Union vote at Nissan in Canton, Mississippi, set for August 3-4

Thousands of workers at the giant Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi, will be able to cast their ballots on whether to join the United Auto Workers in an election set for August 3 and August 4.

A petition had been filed earlier for a July 31/August 1 vote, so the actual election will come only a few days later.

The vote marks the culmination of a 12-year struggle by workers for an intimidation-and-threat-free union election at the plant, where the workforce is 80 percent African American. Local Nissan managers have strongly opposed unionization even thought the company ownership claims neutrality. Workers have been forced to watch anti-union videos, and pro-union workers have complained of harassment on the job.

With the rallying cry "Labor Rights Are Civil Rights", the campaign has include a widespread community grassroots effort with local ministers, civil rights-era veterans and students from nearby Jackson State University and Tougaloo College as well as the University of Mississippi standing side-by-side with the workers. International attention has also focused on the campaign--from as far away as Brazil and also France, where the government controls a percentage of Nissan's partner firm, Renault, and thus has influence on Nissan operations.

However, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant and the Republican leadership of the state Legislature in Mississippi, along with the Mississippi Manufacturers Association and outside groups such as the influential Koch Brothers, can be expected to use their influence to help defeat pro-union forces. This is what happened in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 2014, when workers at the Volkswagen plant sought a union. U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., even promised that Volkswagen would expand operations if the union was voted down. Workers narrowly rejected the union in the vote.

Nissan workers in Mississippi push for a union vote by the end of July / A call from LabourStart to help farm workers fend off legislative attacks in North Carolina

Workers in the South are standing up for their rights and making gains. Autoworkers at the giant Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi, this week asked the National Labor Relations Board for a vote on July 31 and August 1 on whether to join the United Auto Workers. This marks the culmination of a 12-year campaign, which Labor South has followed more closely than any other news outlet. An NLRB petition for a vote requires that at least 30 percent of the workforce approve the vote. A union victory requires 50 percent plus one.

(To the right, civil rights-era SNCC activist Bob Zellner in sunglasses at the center and actor Danny Glover to the right of him at a pro-worker rally at the Nissan plant in 2014)

In North Carolina, farm workers have made steady gains in securing worker rights with the help of organizations like the Farm Labor Organizing Committee. However, the state's arch-conservative legislators, backed by deep-pocketed anti-union moguls like Art Pope (North Carolina's version of the Koch Brothers), aim to destroy those gains. LabourStart, the London-based international labor activist network and publisher of my recent collection of essays by writers around the world on the migrant worker issue, The Strangers Among Us: Tales from a Global Migrant Worker Movement, recently filed this report from the U.S. South, asking for help in keeping those farm workers' hard-earned gains. Labor South posts this call for help on behalf of Eric Lee, who heads LabourStart:

(To the left, a typical North Carolina tobacco field harvested by migrant workers from Latin America)

Following a series of recent farmworker wins in the southern United States, farmers elected to the North Carolina State Legislature are trying to use their legislative power to stop workers on their own farms from organizing for better wages and working conditions. 

On 28 June, the North Carolina General Assembly passed Farm Bill S615 with no debate. The bill aims to stop the progress that farmworkers are achieving by making it illegal for farmers to deduct dues from union members as well as making it more difficult for farmworkers to win union contracts.

The bill would make it illegal for farmworkers to ask growers to sign an agreement with their union as part of settling a lawsuit over wage or labor violations.

US farmworkers are excluded from the National Labor Relations Act and other worker protections like minimum wage, child labor, and workers compensation laws, among others.

However, through the efforts of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), farmworkers have won union contracts that include wage increases, job security, and improved working conditions.

This bill aims to roll back this progress.

Please join FLOC and the International Union of Foodworkers (IUF) in calling on North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper to veto the bill. Your message will be sent by email to the Governor and delivered as part of a signed petition.

Click here to show your support for North Carolina's farm workers:

http://www.labourstart.org/go/floc

And please share this message with your friends, family and fellow union members.

Thank you!



Eric Lee

A visit to Munich and a reminder of the poor state of mainstream U.S. journalism--from Fox News propaganda to MSNBC's Russia obsession

 
(To the right, Munich's famous Rathaus in the heart of the city)

MUNICH, Germany – After my stint in the Army and Vietnam, this city became the scene of my salad days, where I enjoyed the carousel of my mid-20s studying philosophy and journalism at the university, working part-time in a warehouse, and spending far too many hours in the beer halls and beer gardens.

A flood of memories passed through me when I recently returned to my old stomping grounds. One of them was something my journalism professor here said. “If you really want to learn journalism, go to the United States.”

(To the left, my old apartment--the red-tiered rooftop in the center of the photograph--in Munich's Schwabing district) 

It was the mid-1970s. Woodward and Bernstein were chasing Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon out of the White House. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew was so busy fending off bribery charges he had to stop attacking the media’s “nattering nabobs of negativism.” I took my professor’s advice. My expatriate days were over.

This go-round I couldn’t help making all sorts of comparison, and the good ol’ USA came up short on many of them. Why does Europe have such a fantastic train system at a time when Donald Trump wants to end subsidies for the last passenger train service in the United States? Why do so many Americans have to worry about health care when Germans like my 89-year-old farmer cousin Georg know they’ll get the care they deserve after a life of hard work?

And then there’s that great U.S. journalism that my professor at the University of Munich cited as the crown jewel of my craft.

I thumbed through the pages of Munich’s major mainstream newspaper, the Süddeutsche Zeitung (South German Newspaper). The Wednesday, June 21, edition included 41 news-and-feature-filled pages, the kind of news hole (newsroom lingo for written content) U.S. reporters can only imagine in some drug-induced fantasy. The pages themselves are 30 percent larger than those of major U.S. newspapers. And, yes, there’s an online edition, too.

Even tabloids like Munich’s Abendzeitung (Evening Newspaper) with their screaming headlines and giant photographs have far more stories than most mainstream U.S. newspapers.

The contrast really hit home when I arrived at the Memphis International Airport and read in the local alternative newspaper that the Gannett Corporation, master of the shrunken news hole and owner of the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, and many other papers across the country, has put the headquarters for its newly purchased Memphis Commercial Appeal up for sale. Plans are to move elsewhere into smaller space.  Gannett is doing the same at its newspaper in Nashville.

I read further and learned the Memphis Newspaper Guild has filed a complaint against Gannett for its refusal to make severance payments to the 23 Commercial Appeal employees it laid off when it bought the newspaper. Several current workers have joined the protest by hanging “Shame on Gannett” signs around the newspaper office.

Of course, these kinds of developments in Memphis and elsewhere are taking place at a time when U.S. journalism is under severe attack by President Trump, Congress, and other politicians across the land.

Television journalists were recently forbidden to interview U.S. senators outside the Senate chamber. Trump is waging a constant battle with what he considers the purveyors of “fake news”, while those same news outlets struggle to keep up with the stream of misinformation and falsehoods coming out of the White House. Case in point: Trump’s claim of a United Nations “slush fund” to support the Paris climate agreement.  What he referred to is actually the so-called “Green Climate Fund” to aid poorer countries put into place better environmental policies and actions.

A Repubican state senator in Alaska recently slapped a reporter because of a story the reporter wrote. Montana Republican congressional candidate Greg Gianforte physically attacked reporter Ben Jacobs after Jacobs asked a question he didn’t like during the campaign. Gianforte subsequently received a donation from the director of a conservative broadcasting group, and voters elected him despite the attack.

The nation’s most popular news outlet, Fox News, is largely a mouthpiece for conservative propaganda, while its supposed ideological opposite, MSNBC, spends most of its time on a constant drumbeat about Russia’s alleged interference with the 2016 presidential election.

Speaking of that drumbeat about Russia, FAIR, the flagship publication of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, noted recently how all the reporting on Russia and the 2016 election has come at the expense of other reporting on climate, the economy, healthcare and President Trump’s proposed travel restrictions despite polls that show people want to know more about those issues.

The Russian focus “helps to defuse the ticking time-bomb of accountability for last year’s electoral loss” by Democrats, and it “shifts activist energy and attention away from the issues that could challenge the interests of the elites who run the networks,” FAIR says. In fact, CNN CEO Jeff Zucker told his staff to go back to the Russia story after its recent coverage of climate accords, according to a report by Project Veritas. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow spends an estimated 53 percent of her air time on the Russia story, Intercept says.

Thank goodness, good journalism is out there if you look hard for it.  As most reporters on the national scene scurried to find the latest “revelation” about Russian subterfuge, Alec MacGillis of Pro Publica probed the financial holdings of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and found that he’s a slum lord in Baltimore whose “Kushnervilles” are home to 20,000 low-income residents and countless rats, maggots, clogged pipes, and sewage-ruined carpets. Residents who complain have to face Kushner’s lawyers and a court system that mimics the legal maze Charles Dickens described in his 19^th century novel Bleak House.

That’s the kind of reporting my professor in Munich had in mind. Just wish we had more of it.

 A shorter version of this column appeared recently in the Jackson Free Press of Jackson, Mississippi.

"Mojo Rising" and "The Last Ballad" prove the ongoing power of Southern writing--tales of old gumshoes, Beale Street conjurers, and a cotton mill ballad singer who was murdered because she stood up for workers

 

Just returned to the USA from a trip to Europe, where I bicycled from Maastricht, Netherlands, into the little corner where that country meets Belgium and Germany, then rented a car with my family and drove the autobahn to Munich. We stopped along the way to spend time with my German relatives in Wallerstein and the nearby Medieval town of Nordlingen along what the Germans call the “Romantische Strasse” (Romantic Road).

All along the way people asked us about Donald Trump and what is happening to Americans. Can’t blame them. We Americans aren’t really sure what’s happening to us. I was also struck by how much more efficient everything is in Europe compared to us. The infrastructure is solid—whether along the highways and bridges or in the personal lives of Europeans who by and large don’t have to worry about health care or retirement. More about that later.

One thing we do still have going for us here in the USA, however, is our writers. Maybe it’s the pressures of U.S. society, with its unhinged greed and that greed’s hold on our institutions, the recklessness of our politics, the insecurities at practically every level of life. Writers have a lot to write about—and certainly the South’s long and proud literary traditions attest to that.

So let’s look at a couple upcoming books from the South, one of which I edited and served as a contributor, and see what they tell us about ourselves.

Mojo Rising: Contemporary Writers (Vol. 2)

Edited by Joseph B. Atkins (Sartoris Literary Group)

Edgar Allan Poe called the short story the supreme literary art, one that requires the “loftiest talent.” Poe, a Southerner from Richmond, Virginia, was a master of the genre, and he’d be proud of his fellow Southerners---particularly in the fertile land of the Deep South writer/publisher James L. Dickerson calls the “Mojo Triangle”—for proving him right over the years.

The short story tradition that includes masters like William Faulkner and Eudora Welty continues in the South today, and proof of that is in this collection of short stories by contemporary Southern writers, already available for pre-order on Amazon’s Kindle and other venues. A September 23 event at Nobel Literary Prize winner William Faulkner’s home of Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi, will celebrate its publication that month along with its companion, Mojo Rising: Masters of the Art (Vol. 1). That companion volume, edited by James L. Dickerson, will include stories by Faulkner, Welty, Richard Wright and many others.

As I say in my introduction to Mojo Rising: Contemporary Writers, most Southern writers share with their Russian counterparts a visceral connection with the poor, and like literary editor Thomas Seltzer once wrote, they see the poor “as human beings like the rest of us”—multi-dimensional, good, bad, ugly and beautiful, not as charicature or ideological constructs.

From the old gumshoe in Ace Atkins’ The Long Last Ride of El Canejo and Sheree Renee Thomas’ vision-haunted protagonist in Aunt Dissy’s Policy Dream Book to Larry Brown’s lost soul Fay in Girl on the Road, these stories share a gritty earthiness even if the people find themselves in sometimes fantastical situations.

I’ll shamelessly here put in a pitch for my own story in the collection, The Singapore Holy Man, which takes you from a rooftop in downtown Memphis to the streets of Singapore and Hong Kong, where the deals are made to use sweatshop and slave-shop labor to make shoes, clothes and computers for Westerners.

The Last Ballad

By Wiley Cash (William Morrow)

When Wiley Cash, a fellow North Carolinian, asked me to be a reviewer of this book, a novel based on the life of martyred labor leader Ella May Wiggins, I was both flattered and eager to read it. Cash, a New York Times bestselling author, resurrects the life and times of a real working class hero who should be familiar to all high school history students but sadly is not, and likely never will be.

Cash deftly shifts from character to character as he builds his tale of the poor, uneducated mother of five who decided she’d had enough of the injustices of cotton mill life and became a leader of the protest at the notorious Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929. She became a balladeer as well as an organizer, but her conviction, her determination to cross racial barriers, and her beautiful, inspiring voice ultimately led to her murder. Five men were later indicted for her murder, but they walked away free men after less than a half-hour of deliberation at the trial. Justice was never served.

(Ella May Wiggins)

Central to Cash’s powerful novel are his characters. We get to know Ella, her children, her friends. We go inside the mansion on the hill where the aristocrat Katherine McAdam wrestles with the injustices taking place down below in the cotton mills that made her family wealthy, and we see her reach out to Ella. We understand just how much courage was needed when we see the workers confronted by the menacing presence of Percy “Pigface” Epps, the mill security boss who uses every means available to him to make sure unions never gain a foothold in his mill.

The novel will be published in October.

Good reading ahead, folks, and that’s some good news to share!