
they told us about the new (health) plan, the deductible, they couldn’t explain
it. There’s no relationship.”
What he and other workers do get from management, he says,
is a lot of talk about how horrible unions are. Whether it’s focus meetings or
one-on-one sessions, the message is always the same: “Ain’t nothing good about
a union.”
Carter has a hard time digesting that message. “I say that
can’t be true. There’s good in anything.”
(To the right is Nissan worker Jeffrey Moore)
Fellow technician Jeffrey Moore, 34, a 10-year veteran who
earns the same hourly wage as Carter, says his interest in the UAW “is not
about money, it’s all just about being fair,” even though he wonders why he
hasn’t had a pay raise since 2006 and why workers at Nissan’s Smyrna, Tenn.,
plant typically make $2 or more an hour than Canton workers. “I have a daughter
and a wife. That’s another reason I want a union. I want to retire at Nissan
and make sure they’re okay.”
Lee Ruffin, 45, a nine-year veteran technician, is another
Nissan employee talking union. “Everything was fine, everything good, until
2005 and 2006 things started going downhill. Losing benefits, insurance,
increasing line speed, which is a safety hazard, people getting hurt on the
job, lots of strains and sprangs.
“Governor Bryant needs to come down and work and see for
himself.”
Of course, Carter, Moore and Ruffin aren’t holding their
breath for that to happen. Bryant didn’t respond to several requests for
interviews for this story, but he warned recently in a speech in Oxford, Miss.,
that unions would have a negative effect on the auto industry in the South and
he would encourage groups to actively oppose unionization.
The governor is part of a powerful phalanx of business,
political and media leaders that stands in total opposition to any hint of a
union in Mississippi’s automobile industry. “We don’t believe a union is needed
up there,” says Jay Moon, president and CEO of the Mississippi Manufacturers
Association. “We don’t believe the union would provide any benefits that the
workers don’t have already.”
Many Mississippians agree. “I just have a problem with
unions in general,” says Nelwyn Madison, 66, of Madison, Miss., a former part
owner of a software business in the Jackson area. She admits her direct
contacts with unions have been limited. “I just absolutely do not think
employees have a right to tell employers how to run a company. If you don’t
like where you are working, then you need to go somewhere else.”
Nissan officials certainly agree. “We feel the best way to
interact with employees is through direct, two-way communication as opposed to
involving a third party,” Nissan spokesman Travis Parman says. “This approach
to employee relations has been very successful, resulting in a healthy and
positive work environment, and encourages the free exchange of ideas.”
Carter begs to differ. “They says there’s an open door, but
you may not get an answer to your question.”
A legendary union and a powerful corporation square off
These testimonies from the two sides of the union question
at the Nissan plant in Canton are early volleys in what promises to be a
landmark battle, a high-stakes squaring off that could become global in scope.
For the UAW, Canton is key to a $60 million plan to establish its footprint in
the South and beyond. At the center of the union’s strategy is to have Nissan
agree to a set of “Fair Election Principles” that allow both sides equal time
in presenting their case to workers. Union leaders stress they respect Nissan
and want the company to be financially successful.
However, if Nissan refuses to engage in a “fair
election”—and CEO Carlos Ghosn’s long record of intense antagonism to U.S.
unions indicates it most certainly will—the UAW takes its case to a world
stage. UAW officials have talked of a consumer boycott on a scale not seen
since the grape boycott that established Cesar Chavez’s United Farmer Workers
in the late 1960s. Expect workers and community activists carrying banners and
passing out leaflets at Nissan dealerships across the land. The Canton story
will even be heard at global auto shows.
Just this week a Nissan-Canton worker accompanied UAW
President Bob King to Brazil to speak to Brazilian trade unionists there. UAW
representatives are meeting regularly with trade unionists in Brazil, Japan,
Germany, France and other countries.
(To the left is student activist Tyson Jackson)
The UAW Global Organizing Institute is already drawing
interns from around the nation and world to Canton to help coordinate a social
media networking and organizing effort. “There is a silent storm brewing in
people, and the rain is going to start coming down,” says Tyson Jackson, 31,
one of those interns, a Tougaloo College student from Champaign, Ill.
“Here I can feel the fear of the workers,” says Luara
Scalasarra, another intern and a labor law student from the Estate University
of Londrina in Brazil. “In Brazil, they don’t even need to vote. They can just
form a union. But it is really good this campaign here. I really believe in
this campaign.”
The UAW is preparing the same kind of “corporate campaign”
that recently forced the Reynolds American tobacco giant finally to agree to
meet with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in North Carolina. A similar
campaign by workers at the Smithfield pork processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C.,
in 2009 led to their victory in joining the United Food and Commercial Workers.
On the other side, however, is a potential formidable foe,
the world’s fourth-largest automaker, whose CEO and president once warned
Nissan workers in Smyrna in a required meeting on the day before a union
election that “bringing a union into Smyrna could result in making Smyrna not
competitive, which is not in your best interest or Nissan’s.” Workers voted
down the union.
Carlos Ghosn, a Brazilian of Lebanese descent who also is a
French citizen and British knight, enjoys comic-book hero status in Japan for
his role as the “turnaround” artist who saved once-struggling Nissan. To many
in France, he’s the villainous “cost killer” who shut down plants and slashed
jobs on his rise to the top, and who more recently oversaw the implementation
of harsh workplace demands at Nissan’s French partner Renault that are believed
to have contributed to several suicides and suicide attempts between 2005 and
2008.
Onto this battlefield have marched Mississippi workers like
Carter, Moore, and Ruffin, proclaiming they’re never going to be heard unless
they speak as one voice. In the heart of the conservative, “right-to-work”
South—a term labor activists ridicule as really meaning “right to work for
less”--they want to do what the Wagner Act of 1935 gave them full and protected
legal rights to do: join a union.
They aren’t the first Nissan workers to talk this way. Back
in 2007, James Fisher, Yvette Taylor and Stanley Martin challenged at public
meetings the Camelot image of one of Mississippi’s premier manufacturers. They
told of terminations for job-related injuries, intimidation, and anti-union propaganda.
Workers at Nissan’s Smyrna plant also came to testify to humiliations and a
caustic disregard for work-related injuries and illnesses.
“Nissan’s got this big halo, this rainbow over them,” Fisher
said at the time. “It’s all on the outside. We have to fight tooth and nail on
the inside. They can do what they want to on the inside. It’s always somebody
trying to cut somebody’s throat.”
On hand was a wide range of religious and former civil
rights leaders and community and political activists who became the seed of a
grassroots movement that has now ripened to the point that the UAW can say,
“Now is the time.” Canton, Mississippi, is the place where it will stake its
future, and perhaps even the future of the nation’s labor movement.
UAW fighting for its life and its future
UAW officials insist they’re here because Nissan workers
want them here, that this is a worker-and-community-fueled effort. Certainly
workers have reached out. What can’t be denied, however, is the UAW is in a
fight for its survival. It must not only staunch the bleeding that has reduced
its membership by 75 percent in the last 30 years—from 1.5 million in 1979 to
less than 400,000 today, but also once again thrive and grow in a new economy
is making the South what Detroit once was in the automobile industry.
Speculation about where the UAW would focus its do-or-die
campaign has been heated in the labor and automobile press since January 2011,
when UAW President King revealed the union was coming to Dixie come hell or
high water. Early reports pointed to the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga,
Tenn., the Hyundai plant in Alabama, or the Toyota plant in Kentucky as Ground
Zero. “If we lose, we’ll die quicker. If we win, we rebuild the UAW,” King told
Labor Notes.
King said something prescient even earlier in his October 2010
statement to mark the One Nation March in Washington, D.C.: “We cannot sit back
and wait for change to happen. We are the ones who must make change on behalf
of all people. Every great achievement for social justice has been the result
of the mobilization of people to achieve a just purpose.”
With such oratory, King, who took over the UAW presidency in
June 2010, evokes the memory of another eloquent speaker, Walter Reuther, who
braved brutal attacks by anti-union goons at his home and in the famous “Battle
of the Overpass” at the Ford Company’s River Rouge plant in Michigan in 1937 to
put the UAW at the forefront of the nation’s labor movement. In contrast to
many other labor leaders, Reuther later embraced the civil rights movement and
stood with Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during
the March on Washington in 1963.
In many ways, today’s South is a far cry from the South
Walter Reuther knew. It emerged from its bloody and futile resistance to civil
rights in the 1960s to become the heart of the “Sunbelt”, encouraging industry
and investment, and eventually “Detroit South”, which along with the Midwest is
home to more than a dozen foreign-owned automobile assembly plants plus many
other parts factories. What hasn’t changed in the South, however, is the
hostility of its political and business leaders to unions.
Despite union contracts at plants at their home countries,
none of the German and Asian-owned plants in the region is unionized, a glaring
reality to a UAW that has had to make concession after concession to the Big
Three in this struggling economy and witness the subsequent downward pull on
worker wages and benefits everywhere.
The UAW is no stranger to the South. In fact, a sit-down
strike at General Motors’ Lakewood plant in Atlanta in November 1936 became the
first shot fired in the historic all-out “Battle of the Running Bulls” that
would take place in Flint, Mich., in early 1937, an event that rivals the
“Battle of the Overpass” in importance in UAW history. More recently, in 2003
and 2004, the union won major organizing campaigns with Freightliner workers in
North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia. In fact, the UAW scored victories at
smaller companies in Alabama and Kentucky within the past month.
The UAW actually has been in Canton since 2005. In March of
that year, then-UAW President Ron Gettelfinger and then-Vice President and
National Organizing Director Bob King came to Mississippi to meet with workers
and community leaders.
It wasn’t until recently, however, that the union firmly
decided Canton would be “the perfect place” to take its stand, as UAW Region 8
Director Gary Casteel, an Alabama native whose region includes the South,
describes it.
Casteel lobbied hard to make Canton the UAW’s choice even
though he knew “there’s no guarantee to win.” He and others emphasize that race
isn’t a central issue, but the fact that an estimated 80 percent of the
workforce at the Canton plant is black was a factor. Studies show blacks are
comparatively more open to joining unions.
Mississippi’s rich civil rights history was another factor.
Organized labor as a whole needs to recapture its identity as a social
movement, something it had in the 1930s but had lost by the 1950s.
“I had to advocate hard for this,” Casteel told me in a
recent telephone interview. “We have tremendous worker support there. Nissan
hired a heavily African-American workforce. I think that is a plus because of
the history and the battles fought in Mississippi against all odds. Being from
Alabama, knowing how this works in the South, it is just one of those things,
the heritage of Mississippi. They have had to fight for the things they have
achieved.”
Unionizing the South: A long struggle
A fight is what it will take in the South, a region where
coal miners and textile workers in the 1920s and 1930s saw their efforts to
join unions brutally suppressed. In 1946, when Congress of Industrial
Organizations president Philip Murray launched “Operation Dixie” to organize
Southern workers, he spoke of a “civil rights crusade” that would be “the most
important drive of its kind ever undertaken by any labor organization in the
history of the country.” Labor organizers fanned across the South, targeting
textile, oil, lumber and other industries. Even in 1946 they knew the South was
key to labor’s future.
Operation Dixie ended largely in failure, however, as the
region’s power elite locked arms and exploited the racial divide and post-World
War II fear of communism to keep workers from joining unions. Today the South
remains the nation’s least unionized--and least paid--region, a uniformly
“right to work” land where organizing is doubly difficult because workers can
enjoy the hard-earned gains in wages and benefits of a unionized workplace
without having to join the union.
(To the left is veteran labor organizer Bruce Raynor during a recent visit to Canton)
Still, the South’s anti-union reputation never had a thing
to do with the workers themselves, says Bruce Raynor, perhaps the most
successful labor organizer in Southern history. The hostility to unions comes
primarily from the South’s political, business, and media establishment, he
told me in a recent telephone interview.
“I have always found Southern workers very receptive. It
takes persistence. They are up against the powers that be. Southern workers
don’t like being pushed around, being taken advantage of.”
A native New Yorker and president emeritus of Workers
United, Raynor worked with the Textile Workers Union of America in the 1970s in
the history-making struggle with the powerful anti-union textile firm of J.P.
Stevens. That struggle, vividly depicted in the film Norma Rae, led to victory after a corporate campaign that
included a national boycott, court challenges, and a high-level public
relations effort to embarrass the company into recognizing workers’ rights.
“With J.P. Stevens, people thought it was hopeless,” Raynor
recalled. “They ran the state, the local community.”
However, the secret to victory is community, he said. “As
long as the union lets it be driven by the community, and also involving the
religious community. Southerners tend to be religious people. It was the same
way in the civil rights movement.”
Recognition of that need motivated the June 3 press
conference in Canton where U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., Mississippi
NAACP President Derrick Johnson, General Missionary Baptist State Convention
President Isiac Johnson and others stood alongside a group of Nissan workers to
pledge their support for a fair election at the plant. Thompson made it clear
that he will monitor Nissan’s behavior closely in the months ahead.
As in the past, the biggest obstacle organizers face is
fear.
“They have these anti-union meetings—they call them focus
meetings,” Michael Carter says. “They say, `we’re going to give you the facts.
If you have a union, we’ll close the plant.’”
Workers also fear their jobs may be eliminated or
re-classified. The company depends heavily on so-called “temps”, workers hired
on a less-than-fulltime basis with more limited pay and benefits. UAW officials
say the 1,000 new jobs Nissan recently announced it was adding to the Canton
plant will all be “temps”. “There’s a fear they’ll make our jobs temps,” says
Jeffrey Moore.
Nissan spokesman Travis Parman discounts such fears. “Our
communications meetings with employees are not new. We continuously and
routinely meet with our employees to openly discuss matters pertinent to our
business.”
As for the “temps” issue, Parman says, “Our direct and
contract positions are long-term jobs that offer competitive pay and benefits.
… Nissan has never laid off a single employee in the nearly 30 years it’s had manufacturing
operations in the U.S.”
Like all Americans, Southerners have had a realistic fear of
plant shutdowns and relocations to Mexico and China ever since the passage of
the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. They’ve seen it happen again and
again. The textile and apparel industries alone suffered the erosion of more
than 700,000 jobs between 1994 and 2003.
Sujit CanagaRetna, senior fiscal analyst with the Southern
office of the Council of State Governments in Atlanta and an expert in the
Southern auto industry, believes the UAW will have an uphill fight to convince
Southern workers a union will better their lot. However, he says, auto workers
should not fear the kind of shutdowns that devastated the Southern textile
industry. “That is always the boogeyman, but it is not that easy,” CanagaRetna
says. “That is an unlikely scenario. I think there would be negotiated
settlements. I don’t think we run the risk of Nissan closing shop and leaving.”
The foreign transplants’ advantages in the South are too
numerous, he says. Their proximity to major markets, ports and other
transportation, and an established network of suppliers would override concerns
about a union. Furthermore, he says, unions have changed. For example, UAW
leader King has distanced himself from many of the old work rules and other
factors that management scorned as impediments to productivity and
profitability. “The whole environment has changed in terms of union versus
nonunion environment,” CanagaRetna says. “It has become much more of a
collaborative process.”
Mark Klinedinst, professor emeritus of economics at the
University of Southern Mississippi, believes unions actually benefit a company
as well as workers. “Typically unions have been in the forefront in getting
better wages, benefits, working conditions. That is a very honorable tradition.
It helps make for a stronger middle class. I think it is important as
corporations get larger, that employees have a chance to have a voice as well.
Modern management says that in all parts of an institution important
stakeholders should have a voice. Unions could offer that channel.”
The prosperity the nation enjoyed from the 1940s through the
1960s came at a time when union representation was at its highest, Klinedinst
says. “We’d be helped by having a stronger middle class.”
Certainly the folks at the UAW would agree, and so would
workers like Michael Carter, Jeffrey Moore and Lee Ruffin. Nissan officials
believe their workers already have the tools to make a strong middle class.
One of the most famous labor ballads of the 1930s asked the
age-old question: “Which Side Are You On?” It’s a question waiting for an
answer in Canton, Mississippi.
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