(A tobacco field near Cameron, N.C.)
Again another delay in posting on Labor South, and I apologize once more. Wrapping up a book manuscript and other duties kept me busy this time. Coming soon will be a look at labor support of pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong, a victory for casino workers in New Orleans, and a glance back at the hard-hitting journalist Robert Sherrill, a great Southern muckraker who died in August.
CAMERON, N.C. – This tiny town on tobacco road in central
North Carolina looks much like it did back when my father grew up here in the
1920s—a small gathering of stores and homes with wrap-around porches between the
railroad tracks and Plank Road, piney woods and fertile fields in the distance.
Scratch the surface, however, and what you find is deep,
fundamental change—the homes are nearly all antique shops now, some with smart,
little cafes and coffees shops that serve expresso. The residents are artists
and collectors, local and transplant, not farmers and seed merchants.
A lot is changing in my home state, and the change here says
much about the South today. Hard-right Republicans control this once Democratic
haven, and their impact includes: refusal of Medicaid to 500,000 people,
slashed federal unemployment benefits and state earned-income tax credit to
more than a million, deep cuts in public education funding, and new tax breaks
for the wealthy.
A progressive populist movement has risen up, however, and
challenged the conservative junta in the state capital of Raleigh. Led by the
Rev. William Barber II, president of the state NAACP, the multi-racial Moral
Monday movement has been protesting, organizing, and spreading dissent since
April 2013. Hundreds of supporters have been arrested for opposing the junta’s restrictions
on voting and abortion rights, gerrymandered legislative districts, and gutting
of the safety net for the poor.
The movement has spread across the South, including
Mississippi, and beyond, and now members have aligned with a wide range of
progressive activists, including the “Fight for 15” fast-food workers seeking
union representation and $15-per-hour wages. Movement leaders like the Rev.
Nelson Johnson of Greensboro, N.C., and the Rev. J. Herbert Nelson of
Washington, D.C., were early supporters of the effort to bring a union to the
Nissan plant in Canton.
“The South has been one of the greatest purveyors of death
and destruction,” Nelson said during a pro-labor rally in Memphis, Tenn., back
in 2006. “We come here to join in the struggle. People are being mistreated on
their jobs, getting injured on their jobs, and being cut from their health
care, individuals on temporary work and who’ll never have any kind of
retirement income, people who work forty, fifty, sixty hours a week and don’t
make enough to put aside to help their children go to college. That’s our
congregation.”
An old friend of mine in North Carolina, Vietnam and
Afghanistan war veteran Bob Mayton, told me during my recent visit that
Mississippi may be pulling ahead of North Carolina now in the wake of the
Republican takeover there. I told him Mississippi should never be a model, not
with a governor like Phil Bryant who can refuse Medicaid to 350,000 in the
nation’s poorest state.
Despite mainstream media’s general avoidance of any positive
news about the labor movement, workers are gaining ground in the nation’s least
unionized region. The 712-626 vote against union representation at Volkswagen’s
plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., in February may have caused anti-union Gov. Bill
Haslam and U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, both Republicans, to pop champagne, but it
also opened the door to a new kind of organizing that may prove a model for
unions in the South.
The United Auto Workers decided to forego an appeal of the
vote to the National Labor Relations Board—an appeal certainly justified in
view of Haslam and Corker’s obvious interference in the campaign—and establish
Local 42, a voluntary, members-only union in that will fight for workers’
rights in Chattanooga and hopefully grow largely enough to get official
recognition.
In July, a federal judge ruled that the Michigan-based
Kellogg Co. violated the labor rights of the 226 Memphis, Tenn., workers it
locked out after a contract dispute. The 10-month lockout ended with workers
returning to their jobs, and Kellogg’s multi-millionaire CEO John Bryant
exposed as a paragon of greed in corporate America.
In many ways, the Mississippi Freedom Summer 50th
Anniversary Conference in Jackson, Miss., in June was a landmark event in all
this Southern activism. The conference drew activists from across the region--civil
rights-era veterans like Bob Zellner and labor organizing legends like Bruce
Raynor. More importantly, the conference brought young people together to pick
up the banner for social justice in the South. No issue got more attention than
labor rights.
Some 400 students participated in a pro-union rally outside
the Nissan plant in nearby Canton at the conference’s end, waving placards,
singing labor and civil rights songs, and shouting their approval when the Rev.
Isiac Jackson of the Mississippi Alliance for Fairness at Nissan told them,
“Union today! Union tomorrow! Union forever!”
The civil rights movement of the 1960s began with black
students’ protest at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. Mississippi
later became its most heated battleground. Is Mississippi the next stage for
today’s movement of progressive activism?
This column appeared recently in the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Miss.
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