Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Populists and Bourbons fighting again - 21st Century Style - in aftermath of Mississippi's U.S. Senate Republican runoff

 
(A 1904 Populist Party campaign poster for presidential candidate Tom Watson of Georgia)

OXFORD, Miss. – More than a century ago the “forgotten man” of Mississippi and across the South—the farmer, the common worker—decided he’d had enough of “Wall Street speculators who gambled on his crop futures; the railroad owners who evaded his taxes, bought legislatures, and over-charged him with discriminate rates; the manufacturers, who taxed him with a high tariff; the trusts that fleeced him with high prices; the middleman, who stole his profit.”

The forgotten man was so angry, historian C. Vann Woodward goes on to say, that he created a movement. It came as close to toppling our two-party system as any effort in the country’s history.

The parallels between the Populist movement of the 1890s and early 1900s and today’s Tea Party are striking, even though crucial differences also exist.

State Senator Chris McDaniel’s still-contested narrow loss to incumbent U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran in Mississippi’s Republican runoff last month exposed a divide with the Republican Party possibly as wide as the divide that ultimately split the one-party Democratic South in the 1890s between the “Bourbon” establishment and the rebellious “Populists”.

Voting in the June 24 runoff even paralleled the Bourbon-Populist split at the turn of the last century. McDaniel won the old Populist stronghold in the Piney Woods region of southeast Mississippi while Cochran secured the Bourbon stronghold of white voters in the Delta.

The ruling Bourbon Democrats who emerged after the Civil War were pro-big business and made sure government stayed friendly to the railroads and other Northern corporations. They fought any regulation or taxes on big business but ignored the needs of the little guy whose hard work made business leaders rich.

The very embodiment of Bourbon politics today is Haley Barbour, the prominent Washington, D.C., lobbyist and former Republican Mississippi governor who helped lead the charge for fellow Bourbon—“Country Club” is the preferred term today--Republican Thad Cochran’s re-election. Barbour’s nephews Henry and Austin worked in Cochran’s campaign, and an FBI investigator isn’t needed to see Haley’s fingerprints on millions that flowed into friend Thad’s campaign.

After all, Barbour’s oft-ballyhooed influence in Washington owes much to Cochran, a former chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. A prime example: the $570 million in federal housing assistance for Hurricane Katrina victims that Cochran helped divert into Barbour’s  “Port of the Future” project in Gulfport, Miss., which is thus far a boondoggle that has failed to deliver the promised jobs.

McDaniel and the Tea Party despise Barbour and his Country Club friends, who they feel are part of the Big Government-Big Business alliance that is responsible for the corporate bailouts of the 2008 recession, the $17 trillion-dollar federal debt, and soft-peddling of the immigration issue. They believe both parties ignore the daily struggles of average Americans.

Tea Partyers’ hands aren’t exactly clean of corporate stain. Billionaire oilmen Charles and David Koch are big backers. So is the anti-union Club for Growth organization, which spent millions on McDaniel’s campaign.

Still, they have a point regarding politics in Washington.

The mainstream Republican Party is essentially a tool of Wall Street and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. What the split Congress can’t deliver, the U.S. Supreme Court’s pro-corporate majority provides.

Tea Partyers see Democrats as practically socialists, but the sad truth is that many national Democrats are as cozy with Wall Street as Republicans. Former President Clinton gave us NAFTA and helped repeal the Glass-Steagall Act that regulated financial services. The presence of Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin in Obama’s first-term inner circle proved Wall Street still had a friend in the White House.

Big Corporations “want to be able to play both sides of the aisle,” writes historian Kim Phillips-Fein in the current edition of New Labor Forum, “and they want to be close to power regardless of which party holds Congress and the White House.”

The dilemma in American politics is that Wall Street is amoral, self-interested, and in today’s global economy incapable of allegiance to any nation. “Deep down, all of them know that they do not really care—that their own enrichment matters much more than any collective purpose or common vision,” Phillips-Fein writes.

Tea Partyers know this, but much of their anger is misdirected. Unlike the Populists of the 1890s, they despise organized labor. Their benefactors—the Koch brothers and the Club for Growth—would have it no other way. The old Populists wanted government to serve the people. The Tea Partyers want government to go away.

Led by Georgia politician Tom Watson, the old Populists initially welcomed blacks into their ranks—a rare enlightened moment in the South’s tortured history—but then became bitterly racist when black support turned to the mainstream parties. Jim Crow ultimately made black support irrelevant in the South.

Today’s Tea Partyers are overwhelmingly white, and their downfall may be their inability to accept the nation’s changing demographics. Their obsession with immigration and migrant workers, for example, betrays their failure to see a bigger picture, that brown-skinned and black-skinned folks are not the problem. Tea Partyers are too blind to see it.

Monday, July 14, 2014

UAW Local 42 in Chattanooga latest example of creative organizing in the South

 
The United Auto Workers’ decision last week to move forward with establishing UAW Local 42 for Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tenn., shows the creativity that’s necessary to break through the Southern oligarchy’s locked-arm opposition to organized labor.

The decision came just days before Volkswagen announced that it was adding a new product line to the Chattanooga plant with the aide of state and federal incentive funds. The company is pumping $600 million into its Tennessee operations to build a new SUV plus add a research and development center. The new line and center will bring an estimated 2,200 workers to the plant.

Although workers rejected union representation by 712-626 vote in February, “the election was so close, we don’t feel it’s right to turn our backs on these workers,” UAW Secretary-Treasurer Gary Casteel told the Tennessean in Nashville.

The UAW decided to forego pursuing a legal challenge of the February election to the National Labor Relations Board despite widespread accounts of anti-union interference by top Republican politicians like Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam and U.S. Sen. Bob Corker and organizations like Americans for Tax Reform.

“The UAW knew that withdrawing its objections to February’s tainted election, in consensus with Volkswagen, would expedite the company’s decision on the new product line,” Casteel said in a formal statement. “The fact that the new line is being announced four days after the rollout of UAW Local 42 in Chattanooga reinforces the consensus that the UAW has reached with the company.”

Casteel said “a cornerstone of Volkswagen’s business model” is the Global Groups Works Council that provides employee representation on work-related issues at Volkswagen plants around the world.

In fact, Global Works Council chairman Bernd Osterloh, a strong supporter of union representation at the Chattanooga plant, was recently appointed to the board of directors of Volkswagen's American operations. At one point, Osterloh said he would work to prevent the new SUV line from coming to Chattanooga if workers there didn't get union representation.

Local 42 will not collect dues for the time being, and participation is voluntary. However, the UAW hopes membership will grow to a size that gives it weight in representing workers’ concerns at the plant. No formal agreement exists with Volkswagen regarding the local, but a “consensus” exists that allows the local to work with the company in the future, Casteel said.

This non-traditional approach to worker representation is somewhat similar to other efforts across the South to help those who have no collective voice vis-à-vis management. Examples include the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in North Carolina and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida, both of which have won agreements with major corporations despite the fact that farm workers aren’t covered in the National Labor Relations Act.


Friday, July 4, 2014

"Labor rights are civil rights!" declare hundreds of students, civil rights & labor vets, ministers and workers at Nissan's plant in Mississippi


(College students and veteran activists rally for a union election at the Nissan plant in Canton June 27)

CANTON, Miss. – The June 27 pro-union rally by an estimated 400 students, activists, ministers and workers in front of the mile-long Nissan plant here was the perfect culmination of the Mississippi Freedom Summer 50th Anniversary Conference in nearby Jackson.

College students from as far away as New York and Missouri joined with students from historically black schools in the area such as Jackson State University and Tougaloo College to demand that Nissan allow a fair election for the thousands of workers in Canton to decide if they want to join the United Auto Workers.

At the event were legendary civil and labor rights activists like Bob Zellner, still working in the trenches today in Wilson, N.C., prominent actor Danny Glover, veteran labor organizers Bruce Raynor and Richard Bensinger, labor priest Fr. Jeremy Tobin,  political strategist Marshall Ganz, and many more. Of course, the students were central to the event, chanting “Ain’t No Power But The Power Of The People!” and joining Glover in delivering a petition to company security officers at the front gate that declared: “Labor rights are civil rights.”

(To the right, in forefront, veteran labor activists Bruce Raynor, Ray Curry, Tom Savage, Fr. Jeremy Tobin, and Bill Chandler. In the background is the Nissan plant in Canton)

Nissan has strongly resisted efforts to allow a union in its Southern plants although its workers are organized in other countries. Workers in Canton have complained of cutbacks in health care benefits, arbitrary changes in work hours, increased use of temporary workers, and anti-union harassment.

Here are some of the comments and photographs I collected at the event:

“It’s for the people,” said Akilah Fuller, a 19-year-old mathematics major at Jackson State University who is from Detroit. “It’s always good to show support. They’re not alone out here. We’re here to show that they don’t have to be scared.”

(Akilah Fuller and Nathaniel Fuller Jr.)

“It’s for the workers,” agreed her brother Nathaniel Fuller Jr., 19, an engineering major at Jackson State.  A union would “help them have good working conditions.”

Brandon McMillan, 31, a 10-year veteran worker at the Nissan plant in Canton, said he’s hopeful of eventual victory. “I truly believe we have a real good shot. We have to keep a level head. We have a lot of supporters. Fifty years ago this exact same thing happened for civil rights.”

More than 1,000 student volunteers came to Mississippi during "Freedom Summer" 1964 to help bring an end to racial segregation. Among those working for civil rights in the state were Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, who were murdered by racists that summer in Neshoba County, Miss.

(To the right, Nissan-Canton worker Brandon McMillan)

“We’re here because workers have a right to a fair election in the spirit of Christian morality,” Father Tobin said.

The Rev. Isiac Jackson, who chairs the Mississippi Alliance for Fairness at Nissan (MAFFAN), had this to say to the hundreds gathered in front of the plant: “Nissan is exploiting the workforce of Mississippi with a plantation mentality! Union today! Union tomorrow! Union forever!”

Danny Glover told the crowd workers need a union to give them a united voice and a seat at the table across from management. “We’ve got to organize to get what we want on the table. We need to organize to keep what we’ve got on the table. We’re going to win this! We can’t win it without you! We want a better America, a better Nissan! We’re going to create another Nissan that respects human rights!”
(Danny Glover rallies the crowd. The man with the tie and sunglasses is civil rights-era veteran Bob Zellner)

Among those at the rally was 88-year-old Arthur Duncan of Tchula, Miss., who joined the UAW in 1945 and participated in a 113-day strike at General Motors in Michigan. “With the union, if something happens and it’s not your fault, you have someone to speak for you. If you don’t, you’re out. It’s like having a lawyer to plead your case.”

(To the right is veteran UAW member Arthur Duncan)

Duncan recalled seeing legendary UAW leader Walter Reuther at rallies and meetings many years ago. “I thought the guy was a great man. He was doing things to help people.” As for the current campaign in Canton, Duncan said, “I believe Nissan will come around. Can’t say when.”