(Maria Stoller Atkins as a young woman and more recently)
Apologies to readers of Labor
South for the weeks-long delay since my last posting. I’ve been out of pocket
recently with the August 29 death of my mother, Maria Stoller Atkins. She was
92 and a German native who introduced me to the worlds of classical music,
philosophy, and social justice issues. During World War II, she was imprisoned
by the Gestapo for an act of kindness to French prisoners. Working at a plant in France where they were held, she and another lady felt sorry for them and slipped them cakes and champagne during a holiday. The Nazis only
released her from her Polish prison as Russian soldiers made advances on the
Eastern Front. After the war, she married then-U.S. Army sergeant Roger Burton
Atkins, my late father, in Munich, and they settled near his family in Sanford,
N.C., where I spent my formative years. She was a deeply religious woman who
knew first-hand the evils of racism and fascism, and I miss her greatly.
Much is happening on the labor front in the South. I just
posted a column with the Jackson Free
Press in Jackson, Miss., that looks at the region-wide implications of the hard-right
Republican takeover in my native North Carolina and the progressive populist
Moral Monday movement that has risen there to confront it and its efforts to
destroy any kind of safety net for the poor and marginalized in society. I’ll
post the column on Labor South soon.
I see Moral Monday as a movement with great implications for
the South as a whole and one of several developments that show a growing
restiveness among working-class and progressive-minded folks in the region. It
has already linked itself with the “Fight for 15” fast food workers seeking to
organize a union and $15-per-hour wages. Even before Moral Monday, the Farm
Labor Organizing Committee and Coalition of Immokalee Workers were championing
the rights of migrant workers in North Carolina, Florida and elsewhere, and
they were winning battles with major food corporations to better wages and
conditions.
A federal judge ruled last month that Michigan-based Kellogg
Co. wrongfully locked out 226 workers at its plant in Memphis, Tenn., after a
contract dispute. The judge ordered the company to allow the workers to return
to their jobs. For 10 months, through rain, snow and blistering summer weather,
the workers protested outside the Memphis plant, and their perseverance paid
off. The judge’s ruling also exposed the rank greed and arrogance of Kellogg
CEO John Bryant, a multimillionaire with no concept of how his actions affected
his company’s workers in Memphis.
The United Auto Workers may have tapped into a new way of
organizing the South with its decision to establish Local 42 in Chattanooga,
Tenn., in the aftermath of the 712-626 vote against unionization at the
Volkswagen plant there last February. Tennessee U.S. Sen. Bob Corker and Gov.
Bill Haslam shamefully interfered with the vote, raising false alarms that a
union would destroy jobs and investment. Local 42 is a voluntary organization
that will stand up for workers’ rights and hopefully grow large enough to win
official recognition.
Things are happening all across Dixie. Workers at the
Cargill ground beef processing plant in Fort Worth, Texas, have voted to join
the United Food and Commercial Workers union. After suffering unjust firings,
harassment, and threats of cut wages, workers at the 200-worker plant decided
their only chance at fairness was standing together in solidarity as a union.
In New Orleans, teachers fired as a result of anti-union local
and state government opportunists in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are
winning their legal battle in Louisiana’s state courts. A five-judge panel of
the state’s Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the thousands of firings by
the Orleans Parish School Board and state Department of Education were illegal.
The case is now before the state Supreme Court.
An organizing effort is underway among Boeing workers in
North Charleston, S.C. Unions have struggled at the company’s giant
7,500-worker plant there (this includes contractors) over the years and have
been completely absent for the last five. In 2009, the company chose the South
Carolina site to build its 787 Dreamliner instead of its Everett, Wash., site,
where workers are union members.
The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace
Workers (IAM) has started an organizing campaign in North Charleston that could make
it another major battleground for Southern workers seeking union membership.
