OXFORD, Miss. – Travis Parks, a 14-year veteran worker at
Nissan’s plant in Canton, Mississippi, admits that losing the union election in
August was hard.
“Putting a lot of time into it, it was a rough event for
me,” says the 43-year-old, who works in the truck system at the plant, “but you
have to step back and re-evaluate what went wrong. … I am pretty much taking an
optimistic approach to this. I see an opportunity to educate workers who didn’t
know what was going on.”
Parks worked hard to get fellow workers to see the benefits
of belonging to the United Auto Workers. However, he and other pro-union
workers couldn’t counter the anti-union barrage waged against them—the
anti-union videos, the one-on-one meetings, the threats of lost jobs and a
shut-down plant, the endless stream of anti-union commercials on television.
It was a typical union election in the South, where a phalanx
of plant owners and management, politicians, preachers, and radio and newspaper
commentators is guaranteed to decry the evils of workers having a joint voice
in their working lives.
Parks says the Nissan-Canton management has made a few post-election
changes—painting the bathrooms, improving some benefits for temporary workers--but
the changes are merely cosmetic. “Small, insignificant things to make it appear
that they are concerned.”
A source who works with the national UAW, asking to remain
anonymous, says, “there is a natural period of time” after an election loss
when people are “being introspective, retrospective.” The UAW still has an office
in Canton, but it has reduced its staff there.
In These Times
writer Joe Allen says the Nissan-Canton election loss “is nothing less than a
knockout punch ending for the foreseeable future any efforts by the UAW to
organize the large, predominantly foreign-owned auto assembly plants in the
South.” He says the UAW’s loss of militance is partly to blame. “The UAW has
become a prison of its modern history … a long track record of making
concessions on wages, benefits, and working conditions.”
What the future holds remains uncertain. Workers are at the
mercy of the company, and they have nothing really to say or do about it. It’s
a situation facing blue-collar workers across the nation these days.
Many of them voted for Donald Trump to be president. Unlike
Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, Trump at least talked about bringing
good-paying blue-collar jobs back to America and an end to job-killing trade
deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.
Trump ended TPP, but he’s done little else to live up to his
campaign populism. His tax reform plan is the same old Republican saw that tax
cuts to the rich trickle down prosperity to everybody else, the same lie today
that it was when Ronald Reagan pushed that bill of goods.
Every demagogue has to have an “other” to blame for the
nation’s troubles, and Trump’s was the immigrant. No Mexican-financed wall yet,
but he has called for a major increase in jails and prisons for the tens of
thousands of immigrants agents at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
have been arresting. Some of these facilities are little more than modern-day
concentration camps for people whose big crime is to seek work that U.S.-pushed
trade deals destroyed in their home countries.
Trump is feuding with establishment Republican leaders like
U.S. Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee. However, don’t kid yourself. Those
Republicans are on the same page with Trump when it comes to serving their
corporate friends and doing nothing for workers.
In my native North Carolina, the Republican-ruled General
Assembly passed a law this year aimed directly at destroying the Farm Labor
Organizing Committee, farm workers’ best hope for justice in the fields.
Republican N.C. state Senator Brent Jackson, a farmer fined
and cited in court rulings repeatedly for mistreating his workers, pushed
through legislation that bans farmworker unions from deducting union dues from
workers’ wages. The law even prohibits farmers from agreeing to a union
contract as a means to settle lawsuits.
To whom can workers turn for support? The Democratic Party?
Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez has undertaken a purge of party
leaders who supported pro-union Bernie Sanders during last year’s presidential
primaries. In their place are Clintonite corporate lobbyists.
Travis Parks, I admire your optimism at a time like this. I
often call myself the last optimist in the room, but I’m worried that maybe now
you are.
A version of this
column appeared recently in the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Mississippi.
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