Labor South

Martyred labor minstrel Ella May Wiggins celebrated in Gastonia

2012-01-28T07:54:00.000-08:00

I’ll never forget my first encounter with the story of mill worker-labor minstrel Ella May Wiggins and her last words, “Lord a-mercy, they done shot and killed me.” Why, I wondered, was I never taught this in my history classes?

Wiggins uttered those words in the fall of 1929 when she was shot down by vigilantes for supporting a strike at a textile mill in Gastonia, N.C. No one was ever convicted for the murder of the 29-year-old mother of five.

Martyred labor heroes like Wiggins are the great “disappeared” in most U.S. history books because they all too clearly demonstrate the dark underside of class in the American story. Many would rather that part of the story never be told.

A group in Gaston County, N.C., is bound and determined to tell it, however, and to make sure that Wiggins and her fellow workers will be remembered.

The Ella May Wiggins Textile Heritage Council, composed of artists, scholars, and historians, sponsored a poetry reading in Wiggins’ honor at the Poor Richard’s Book Shoppe in downtown Gastonia Saturday (Jan. 28). Poets from around the area came to read and discuss poetry inspired by the textile experience in the South.

Over the past four months, the group has made much use of social media in telling the Wiggins story, contacting folks around the country to spread the news. Some 500 have joined the discussion, including donors and others who are helping the group attain nonprofit status. During Gastonia’s “Celebrate Gaston” festival in October, the council recruited Gastonia resident Margaret Smith to portray Wiggins in a dramatic presentation.

The council hopes to educate people to the full story about Wiggins and the other Southern textile workers who stood up for their rights and commanded the nation’s attention in the late 1920s and 1930s.

“Our goal is to show that there is support near and far for a memorial for our Ella, which is long overdue,” said council member Amy Sifford in a recent e-mail conversation.

After earlier strikes in German-owned mills in Elizabethton, Tenn., in March 1929, workers at the giant Loray Mill in Gastonia went on strike that April. The protest later spread to mills in Marion, N.C. Violent confrontations with state and local authorities led to the wounding of dozens of strikers and several officers and the deaths of Wiggins and Gastonia police chief O.F. Aderholt.

A full-page ad in the Gastonia Gazette declared the purpose of the strike to be the “overthrowing of this Government and destroying property and to kill, kill, kill.”

Yet Wiggins and other Southern workers like her were striking against 12-hour days, pay that ranged from $8 to $10 a week, and filthy, unsafe working conditions “amid a terrible din of machinery in temperatures near 85 degrees,” according to historian Irving Bernstein. They also had to deal with the notorious "stretch-out," a common practice at the time that forced workers to double and triple their output at breakneck speed.

Wiggins was a single mother who had lost four children to whooping cough and struggled to rear her other five after her husband John Wiggins abandoned them. According to writer Beth Crist in an article for the North Carolina Museum of History, Ella May, who was white, and her family lived in a rented shack in an African American neighborhood called Stumptown. She earned $9 a week as a spinner at her textile plant.

Despite a furor in the town against labor organizers and amid claims they were all communists, Wiggins became committed to the labor movement and the National Textile Workers Union (NTWU). Perhaps her best-known contribution was as a balladeer to striking workers. She would serenade the families of strikers in the tent colony they established after being evicted from company housing. Here are a few lines from her “A Mill Mother’s Lament":

We leave our homes in the morning
We kiss our children goodbye
While we slave for the bosses
Our children scream and cry

But understand all, workers
Our union they do fear
Let’s stand together, workers
And have a union here

Crist writes that Wiggins not only stood up for workers but also crossed the racial divide and recruited African Americans for the union. She once “stepped over a rope separating African American and white workers at a union meeting and sat with the African Americans.” With her help, the NTWU voted to allow African Americans to join the union.

That outspoken advocacy ultimately cost her her life. She was killed as she and other union members were returning home in a truck after a confrontation with an angry mob. Although five men were arrested and charged with the killing, they were quickly acquitted in a March 1930 trial.

Five years later the textile industry was rocked by a general strike that idled 180,000 workers in the South and 400,000 nationwide. Seven striking workers were shot to death in Honea Path, S.C., as local, state, and regional authorities aligned together with industry leaders, the press, and local hooligans to stop the Southern labor movement dead in its tracks.

You can’t kill an idea, however, and that’s why the spirit of Ella May Wiggins refuses to fade away even if the modern-day versions of those same forces that killed her wished she would just simply disappear.

Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, a review

2012-01-20T12:50:00.000-08:00

(To the left is Billie Holiday, a 1947 photo from Down Beat magazine)

Billie Holiday rocked America when she first sang “Strange Fruit” back in 1939. Radio stations banned the song, Southern politicians fumed, and black people nodded their heads with admiration at a black female singer who had the guts to tell the true story of the evil of lynching in the U.S. South.

So when jazz singer Joyce Cobb sang “Strange Fruit” during her performance Thursday night as Holiday in the Hattiloo Theatre production of Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, I was struck by the power that a great protest song can have 70-plus years after it was conceived.

Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill is a rich and intimate experience for those who come to the tiny theater near downtown Memphis, just a stone’s throw from the Sun Records studio. The Hattiloo offers black repertoire theater and is becoming one of the cultural treasures in the city on the bluffs of the Mississippi River.

Written by Lanie Robertson and directed by Emma Crystal, the play features Cobb in the lead role backed by Gerald Stephens on piano and 17-year-old Philip Andrew Joyner III on stand-up base. The scene is the Philadelphia, Pa., nightclub where a broken Holiday sang just months before she died in July 1959. Years of heroin and alcohol abuse had cost her a year of freedom in a West Virginia rehab center and the loss of her license to play in New York’s jazz clubs. When she took to that stage at Emerson’s, she was a shadow of the star with the gardenias in her hair who had performed at Carnegie Hall and with Count Basie, Benny Goodman, and Artie Shaw.

Cobb, a nationally known jazz singer who lives in Memphis, is a natural in this role even though she sings in her own voice and doesn’t try to mimic Holiday. On stage, she magically becomes Holiday, damaged goods and all, a pretty wreck you want to rescue but know you can’t. It’s too late. You see it when Lady Day returns from her break, another shot in her veins, voice slurred, her will fighting, however, through the fog to finish what she started.

Stephens plays her lover as well as her pianist, and he’s good on both counts. Holiday always had a lover, usually to her detriment. You hear that, too, when Cobb does “Don’t Explain”, a classic that’s still a bit scary, even masochistic, in its utter submission to a lover’s will.

Stephens’ piano does occasionally overpower Cobb, but maybe that’s something that happened at Emerson’s, too, back in 1959. I’ve got a copy of Holiday’s last album, “Lady in Satin”, the once-great voice trembling, sometimes breaking up. Wasn’t much needed to overpower it.

I also have a tattered paperback copy of Holiday’s 1956 autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, which she wrote with William Dufty. Some say you can’t believe everything she writes in it, but it has one of the greatest openings of any book ever written: “Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three.”

Holiday’s life was indeed a tale worth telling. Born in Philadephia in 1915, she grew up in Baltimore, was raped by a neighbor at the age of 11. Her mother worked in a series of brothels, taking her daughter along. After Holiday got her start in music, she rose quickly, getting her nickname “Lady Day” from Mississippi-born saxophonist Lester Young. A boyfriend and fellow musician turned her on to heroin in the 1940s, and she was never the same. When she died in 1959, 3,000 attended her funeral in New York.

Hers was a tough, scary, hardboiled way to live a life, and Cobb admitted during a conversation with the audience after the production that playing the singer with truth and honesty takes a lot of commitment and lots of practice. For Holiday, that was just life, and a lot of times she wasn't very successful at it.

Bill to propose: Either abolish Miss. Workers' Compensation Commission or fix it

2012-01-18T08:55:00.000-08:00

(This is a follow-up to my earlier posting on a recent report that was highly critical of the Mississippi Workers' Compensation Commission, an agency charged with handling cases of workers injured on the job. This blog has followed this story more closely than any other publication in the state. It's an issue that reaches far beyond Mississippi, however, as leading regional and national politicians like presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich have expressed disdain for the very concept of workers' compensation.)

A bill will be filed in the Mississippi Legislature either to abolish the state Workers’ Compensation Commission or change it to require better legal training of commissioners and that it do a better job explaining its handling of worker injury cases.

“The issue here is transparency,” Joint Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review (PEER) Director Max Arinder said about the commission. “They don’t explain their actions.”

In a long-awaited report released this month, PEER, a bipartisan state watchdog agency, said the commission failed to provide "clear, principled legal grounds for reversal or modification of orders" from administrative law judges, and that it failed to adopt "rules and practices to ensure statutorily compliant and efficient operations."

The commission’s review of administrative law judge rulings in compensation cases, including its penchant to modify or reverse them, adds an estimated 57 days in getting cases resolved, the report said. An earlier study ordered by Jackson, Miss., attorney Roger Doolittle showed a clear pro-employer tilt in commission decisions.

Lack of transparency about commission decisions is one of its problems, the PEER report says. “We don’t know what their motives are,” Arinder said. “A good appellate record would say why they are going against administrative law judge rulings.”

The report “pretty much confirmed what my and other claimant lawyers’ perception was,” Doolittle said last week. “These (commission) actions, by and large, were to the detriment of injured workers in Mississippi.”

John Jones, another Jackson attorney who handles workers’ compensation cases, said the report shows “we’ve lost touch with the history and purpose of the (workers’ compensation) act.” The law says close cases should actually tilt toward the employee rather than the employer because the injured worker, in seeking compensation, is surrendering the right to future legal action.

Commission Chairman Liles Williams, recently re-appointed to a six-year term by then-Gov. Haley Barbour, and fellow commissioners John Junkin and Debra Gibbs issued a sharp rebuke of PEER’s findings, claiming that PEER “blatantly contradicts itself” and makes “a gross mis-characterization” of the commission’s role and in assessing the commission as if it were roughly equivalent to an appellate court. They also take PEER to task on its description of several compensation cases cited in the report.

In an unusual move, PEER filed a written response to the commission response to the report and said PEER doesn’t accuse the commission of violating the law but instead “points out … that the adjudicative process could be carried out more efficiently and with greater transparency.”

PEER’s investigation revealed that prior to 2007 the commission approved administrative law judges’ decisions without modification in 70 percent of cases. That dropped to 58 percent after 2007. January 2007 was the point when Republican Gov. Barbour assumed control of the majority of appointments to the commission.

PEER offered two options for remedying the situation: (1) eliminate the commission altogether and create an office administered by an executive director appointed by the governor and allow administrative law judge rulings to be appealed directly to the Mississippi Court of Appeals; (2) revise the commission to "reflect the need for members to have extensive legal training"—at present, only one of the three commissioners must be a lawyer--and to require the commission to "review the appeals brought before it entirely on the record."

Arinder said PEER committee members, which include seven state senators and seven representatives, will sponsor legislation regarding these options. “To what extent it will gain traction remains to be seen,” Arinder said.

Commission senior attorney Scott Clark, speaking on behalf of Chairman Williams, said the commission “will not become involved in the legislative process in any way” in connection with the PEER report.

If the commission is left in present form, the PEER report said, it needs to provide administrative law judges with "necessary clerical and editing support" and to make sure its rules conform with existing statutes.

“We knew something was just not right with the workers’ compensation commission,” said former state Rep. and PEER committee member Dirk Dedeaux, who initially asked PEER to undertake the review. “You want a process that is consistent, fair. We’ve got the administrative judges, the appellate courts, and this hole in the middle.”

Mississippi, the last state in the nation to adopt a workers’ compensation law, is perennially at the bottom among states in what it pays injured workers. Most states award 100 percent compensation for weekly wages. Mississippi workers receive two-thirds of their weekly wages. Jones estimated approximately 13,000 workers are injured on the job each year, and many more may go unreported.

What's up in 2012? Immigration demagoguery's pay-off, UAW's new Southern campaign, and more Walmart image-building

2012-01-11T10:08:00.000-08:00

The year 2012 promises to be an interesting and potentially pivotal one for workers in the South and nation as politicians on the national level vie to steer voter disgust with Wall Street excess to their own advantage, state-level politicians wrestle with the ramifications of their demagoguery, and unions and protesters seek to keep the “Occupy” momentum going. Let’s look at some of the developments unfolding.

“We want our immigrants back!”

In the South, the states of Georgia and Alabama are already paying the price for the racist, anti-immigrant ranting of their political leaders, ranting that led to Arizona-style legislation in both states and a resulting disaster on the farm.

The irony is that illegal immigration is down in this country. The New York Times reported this month that arrests along the U.S.-Mexico border are the lowest since 1972. Immigration continues because poverty continues to push workers away from home in search of jobs. However, the poor economy and the anti-immigrant backlash in the United States is forcing many Latino workers to those places in Mexico, Chili, Argentina and Brazil where there are jobs waiting.

Up in Georgia, meanwhile, “millions of pounds of watermelons were left to rot in the fields” last summer, “along with peaches, blackberries and cucumbers” because of a new anti-immigrant law that scared farm workers away, wrote Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) co-founder Greg Asbed and Sean Sellers in The Nation magazine.

Asbed and Sellers say the same is happening in Alabama, which went a step beyond Arizona and passed what many consider the most draconian anti-immigrant law in the nation. A Mercedes manager, visiting the state where the German automaker has built a huge plant, was even arrested and taken to jail for failing to have his papers, an offense under the new law.

Small towns dependent upon immigrant labor are drying up across the South, fruit is left to die in the fields, and now politicians have to figure out how to undo the mess they created. It’s not that easy. For example, the watermelon picking so necessary to the farm economies of Georgia, Florida and other states is actually skilled labor. Latinos who’ve done it for years know the intricacies of distinguishing various levels of ripeness among watermelons. Replacement workers have made crop losses even worse because of the lack of such knowledge, Asbed and Sellers say.

Republican politicians brought this about, yet they still hope they can pull a rabbit out of the hat. On the national level, they’re touting conservative Latinos like U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida—a potential vice presidential nominee--in an effort to prove the party’s credibility. However, Rubio comes out of the comparatively small and very conservative Cuban community in Florida and thus is hardly representative of Latinos as a whole.

Mississippi’s newly elected Republican governor, Phil Bryant, earned his political stripes in part by his demagoguery of the immigration issue, pushing, for example, a discredited study showing the alleged high cost of illegal immigration to the state. As a result of the elections, Mississippi now also has a GOP-controlled House and Senate. Will the state learn by Alabama and Georgia’s example regarding immigration? State Republicans like Bryant signed a lot of IOUs to their Tea Party constituencies, and the pressure will be on to deliver.

The UAW targets the South … again

(To the left is a photograph of workers at the Flint, Mich., sit-down strike in 1937, a pivotal event in the creation of the modern-day United Auto Workers. The photograph was taken by Sheldon Dick for the U.S. Farm Security Administration.)

The struggling United Auto Workers, its membership down 75 percent from 30 years ago, is hoping to gain traction in the U.S. South by targeting German-owned automakers in Alabama and Tennessee for organizing drives.

According to Reuters, the UAW sees the Volkswagen plant near Chattanooga, Tenn., and the Daimler-owned Mercedes plant near Tuscaloosa, Ala., as potentially easier to organize than the Japanese and Korean-owned plants in the region. UAW already represents workers at Daimler’s Freightliner trucks plants in North Carolina and other states.

UAW President Bob King apparently believes the German-owned companies are more likely to allow union elections without a major fight than Nissan, Toyota or Hyundai. In recent years, UAW operatives have been working closely with the giant German union IG Metall in hopes of developing joint strategies.

Automative News reports IG Metall “wants to keep the United States from becoming a cheap-labor alternative to Germany” and thus is also working with the United Steelworkers in its efforts to organize a ThyssenKrupp steel plant in Alabama.

UAW tried unsuccessfully to organize workers at Nissan's Tennessee plant and did preliminary work for a possible campaign at the Japanese automaker's Mississippi plant as well as at Toyota's plant in Kentucky. None of these efforts has borne fruit yet, however.

Mini-editorial: The UAW and other major unions have to rediscover their fighting roots, and that means dumping the term “middle class”. Like Barack Obama, Democrats in Congress, all Republicans, and most mainstream media types, union leaders love to talk about the “middle class”, that oh-so-comforting way to describe working people in this country, a term that tells them they’ve climbed a notch or two in our supposedly classless society and which separates them from the lumpenproletariat. No one every fought a revolution or even started a movement with a euphemism meant to mollify rather than inspire. We’re working class, and so is the UAW’s targeted constituency. Call them that, Bob King!

Walmart: Reform or image-building? Oh, come on. You know the answer

After winning its day in court with the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of the Dukes class-action sex discrimination suit, Walmart apparently decided its public image needed some more sprucing up. Thus we now have the Global Women’s Economic Development Initiative, a Walmart Foundation creation that supposedly seeks female empowerment through training centers for retail and garment workers in India and Bangladesh and by encouraging women entrepreneurs.

According to The Nation, Walmart President Sylvia Matthews Burwell will head the project, yet she will report to Walmart Corporate Affairs Executive Vice President Leslie Dach.

Hmmmm. Is this one of those wait-and-see, the proof-is-in-the-pudding situations?

I’m not encouraged by the fact that Walmart, after responding to earlier criticism and improving its poor benefits to employees, announced in October that it was cutting back health care coverage significantly for part-time workers as well as raising premiums for full-time employees. Just as discouraging is the fact that Walmart fired 22 workers in Chili for taking part in a nationwide general strike to promote tax reform, new labor laws, and other social justice issues.

Walmart was the only company in Chili that fired its workers for joining the nationwide protest.

Bi-partisan watchdog agency takes Mississippi Workers' Compensation Commission to task for failing injured workers

2012-01-04T11:22:00.000-08:00

(To the right is labor attorney Roger K. Doolittle in his office in Jackson, Miss.)

The Mississippi Workers’ Compensation Commission is failing workers who’ve been injured on the job as a result of their work, according to a report by a bi-partisan government watchdog agency in the state.

In a long-awaited report released Tuesday (Jan. 3) and revealed here for the first time, the Joint Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review (PEER) said the state Workers’ Compensation failed to provide "clear, principled legal grounds for reversal or modification of orders" from administrative law judges, and that it failed to adopt "rules and practices to ensure statutorily compliant and efficient operations."

The report also pointed to the comparatively long time required in Mississippi to resolve worker compensation cases. PEER’s investigation revealed that prior to 2007 the commission approved administrative law judges’ decisions without modification in 70 percent of cases. That dropped to 58 percent after 2007. Commission modification of rulings rose from 8 percent before 2007 to 12 percent after 2007.

“Ultimately, reversals or modifications can impact the amount of time it takes claimants and other parties to resolve their workers’ compensation claims,” the report says.

The commission’s review of administrative law judge rulings adds an estimated 57 days to the process of adjudication, the report says.

January 2007 was the point when Republican Gov. Haley Barbour assumed control of the majority of appointments to the commission.

A 2005 study by the Workers Compensation Research Institute showed that cases in Mississippi take much longer to resolve than cases in other states. “The average interval from petition filing to a judge’s order was almost 20 months,” the study said.

PEER offered two options to remedy the situation. The state could eliminate the commission and replace it with an office whose executive director would be appointed by the governor and a procedure to appoint administrative law judges whose rulings could be appealed to the Mississippi Court of Appeals. It could also revise the role and composition of the commission to "reflect the need for members to have extensive legal training" and to require the commission to "review the appeals brought before it entirely on the record."

If the commission is left in present form, PEER said it needs to provide administrative law judges with "necessary clerical and editing support" and make sure its rules conform with existing statutes.

More than two years ago, the state House Insurance Committee held a hearing on findings in a study ordered by Jackson, Miss., labor attorney Roger Doolittle that showed the three members of the state Workers’ Compensation Commission—Chairman Liles Williams, John Junkin, and Augustus Collins II (since replaced by new commissioner Debra Gibbs)—siding decisively with the employer in most cases before them, particularly in reversals of administrative court decisions.

For example, 77 percent of the reversals of administrative judge rulings sought by Williams were in favor of the employer. For Junkin, 91 percent of the reversals were for the employer’s benefit. For Collins, 75 percent were for the employer.

Such a record “is unprecedented in Mississippi jurisprudence,” Doolittle said about his study in 2010. “You’ve got judges that collectively have the highest experience rate in the history of the (workers compensation) act, and they are being reversed at the rate of about 80 percent.” He referred to reversals of decisions favoring the employee.

“I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and I’ve never seen a commission this conservative,” said Jackson attorney John Jones at the time. “The irony is that by statute and by history (workers’ compensation) is supposed to be tilted toward the worker. The worker is supposed to get the benefit of all doubt.”

Mississippi, the last state in the nation to adopt a workers’ compensation law, is a perennial bottom feeder among states in what it pays injured workers. It is one of the few states that award less than 100 percent of weekly wages to workers injured on the job. Injured Mississippi workers receive two-thirds of their weekly wages. Jones estimated that approximately 13,000 workers are injured on the job each year, and many more may go unreported.

Williams, recently re-appointed to a six-year term by outgoing Gov. Barbour, and fellow commissioners Junkin and Gibbs issued a sharp rebuke of PEER’s findings, claiming, for example, that PEER is off base is assessing the commission as if it were roughly equivalent to an appellate court. They also take PEER to task on its description of several compensation cases cited in the report.

In an unusual move, PEER filed a written response to the commission response and said PEER doesn’t accuse the commission of violating the law but instead “points out … that the adjudicative process could be carried out more efficiently and with greater transparency.” It also notes that “the additional time the commission expends on reviewing and often modifying decisions of the administrative law judges adds little to the ultimate fairness of the process, but does add time.”

PEER’s 14 members include seven state senators and seven state House members.

Occupiers in 2012: Continuing the fight for progress "from the bottom up"

2011-12-22T09:00:00.000-08:00

Among the stacks of books, newspapers, and magazines that crowd my office is a collection of century-old editions of Populist Party leader Tom Watson’s The Jeffersonian. What caught my eye as I recently browsed through them were artist Robert Carter’s drawings on pages 4 and 5 of the Jan. 9, 1908, edition.

On page 4 was a gathering of well-dressed, big city New Year’s Eve revelers—top hats, glowing gowns, expensive furs, happy smiles—under the caption “The Wine Line” and with this description: “While Caruso sang the `Chime Song’ at the Plaza, and the great ones of society clinked glasses … something very different was going on at the back door.”

The “back door” scene was on page 5 under the caption “The Bread Line”. Here a bedraggled gathering of women, children, and old men, faces down-turned, their clothes ragged, waited patiently. “At nearly all the restaurants the unfortunate straggled and shivered waiting for 1 o’clock, when the passing out of the free bread and coffee would begin,” read the description.

Watson’s Atlanta-based weekly was one long critique of the excesses of “the captains of finance on Wall Street” and the equivalent of what we’d call today the “1 percent”. At its heart, before it disintegrated into racism and bogus monetary issues, the Populist movement was a stirring precursor to the Occupy Wall Street movement and the strongest challenge in the nation’s history to our Wall Street-beholden two-party system.

As the year 2012 looms, the protest that began in September against the “captains of finance” who nearly destroyed the nation’s economy in 2008 promises to continue to shape the political dialogue in a crucial election year and steal some of the thunder from the corporate-sponsored Tea Party movement.

“I’m here because the political process is completely broken,” Occupy Memphis protester William Newton told me one chilly morning recently. “The banks own both parties. We have a small presence here, but we are the nucleus of the next step.”

(William Newton)

An attorney with a background in mortgage banking and specialty in corporate mergers, Newton, 59, is a former “hawk” and “Goldwater supporter” who has seen the modern-day corporate world from the inside and didn’t like what he saw. “Our country has been high-jacked. I’m here because I couldn’t live with myself otherwise.”

The validity of Occupier complaints has been confirmed in several recent studies.

According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the top 1 percent of the population (in wealth) has seen its income grow 275 percent since Ronald Reagan first took office. As for the rest of us, our income grew less than 40 percent. But the wealthy do give. For example, they contribute $7 to every $1 small donors give to political campaigns, a 2010 study by Common Cause showed.

No wonder two-thirds of the nation believe wealth should be re-distributed to make it more fair, support higher income taxes on the wealthy, and oppose tax cuts for corporations, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll in October. Seven in 10 say Republicans in Congress primarily support the rich.

Yet you won’t get much of a feel for the growing class resentment in this nation from Fox News. It took what writer David Love called the “Bull Connor” tactics of the police in New York, Oakland, and other cities against Occupy protesters even to get mainstream media’s attention to the movement.

With his fiery, populist-sounding speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, in early December, President Obama indicated that he is now ready to take on the true powers-that-be in this nation and fight tooth-and-nail for the little guy. However, the continuing presence of Wall Street insiders like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitner in the president’s inner circle, the legacy of his many concessions to congressional Republicans, and his projected $1 billion campaign kitty can’t help but breed a certain amount of skepticism.

Even progressive politicians spend “most of (their) time on the phone asking rich guys for money,” musician, Rage Against the Machine member, and activist Tom Morello told The Progressive magazine recently. “I’ve never been a fan of waiting around for some President or Supreme Court panel to wave a magic wand and set things right.”

Progress comes from the bottom up, Morello said, not the top down. William Newton knows this. That’s why he’s “occupying” Memphis and preparing for “the next step.”

Workers around the world are getting "behind the mule" and plowing for social justice

2011-12-11T11:40:00.000-08:00

(To the left is Tom Waits during an interview in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2007. Photo from Theplatypus)

I’m going through a real Tom Waits phase right now. A belated discovery for me, Waits is one of our geniuses. The great storyteller, musician, performer, actor, and man of the times, who has waged holy war against major corporations that tried to appropriate his music for their advertisements, has some good advice for the social movement taking shape in this country and around the world: “You gotta get behind the mule in the morning and plow.”

(Check out Tom Waits' amazing 2008 performance of "Get Behind the Mule" in Atlanta on YouTube. Tried to link it but no luck)

And that’s exactly what a lot of folks are doing, plowing for their rights, whether it’s “Occupy” sites around the country or in Southern towns like Greenville, N.C., home of my alma mater, East Carolina University. An old tobacco town in North Carolina’s poorest region, Greenville is where the lowest of the low-paid, sanitation workers, have taken a stand in their fight for better pay and conditions.

“Just because we pick up garbage doesn’t mean we have to be treated like it,” says nine-year-veteran sanitation worker Harold Barnes in a recent online letter from the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). “We are all grown men, not children, and this is the day we decided we are going to stand up for what we actually believe in.”

Barnes and other sanitation workers began an occupation of their workplace on November 9 that forced the city to sit down and bargain with them. The work action was inspired by training conducted by UE’s Research & Education Fund (UEREF) and its Southern Workers International Justice Campaign (SWIJC).

A key issue for SWIJC and UE is the collective bargaining rights denied public employees in North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.

“The ban on collective bargaining in the public sector has led to the unmistakable prevalence of widespread race and sex discrimination in the workplace … as well as racial and sexual harassment,” proclaimed the International Labor Organization of the United Nations in 2007.

In Greenville, according to the UE letter, SWIJC “helped the workers connect with community allies and city council members, organize themselves democratically and talk with the media. Their actions forced city management to meet and negotiate over their issues and ensured that no one suffered retaliation despite the fact that strikes by public employees are illegal in North Carolina.”

Despite what writer David A. Love recently called “Bull Connor” tactics by police in various cities to quell the “Occupy” protests, the movement is growing and taking on a deeper resonance. Labor writer David Bacon says the movement is embracing the “planton tradition” of protest in places like Mexico, El Salvador and the Philippines, where workers and strikers are “living at the gates of the factory or enterprise where they work.”

Bacon says “each planton is a visible piece of a movement or organization—a much larger base” that includes “unions, students, farmers, indigenous organizations and other social movements.”

UE is a legendary militant union with a proud tradition, having survived ostracism during the McCarthy era and gone on to be at the forefront today in the building of a truly international labor movement. This year marks the 75th anniversary of UE’s soldiering for social justice.

Truly an international movement is underway. Witness the recent walkout by 7,000 workers at the Yucheng factory near Dongguan in southeastern China. They are protesting the Taiwanese owners’ recent dismissal of 18 section managers, new rules that eliminated worker bonuses, and plans for a possible relocation.

On Nov. 23, 1,000 workers at a Guangdong factory that makes keyboards for Apple and IBM went on strike to protest overtime policies that required workers to work as late as 2 a.m. in addition to their regular shifts. According to China Labor Watch, workers sometimes put in as many as 120 hours overtime a month at the factory. Even so, the factory has managed to avoid paying legally required double (overtime) wages by forbidding the workers to work on Saturdays.

The Economist reported in its Oct. 29 edition that rural migrant workers within China are growing increasingly angry at companies that withhold pay when the companies get short of cash. Even though the government has passed a law forbidding financially viable companies from doing so, “this has done little to protect the more than 150 million rural migrants who perform most of the country’s manual labor,” the magazine reported.

Workers and activists around the world are indeed getting “behind the mule” and plowing hard for their rights these days. Organizations like the UE should be praised for helping these workers see that theirs is a global fight that needs global solidarity.

Occupy Memphis: From lawyers to the homeless, a protest against the plutocracy

2011-12-01T17:42:00.000-08:00

(To the right is the logo for the Occupy Wall Street movement that was created by Kalle Lasn and others. Lasn is a native of Estonia and resident of Canada who edits the magazine Adbusters.)

MEMPHIS - William Newton is a 59-year-old Memphis lawyer whose specialty is mortgage banking, corporate mergers and loan recovery. In the 1960s, he was a right-wing Barry Goldwater supporter and hawk on the Vietnam War who flunked his physical for the military.

Now he's a self-proclaimed "anarchist"--a hot-button term but one that he defines as calling for "no rulers," not "no rules." Newton believes "the political process is completely broken" and "the banks own both parties."

(William Newton)

That's why he is camping out across from City Hall in downtown Memphis as part of the Occupy Memphis protest. Approximately 40 protesters spend every night here. The group swells to as many as 80 on the weekends. When a march is called, their numbers top 120.

"I'm here because I couldn't (otherwise) live with myself," he said on the morning after Thanksgiving day, standing in front of a small village of blue, green and white Occupy Memphis tents near the trolley line on north Main Street.

He pointed to City Hall across the street. "This is a police state we live in. They would treat us like Oakland if they could get away with it."

He referred to the hardline crackdown by police on "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrators in Oakland, Calif., and other cities.

Newton is one of the comparatively small-but-impressive army of "Occupy" protesters who are proving that the spirit of protest is alive and well in the South as well as in New York, Oakland and other cities and regions. "We are seniors, teachers, small business owners, clergy, and union members," proclaims The First Declaration of Occupy Memphis. "We are clerks, firefighters, nurses, police, and immigrants. We are service workers, veterans, entrepreneurs, students, and unemployed, and recipients of Social Security benefits."

They are also the homeless. "This is worldwide," said Donna Crawford, 59, an Arkansas native who has been homeless "off and on" every since her "first divorce" 10 years ago. "All these cutbacks. The ministries are not helping. I worked for them."

Crawford sees the protest in a very personal way. The richest nation in the world offers little to the marginalized, the poor, the ones who fall through the cracks. Homeless "women everywhere have nowhere to go," she said.

(Donna Crawford)

Occupy Memphis, like its counterparts around the country, denounces "the control of our government by the 1%. We the People have a right to govern ourselves; that right has been usurped by corporations, big banks, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and the wealthiest 1% of our population," the First Declaration says. "These elites put profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality."

They're not people who simply need a bath, as Republican presidential contender and former Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich says.

Everything that comes out of Gingrich's mouth requires more than a few grains of salt. This is what he said back in 1995 about workers' compensation: "If you are not at work, why are we paying you? It's not called a vacation fund."

This is the man who has become a top Republican candidate for president. He talks like a man who has never worried about an injury on the job, never worried about doctors' bills. He talks like the 1 percent.

Who is more real in our world today? William Newton and Donna Crawford, or Newt Gingrich?

The time has come, as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, to "begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

Dimming the lights: The Republican Takeover in Mississippi

2011-11-23T07:51:00.000-08:00

(To the left is an 1892 campaign poster of the People's Party, also known as the Populists, promoting James Weaver for president)

OXFORD, Miss. - It was late at night, and my relatives were tired after their seven-hour journey from Pensacola, Fla. Within minutes came the inevitable comment.

“It sure is dark in Mississippi,” one of them said, repeating an observation I’ve heard many times. “Between Jackson and Oxford is the wilderness.”

Just wait until your next visit up here, I told them. “It’s about to get a lot darker in Mississippi.”

Anyone disagree? With the Nov. 8 Republican takeover of the state House and now its Republican-controlled Legislature, Republican governor, Republicans in every statewide office except attorney general, Mississippi is all prepped to dim the lights even more, not make them brighter.

Better roads and highways? Not on this watch. Better public transportation? Education? Health care? Mental health services? Social services? Are you kidding?

It’s going to be Tea Party heaven down here? People finally get to see what it will be like in a Tea Party world. The lion-tamers are in the cage now, and the big, bad, ugly beast known as GOVERNMENT is cowering in his corner.

“They have been tasting this blood for many years,” says state Rep. Steven Holland, the Plantersville Democrat, outspoken populist, and perennial thorn-in-the-side to right-wingers before their Nov. 8 ascendancy. “You are going to see `personhood’ through statute. You’ll see an immigration bill, Alabama style, come through. English will be the official language. Drug testing for welfare recipients. It is going to be fairly bizarre.”

Holland’s own party, of course, is in shambles--divided by race and the fact that many white state Democrats hardly remember what their party even stands for. Like Ole Miss football, the party is about as far down as the saddest blues song to ever come out of the Delta. Much the same can be said for the Democratic Party elsewhere in the Deep South.

“Over 29 years, I have watched the slow destruction of the (Mississippi) Democratic Party. We have been so outfoxed with technology and money and organization. Eight years of (outgoing Republican Governor Haley) Barbour has left me completely bruised.”

Old-style populism like Holland’s, one that calls for a progressive, people-serving government and casts a distrustful eye at fat-cat Wall Street types who serve their wallets and nothing else, seems ready for that funeral home Holland runs when he’s not legislating. “If it gets bad enough, education so assaulted, public transportation so assaulted, this `big, ole, fat government,’ I can imagine the people who have now voted against their own interests in the last two elections will rise up and revolt,” Holland says.

Hmmm. Maybe. The “revolt of the rednecks” that barnstormers Bilbo and Vardaman led a century ago indeed expanded education, state health services, and state regulations against child labor and other corporate abuses, but the revolt came on the backs of black people. Modern-day racial demagoguery tends to go after brown rather than black, and state Republicans have largely cornered that market.

It’s not that Republicans simply won’t spend taxpayer money. The reason has to be right.

As Holland predicts, the new Republican Legislature is poised to take up the “personhood” initiative that voters rejected Nov. 8 as well as an Alabama-style immigration law, both of which will likely involve costly legal battles in court and ultimately result in rejection and failure.

Haley Barbour was quick to call for cuts in Medicaid and other social programs, yet he always seemed to find the cash for big incentives packages to pay out to private corporations looking at Mississippi.

In fact, while we’re at it, what does Barbour, a man held in Reagan-like awe by many conservatives in Mississippi, have to show for his eight years as governor? Mississippi remains the nation’s poorest state. It ranks 51st in teenage births, 51st in percentage of homes struggling with hunger, 49th in child poverty, 47th in high school graduation rates.

What did he do to change any of this?

I’ll be asking Mississippi’s new Republican leadership the same question four years from now, even though I already know the answer.

The battle goes on for Ikea workers in Danville, and the world is watching

2011-11-17T09:31:00.000-08:00

(To the right is Ikea founder and former Nazi sympathizer Ingvar Kamprad)

Workers at the Ikea-owned Swedwood plant in Danville, Va., are still struggling for their rights against union-hostile supervisors despite workers’ 221-69 vote last July to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM).

“Supervisors are targeting union supporters for discipline, violating workers’ rights to be represented by stewards, threatening and intimidating pro union workers, and making numerous unilateral changes which by the law must be bargained,” writes IAM official William V. Street Jr. in the latest issue of the London-based International Union Rights magazine.

The July vote was heralded as a major and rare victory for labor organizers in the U.S. South, a region whose business and political leaders have fought against labor rights since before the Civil War. The vote came after workers complained of stretch-out-like conditions on the assembly line that evoked images of 1930s textile companies, mandatory and unpaid overtime, eliminated raises, and racial prejudice. “In many ways, work conditions more akin to Dickens than Keynes,” writes Street, director of IAM’s Woodworkers’ Department.

In addition, workers in Danville were paid considerably less than Ikea workers in Sweden, whose minimum wage is $19 an hour with five weeks of paid vacation. Ikea workers in Danville start at $8 an hour and get 12 vacation days. In the fall of 2010, packing department workers saw their wages drop from $9.75 an hour to $8 an hour. This came despite a 6 percent-plus hike in company profits in 2010 and a $12 million incentives package from local and state governments to get Ikea to locate in Danville. The median wage in Danville is more than $15 an hour.

Ikea calls itself a Swedish company but “is actually chartered in The Netherlands while controlled by a family trust in Luxemburg,” Street writes. It was founded in 1947 by former Nazi sympathizer Ingvar Kamprad, one of the world’s richest men whose personal wealth is estimated to be anywhere from $6 billion to many times that much.

When an organizing effort started in Danville, the company hired the union-busting Jackson Lewis law firm to help keep the union out.

All of this proved an embarrassment to a company that had touted its code of conduct recognizing workers’ rights to join a union.

It also inspired an international effort to support the Danville workers. IAM ran a sophisticated campaign that put the spotlight on Ikea back in Sweden, prompting extensive coverage in the Swedish media and producing countless phone calls and emails and picket lines as far away as Australia.

“The capacity of the IAM and the need to educate both EU (European Union) affiliates and US citizens as to the backward nature of US labour law all were part of the decision making process,” Street writes. “In the US, this discussion was characterized as the US becoming Sweden’s Mexico, meaning a place for global business to exploit lax laws in order to exploit both workers and the environment.”

Meanwhile, however, the battle goes on at the Danville plant. “The media has left, the story is over,” Street laments.

However, IAM is fighting back, and so is the international labor community, which sees the Danville situation as part of a bigger picture of neo-liberal economic policies being pushed globally by the United States and organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. These policies are hostile to unions as they push to increase corporate profits and work to inhibit government oversight. “Swedish union leaders are planning to visit Danville to see the fight for social justice first hand,” Street says, adding that university-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the U.S. are also planning boycotts if workers’ rights continue to be abused in Danville.

Ikea is a classic example of a modern-day “hollow” corporation that attempts to evade labor and environmental standards through the use of wholly owned subsidiaries like Swedwood and supplier companies, Street says.

A “hollow” company works something like this: It publicly pressures its subsidiaries and suppliers to be good corporate citizens and meet acceptable standards, but when they do, it proceeds to squeeze those same operations to lower their costs to the very minimum, ultimately forcing wages down and hurting working conditions.

It’s the same kind of hypocrisy Walmart has engaged in for years. Once again, the South is in the middle of a battle that stretches around the globe.

Writers who've stood up to the "Grindles" of the world

2011-11-06T17:41:00.000-08:00

(To the left is Nelson Algren)

When the inspiration’s getting low, I usually don’t have far to look before I find it. It’s right there on the bookshelves in my office at home. I just round up the usual suspects, and there they are, words on paper, in the books that have been milestones in my life, written by the writers I’d admired most, the ones who cut through the fog the best and got to the hard, cold stone of reality that each of us faces in his or her own way.

At or near the top of the list is Nelson Algren, the great Detroit-born Chicago writer who has never gotten his due from the American literati, but, hey, who’s surprised by that? As with many writers I admire, it’s not his best-known novel that really struck me to the core. It’s one of the others. In this case, Never Come Morning, Algren’s 1942 novel about the Polish ghetto in Chicago, the neighborhood around Milwaukee Avenue and West Division Street, where the evil Bonifacy Konstantine ran his Tonsorial Palace of Art & Barber Shop.

The book is full of lines where Algren just nails it. I’ll pick one: “The lower the wage the greater the morality demanded of you off the job.” We got echoes of that 60 years later when Barbara Ehrenreich went to work waiting tables, cleaning rooms, and sorting clothes at Walmart in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. If blue-collar workers aren’t getting tested for drugs, they’re taking tests to make sure they’re not trouble-makers. “You weed out all the rebels with drug tests and personality `surveys’” and get “a uniformly servile and denatured workforce, content to dream of the distant day when they’ll be vested in the company’s profit-sharing plan.”

Jack London was one of the writers who inspired me to take up the profession. This was way back when I was fourteen years old. The former oyster pirate, gold prospector, and tramp whose philosophy was a curious mix of socialism and Nietzschean individualism wrote like a fiend during his brief 40 years, and the writing holds up well even a century later. My favorite was not his dog stories but The Sea-Wolf, a great adventure tale that pits the brutal Captain Wolf Larsen against the effete intellectual Humphrey Van Weyden.

(Below is a 1905 photograph of Jack London)

Here’s Larsen’s contemptuous assessment of Van Weyden’s soft life before he came aboard the captain’s ship, Ghost: “You have slept in soft beds, and worn fine clothes, and eaten good meals. Who made those beds? And those clothes? And those meals? Not you. You never made anything in your own sweat. You live on an income which your father earned. You are like a frigate bird swooping down upon the boobies and robbing them of the fish they have caught.”

Would make a nice poster for “Occupy Wall Street”, wouldn’t it? London wrote it more than a century ago, and it still resonates today.

Want to read some real anger at the “frigate birds” on Wall Street and in the corporate executive offices? Read William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, a 1946 classic of the hard-boiled genre that was made into a film noir classic movie. The novel is a phatasmagoric, hallucinatory trip via literature through the world of carnivals, séances, and mentalism that nevertheless never loses sight of the naked-eyed greed at the dark heart of unhinged capitalism. Embodying that dark heart is Grindle, a name worthy of Charles Dickens and with the same rank arrogance and heartlessness of Mr. Bounderby in Dickens' Hard Times.

(To the right is Charles Dickens)

While we’re at it, let’s take a look at Dickens. Here’s Mr. Bounderby talking about the workers—the “Hands” in his words--in Coketown, an industrial city not unlike Algren’s Chicago: “There’s not a Hand in this town, Sir, man, woman, or child, but has one ultimate object in life. That object is to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon. Now, they’re not a--going—none of them—ever to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon.”

How many Wall Street executives in the privacy of their sanctuaries high in the sky have said much the same? Wouldn’t we like to know?

I could go on and on. I’ve done this before as you early readers of this blog recall. I’ve written about Hammett, Cain, Thompson, Woolrich, and the other hardboiled writers who stood side-by-side with the working class, and produced great literature in the process. Lots of males here, but I've also paid homage to female writers who stand shoulder to shoulder with every one of them, none moreso than Dorothy Day.

They're all inspiring, and their words are still with us even if they aren't, and we don't need to forget them.

Writers and protest

2011-11-04T14:13:00.000-07:00

Just a quick notice about an upcoming posting that will be another of my occasional reports on "writers and protest" and how our best wordsmiths still can give us inspiration to fight the good fight in society today.

I've been re-reading some old favorites this fall season--Nelson Algren, Jack London, Dorothy Day--and I'm struck by how much their writing still resonates and still says important things about mankind and, more specifically, the struggle of those who get the raw end of the deal to make themselves heard in the U.S. and beyond.

These are heady times. The Greek prime minister is castigated for attempting to insert democracy into the nation's financial crisis and to put to a popular vote the latest "austerity" deal European and U.S. bankers want to impose on the people. It's a neo-liberal mantra that draconian cuts are better than tax hikes in offsetting debt. In some ways, it's a Tea Party-Gone-Global philosophy, and the Greek people have rightly protested in the streets to have some say-so in the matter.

Here in the states, voters in Boulder, Colo., joined citizens in Madison and Dane County, Wisconsin, by supporting a bid to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens' United ruling through a constitutional amendment. If our politicians are too scared to take it on, then let the people have their say!

"Occupy Wall Street" protesters are continuing to refocus the national dialogue despite arrests and police harassment from Nashville, Tenn., to Oakland, Calif., and more power to them!

"Behind Business's billboards and Business's headlines and Business's pulpits and Business's press, and Business's arsenals, behind the car ads and the subtitles and the commercials, the people of Dickens yet endure," novelist Nelson Algren once wrote.

Jack London wrote a weekly column on the labor movement, Jim Thompson was a former Wobbly, and James Cain worked as a reporter covering the plight of mine workers in West Virginia. They all saw then what we're seeing today.

Stay tuned as I take a fresh look at these writers and see what they have to tell us.

Money rules, and that's why we should "Occupy Wall Street"

2011-10-27T07:23:00.000-07:00

(To the left is Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour)

Haley Barbour, the stalwart Republican and former Washington lobbyist who is now ending his second term as Mississippi’s governor, has no problems with the big money now pouring into political campaigns.

“Money is speech in American politics,” Barbour told a crowded auditorium at the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics at Ole Miss recently. “What we need are unlimited contributions that are transparent and made public in real time.”

Furthermore, big money is the best weapon conservative Republicans have against the manpower labor unions can put into an election on behalf of Democrats. Labor unions were able to put 10,000 volunteers on the streets during an election in Cook County, Illinois, last year, the governor said. “Their political strength was manpower.”

In other words, deep pockets versus people.

The governor is a smart politician. He knows the ways of politics today. It’s a system he helped put in place during his days as a Republican operative and then a well-heeled lobbyist in the nation’s capital.

In that system, money is everything. Politicians spend the lion’s share of their time begging for it, and then when they get it, they spend the rest of their time serving those who gave it to them. It not only buys air time for political ads, it buys entire television networks like Fox News and radio programs like Mississippi Super Talk Radio, where the corporate agenda is pushed onto people whether they want it or not.

“Wealth is virtue,” says the gangster Vautrin in Honoré de Balzac’s novel about greed, Père Goriot. That’s the philosophy today for the 1 percent that essentially rules this nation, and that’s why protesters have gathered in Zuccotti Park—renamed Liberty Square--in New York to “Occupy Wall Street” and why protesters from Jackson to Memphis to Madrid have joined them. What about the other 99 percent?

“Those who worship money believe their buckets of cash, like the $4.6 million J.P. Morgan Chase gave last week to the New York Police Foundation, can buy them perpetual power and security,” author Chris Hedges wrote in The Occupied Wall Street Journal, the newspaper of the protesters in New York. “Masters all, kneeling before the idols of the marketplace, blinded by their self-importance, impervious to human suffering, bloated from unchecked greed and privilege.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, allowing an unlimited corporate cash flow into campaign coffers, has emboldened the hard-line right-wing billionaires Charles and David Koch to invest millions in the America they want to create, financing shadowy political organizations, think tanks, and politicians like Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain, who wants to give more tax breaks to corporations while raising the sales tax on average Americans.

The Koch brothers are major supporters of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization that writer Mark Pocan calls “a dating service” that matches “legislators and special interests, culminates with the birth of special interest legislation, and ends happily ever after.” ALEC’s corporate friends include Walmart, British Petroleum, Chevron, State Farm, and, of course, Koch Industries, Inc.

ALEC tries to do on the state level when the Koch brothers are doing on the national level. Aiding them are political bosses like Art Pope of North Carolina, the multi-millionaire C.E.O. of Variety Wholesales whose deep-pocketed political machine helped Republicans win 18 of 22 legislative races and take over the General Assembly in North Carolina in 2010. One of Pope’s key targets is higher education in North Carolina, which he feels is too dependent on state funds and too populated by liberals. His goals also include embedding pro-corporate courses championing conservative writers like Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek in university curriculums.

To check out the good investigative work that the North Carolina-based Institute for Southern Studies is doing on Pope, who also has played a role in Herman Cain’s rise to prominence, go to http://www.artpopeexposed.com.

In view of Pope’s activism in North Carolina, the actions of the so-called “Forward Rebels” group in Mississippi bear watching. The group is talking football now, using newspaper ads to blame the University of Mississippi football team’s losses on the Ole Miss administration, but its chief media officer, Lee Habeeb, is a conservative radio talk show boss who recently spoke at a Tea Party rally in Oxford. What is its ultimate agenda? Some believe it's to make Ole Miss a conservative think tank where right-wingers like the Koch brothers and Art Pope can come and be treated like royalty.

Only time—and maybe money—will tell.

A '60s protester rejoices at "Occupy Wall Street"

2011-10-18T18:27:00.000-07:00

I was a student protester in the late ’60s. My small cell of anti-war activists lived and breathed protest. It began in the last days of the civil rights movement—sit-ins, getting taunted, spit on, and threatened by football players and frat guys—but quickly shifted to the Vietnam War. The war was never-ending and the death toll was on the evening news every day.

“Why Are We In Vietnam?” Norman Mailer asked, and he provided the answer. It was our pride, our short-sightedness, our blindness to the greedy among us, our macho, parochial view of the world that saw or cared only for America—and America was these United States, not that Spanish-speaking part or Canada.

I was a student at East Carolina University, a school in North Carolina's poorest and blackest region, not the much-lauded (and certainly very fine) University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, North Carolina State, or Duke, but the “other” school, the one that had to clamor and claw its way through a state General Assembly full of Chapel Hill-trained lawyers to attain its university status in 1967. So protest was in the air at ECU in the late 1960s. Not that everyone liked shaggy-haired anti-war protesters, some of whom stunk suspiciously of cannabis, and other sign-carriers who were either art or philosophy majors, and, well, just weird anyway.

It was intense, too intense, with lots of burn-out potential. We devoured Soul on Ice, The Wretched of the Earth, and I.F. Stone, talked "movement" endlessly over pitchers of beer at the Rathskeller, planned and plotted the “revolution” that would change this country from a take-from-the-poor-and-give-to-the-rich war monger to something closer to what Jefferson envisioned. Despite protests, marches and sit-ins, however, the war wore on until its final, inglorious end. Before it was over, I was even drafted and sent to Vietnam myself—Canada was not an option—and when I got there, I found a whole new set of buddies who survived, like me, by simply accepting as best they could the theater of the absurd we had all entered.

So how wonderful and gratifying is it to this old ‘60s protester that the “Occupy Wall Street” protest has now spread from New York to across the nation and world? What do you think? Even the old, conservative South so scrutinized in this blog has joined in! From Raleigh, Memphis, and Shreveport to Jackson, Miss., and McAllen, Texas, Southerners are adding their voices to the chorus of protest against the plutocracy that has entrenched itself in this nation, corrupting and compromising Democrats as well as Republicans to the point that it is Wall Street that is served in today’s economy, not the 99 percent of the rest of us.

The glory of this protest is that labor unions are now marching side by side with students, professors, activists, and just plain folks who’ve had enough of give-to-the-rich politics. That’s what was sorely missing in the late ‘60s. Let’s hope Barack Obama is listening. I hope and think he is, but my friends will tell you I’m the last optimist in the room.

I haven’t marched yet in this protest, but I’ve contributed monetarily and spiritually, and I plan to march just as soon as I can. Can’t find those old protest signs anymore, but that’s all right. It’s a new day, even if it’s, in its heart of hearts, the same protest.

More cutbacks in legal services for the poor in the nation's poorest state

2011-10-13T08:44:00.000-07:00

(To the right is Nancy Jones, one of many poor north Mississippians who've depended on North Mississippi Rural Legal Services for legal aid.)

Two years after the North Mississippi Rural Legal Services laid off workers, slashed wages up to 19 percent, and eliminated needed programs for the poor, the agency is now shutting down its office in the region's largest city and eliminating a unit that handles public benefits issues.

"The struggle for legal services in North Mississippi goes on," said Elaine Lantz, regional organizer with the National Organization of Legal Services/UAW Local 2320. The union represents workers at the agency.

The agency covers 39 counties across northern Mississippi and helps clients with food stamps, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, evictions, and other needs. Dependent on federal and state grants and other funding, it has faced budgetary cutbacks now for years, resulting in decisions two years ago to eliminate a unit that helped those facing eviction from their homes and to transfer half its small staff of lawyers off courtroom duty and onto full-time "hotline" telephone duty.

With the budget crunch still continuing to deepen, the NMRLS board this week decided to shut down its Tupelo, Miss., office--which served 10 counties--and relocate its services to the agency's office in Oxford, Miss. "Cuts necessitated that one office must be closed," NMRLS executive director Ben Cole told the Oxford Eagle in Oxford. "The overall effect this will have on legal aid services is not yet known, but it is going to directly impact clients in the Tupelo area."

With the closure of the office in Tupelo--north Mississippi's largest city--the NMRLS will have four remaining offices across the region, including the Oxford office.

Lantz said "one thing that is very bothersome" is that the board of directors is currently raising "outside" non-program money to build a new building for its offices in Oxford. "In a time when funds for legal services are shrinking, it does not make sense to spend time raising money for a new building. Any fund raising efforts should go toward maintaining client services."

In a public hearing on NMRLS cutbacks in August 2009, Nancy Jones, then 54, a mother of three and grandmother of six, said legal services helped get her unemployment checks restored and eliminate a $4,100 fine imposed on her by the state because she had unknowingly failed to meet a requirement that she re-register with a temp service after a series of layoffs from several jobs.

"We were out in the street, looking for a job, unemployed for eight months," Jones said. "I was already poor. A lot of us out there don't have no job, no money. I know I didn't have money to pay for an attorney. ... I don't know what I would've done."

At that same hearing, veteran paralegal Henry Boyd warned, "You've got the wolves out there waiting for the NMRLS to go down. Who's going to serve these people? Let's don't cut our help to poor folks."

Occupy Wall Street protest spreads to the South, ex-Schnucks workers get the shaft, Avondale closing worries New Orleans residents, Alabama bans "incendiary" book in prison

2011-10-06T08:54:00.000-07:00

It's time for another Labor South roundup:

Occupy the South

The ongoing Occupy Wall Street protest in New York is spreading across the country, including the South. Activists in Memphis, Raleigh, and other Southern cities are organizing similar protests to represent the "99 percent" of the population not raking in the dough over the past several years.

In Memphis, according to a draft statement by the protesters, "workers, students, the unemployed and those on Social Security benefits"--in other words, those who are not part of the 1 percent of the nation's population that has accumulated billions as a result of America's top-down economy--will stage a protest in the city's Overton Park and join what has the potential to become a massive national movement similar to what has taken place in the Middle East over the past year.

These are people who "have not benefited from the various financial bailouts, tax breaks and other subsidies that the dominant 1 percent of the population has gained over the past years," the statement says.

In New York, police arrested some 700 protesters on Brooklyn Bridge last weekend. Mainstream media has resisted giving the protest any coverage, but it has now grown large enough and spread far enough that they can no longer ignore it.

Major labor unions have now joined the protest, providing an element that was missing in the protests of the late 1960s. Perhaps now, after four decades, students, activists and blue-collar workers can finally join together to take their stand against the plutocracy that has taken over this country.

Shafted by Schnucks

The St. Louis-based Schnucks grocery chain gave only an eight-day notice to its more than 1,000 employees in Memphis that it was selling nine stores to Kroger and closing three stores in the area.

Featured in a recent posting in this blog, Schnucks strongly resisted unionization in Memphis, and now its former workers can see how a union might have protected them from the treatment they got.

Federal regulations require a 60-day notice but waive it for companies that provide 60 days of pay and benefits instead. Schnucks employees told the Memphis Commercial Appeal, however, that company officials said they won't get the pay and benefits. The federal rules include loopholes--such as exceptions for work sites with less than 50 employees--that Schnucks may try to crawl through.

Employees said they worked hard for the company, chipping in to help it make its pledge to United Way. Now they feel discarded and disrespected.

One bright side, however, is that Kroger is unionized, and Schnucks workers who manage to land a job at one of that company's stores will find themselves better protected in the future.

Avondale blues

Plans by Huntington Ingalls Industries, formerly known as Northrop Grumman, to shut down the onetime 5,000-worker Avondale Shipyards in New Orleans are going to have a profound effect on housing values and the economy in the neighborhoods around the shipyard, residents say.

According to the AFLCIO Now blog, a recent survey showed 90 percent of area residents believe the closing could drop housing values more than 20 percent. The workforce at the shipyard has dropped from 5,000 to 3,000 as the company moves toward shutting it down. It's the kind of blow that still-fragile, post-Katrina New Orleans doesn't need.

A dangerous book in Alabama

Convicted murderer Mark Melvin, serving his 19th year in an Alabama prison for two murders he helped commit at age 14, has been denied his request for a copy of the book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon.

According to the New York Times, Melvin claims officials at Kilby Correctional Facility near Montgomery, Ala., told him the book was "too incendiary" and "too provocative" for him to possess it.

The book, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009, deals with the notorious convict leasing system--also discussed earlier in this blog--that spread across the South after the Civil War and which allowed plantation owners once again to take advantage of free black labor.

Melvin has filed a lawsuit on the matter. He was released on parole in 2008 but then returned to prison due to what the Times called, quoting his lawyer, "a technical violation."

The story of a labor town in the Deep South and the sheriff who stood up for workers

2011-09-26T17:04:00.000-07:00

(To the left is a photograph of a mural just off Main Street in downtown Water Valley depicting the town's colorful railroad history)

WATER VALLEY, Miss. – The odds against the striking workers at Rice-Stix Dry Goods Co. seemed overwhelming.

Aligned against them were the company, the town’s business leaders, its banks, the local newspaper, the courts, even the governor of Mississippi who had called out the National Guard. Only one store in Water Valley would even do business with the strikers.

It was October 1952, and Mississippi “was not a great place to be on strike,” Rice-Stix worker Nellie McCulley told ACTWU Voices, the publication of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union.

But she and the 650 other workers at Rice-Stix’s plants in Water Valley and Farmington, Mo., had had enough of sub-minimal wages and disrespect. “The pay was low,” McCulley said. “But it was the unfairness the company carried out that really made people mad. They had a good time playing favorites with their kin or friends.”

Then came an unlikely ally: Yalobusha County Sheriff Floyd Farmer. When Gov. Hugh White’s National Guardsmen unsheathed their bayonets and began arresting workers willy-nilly, Farmer told his deputy to release them. The strikers were hard-working neighbors, not criminals.

“As soon as they locked them up, my daddy was letting them out the back door,” recalls Water Valley native and veteran labor organizer Danny Forsyth, whose father was Sheriff Farmer’s deputy. “The sheriff almost got impeached. They had an impeachment hearing … at the old gymnasium. (People) filled that gymnasium full. There like to have been a riot. They were not able to impeach him. It wouldn’t have been legal anyway.”

After six weeks, the workers, singing the old union song and later civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome on the picket line, won their strike.

The story of Sheriff Farmer and the Rice-Stix workers is one of many labor union tales in this former railroad town of roughly 4,000 in north Mississippi.

Another chapter in that history was written this August with the 80-to-28 vote by workers at Water Valley Poultry to join the United Food & Commercial Workers Union. The former Mott’s Conagra-Blue Coach Foods plant had been union-represented before it shut down in 2003. “Hopefully we can go ahead and try to get a contract with the company,” UFCW organizer Rose Turner said. “That’s what we’re looking forward to.”

Efforts to get comment from company officials were unsuccessful, but Turner said she expects a struggle ahead over a contract. “I know they are going to fight us.”

Water Valley’s history with labor unions goes back to legendary 19th-century railroad engineer Casey Jones, who once lived in Water Valley and who held dual membership in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. Jones, subject of song and legend after his death in a train accident in Vaughn, Miss., in 1900, was even master of his brotherhood’s Water Valley Lodge.

“They had a good reason back then to have a union,” said 84-year-old Jack Gurner Sr., who oversees the Casey Jones Museum in Water Valley. “The railroad company was quick to fire a man if he made a mistake, and the union would make them hire him back.”

The other side of Water Valley’s labor tradition, however, is entrenched opposition to unions, even from folks like Jack Gurner Sr. “As far as I’m concerned, all the union wants is dues. If an individual has a problem, it is his problem.”

The labor tradition is woven into Water Valley’s culture and history in complex ways. Blue-collar workers at Rice-Stix, Big Yank clothing, Mott’s and now Water Valley Poultry have voted again and again to join a union. “They see the difference … in working in a union plant and in a non-union plant,” Rose Turner said.

When Water Valley was struck by a devastating tornado in April 1984, ACTWU donated $10,000 to a disaster relief fund and collected contributions from union locals around the country. The Red Cross’ 12-county relief effort was headquartered in ACTWU’s union hall in Water Valley.

Yet something Nellie McCulley said decades ago still rings true today. “Unions in Mississippi are still having a hard time. I’ve learned that everyone has to work just as hard now to get the union organized as the way they did before.”

Unionized Kroger buys nonunion Schnucks stores in Memphis; Louisiana business leaders fight against higher wages for migrant workers

2011-09-20T10:48:00.000-07:00

Goodbye to nonunion Schnucks grocery stores in Memphis

The ubiquitous Rose Turner, organizing director for Local 1529 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, was on the streets of Memphis talking to grocery store workers when I called her a few days ago.

Kroger's Delta Division was in the process of taking over nine Memphis-area Schnucks supermarkets. Kroger had announced its purchase of the stores from one of its major competitors earlier in the month.

Kroger workers are unionized, and the St. Louis-based Schnucks had resisted unionization ever since it came to Memphis 10 years ago. According to the Memphis Daily News, Schnucks' 13 percent of the area market will add to Kroger's 30 percent market share.

Schnucks' 1,200 workers in Memphis will have to reapply to Kroger's to keep their jobs. Several Schnucks stores in the area will close as a result of the deal.

"Schnucks was union in St. Louis, then they tried to be nonunion" in Memphis, Turner said. "We tried to organize them when they first came here. They said, `We are going to close if we go union.'"

(To the left is UFCW organizer Rose Turner)

Well, they closed anyway after 10 years, and a union-represented company bought them out, Turner said.

Turner is fresh from a successful organizing campaign at Water Valley Poultry in Water Valley, Miss., and she also is a key organizer of catfish plant workers in the Mississippi Delta.

Louisiana business coalition files suit to keep from paying migrant workers better wages

Federal rules requiring wage increases of up to 83 percent for migrant workers with H-2B visas have prompted a protest from Louisiana business interests, including sugar cane and seafood processors, amusement park operators and hotel owners.

Earlier this month, the business coalition filed a federal lawsuit in Alexandria to keep the rules from being implemented, according to the Associated Press. The business coalition argues that the rules put its members at a competitive disadvantage, and they will not be able to pay the higher wages.

The rules are scheduled to take effect Sept. 30. A hearing on the lawsuit is scheduled for Sept. 23.

Dorothy Day, radical conscience of America, lives on in All Is Grace

2011-09-13T09:00:00.000-07:00

(To the left is a photograph of Dorothy Day in 1934.)

I didn’t waste much time when I learned that a new biography of Dorothy Day had been published. I had to order it, of course, since books by or about Day seem never to find themselves to the shelves of your local corner bookstore.

At last it arrived, All Is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day, by Jim Forest, published by Orbis Books, and even though I’ve read and studied her life many times, I’ve now learned that there was so much I didn’t know about this enigma in American literature and social consciousness.

Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, social activist, newspaper editor and writer, author of the classic autobiography The Long Loneliness, and resurrectionist of the grand-but-almost-forgotten tradition of Catholic social teaching, is a haunting, even troubling figure in modern-day America.

Few have stood farther to the Left on many social issues—from labor rights to civil rights—or bore as many bona fide credentials—from her jailing as a card-carrying IWW Wobbly during the original Red Scare at the end of World War I to marches with United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez and with civil rights leaders in the segregated South in the 1960s.

Yet her Christian faith was unwavering, a faith that embodied both a clear-eyed look at the cold realities of this earthly life and a mystical union with the crucified Son of Man and the church he entrusted to his disciple Peter.

Forest, an old hand at the Catholic Worker and friend of Day, captures this dichotomy well. I’ll make a confession here: I’ve not yet completed the book. I plan to read it slowly, too slowly to wait before offering this review. However, I’ve read enough to know that it provides a new, in-depth look at Dorothy Day, filling in many gaps with wonderful details about her life and her views. Yet perhaps what I love best about it are the photographs.

The photographs are wonderful—from the book’s cover photo by Bob Fitch showing her busy at her typewriter in a cluttered room with her beloved books lining the shelves behind her to the closing photographs of her funeral procession through the streets of New York in 1980.

The story of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker is familiar to many, but it’s still a fascinating one. The daughter of an itinerant sportswriter, Day saw poverty and the marginalized up close and personal at an early age. A radical and a rebel from her last days in high school and first days at the University of Illinois, she dropped out of school and launched her writing career with socialist publications like The Call. She had a lover, became pregnant, had an abortion, lived the bohemian life in New Orleans and later Provincetown, befriending playwright Eugene O’Neill, and taking in a common-law husband who was an atheist. Pregnant again, she vowed she would have this child, and the religious impulses that she had long resisted became too strong to ignore.

An Episcopalian by birth, she found herself drawn to the Catholic Church and had her daughter Tamar baptized in it. She and her common-law husband parted. Later in New York she met the vagabond French poet and philosopher Peter Maurin, who with her co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement at the beginning of the Great Depression and the Catholic Worker newspaper that was at the movement’s heart. They and a long line of volunteers who would eventually include such folks as The Other America author Michael Harrington fed and sheltered the poor and jobless in the movement’s “houses of hospitality” while growing their own food at communal farms outside New York and elsewhere. Meanwhile, they put out a newspaper that hit hard at the issues of the day while searching the issues of the soul as well.

Day, whose father came from Tennessee, kept an eye on the South even as she wrote about urban life in New York. The first issue of The Catholic Worker (cost: 1 cent per edition, 25 cents per year’s subscription—still true today) in May 1933 dealt with the treatment of black labor on the river levees in the South. The newspaper’s third issue focused on child labor and the Carolina textile mill strikes.

In 1936 Day traveled to Memphis to get a first-hand look at the Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union and its struggles to improve workers’ lives in the area. “During that trip I saw men, women, and children herded into little churches and wayside stations, camped out in tents, their household goods heaped about them, not one settlement but many—farmers with no land to farm, housewives with no homes. I saw children ill, one old man dead in bed and not yet buried, mothers weeping with hunger and cold. I saw bullet holes in the frame churches, and their benches and pulpits smashed up and windows broken. Men had been kidnapped and beaten; men had been shot and wounded. The month after I left, one of the organizers was killed by a member of a masked band of vigilantes who were fighting the Tenant Farmers’ Union.”

Such was Day’s evocative writing, a pared-down, even simple style yet one brimming with compassion and righteous indignation against social injustice.

Day was an activist as well as a journalist. As a result of that Memphis trip, she telegrammed a plea for help to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who in turn contacted Tennessee’s governor. The governor was unmoved, and so was the Memphis Commercial Appeal, which editorialized against outsiders like Day “who came to criticize.”

My hope is this new biography will help excite further new interest in Day. A movement is already underway to have her declared a saint, something she likely she would have opposed. Her life is a testament to the validity and strength of Catholic social teaching, a tradition ignored and nearly forgotten until recently.

The phenomenon of once-staunchly Democrat Catholics, all of them immigrants or descendants of immigrants, many of them once poor, siding with the Republican Party in recent decades is, as the late and fiery Catholic labor priest Monsignor Charles Owen Rice of Pittsburgh once lamented, “another cross in my old age.”

This writer recalls attending the annual meeting of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists here in Oxford, Miss., in October 2009, and hearing one speaker attempt to brand even fascism and Nazism as sins of the Left, not the Right.

In a Labor Day speech this month, however, the head of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, Bishop Stephen Blaire of Stockdon, Calif., praised labor unions and pointed to Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 and subsequent papal encyclicals and statements as unassailable proof of the Church’s deep commitment to the right of workers everywhere to unite and to be treated justly as workers and human beings regardless of claims against them by capital.

Dorothy would approve.

Labor South's Labor Day Round-Up: Poultry workers in Miss. say "Yes!", Walmart fires striking workers in Chile, Puerto Rican students strike against tuition hike, Roosevelt-era firebrand Kennedy dies, Ala. bests Arizona in immigrant hunt, and Ikea founder's Nazi skeleton rattles in closet

2011-09-05T10:57:00.000-07:00

(To the right is UFCW organizer Rose Turner)

Poultry workers in Mississippi vote union

Workers at Water Valley Poultry in Water Valley, Miss., recently voted overwhelmingly to join United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1529.

The vote was 80 for the union and 28 against at the 150-worker plant, said Rose Turner, organizing director for UFCW Local 1529. "Hopefully we can go ahead and try to get a contract with the company," Turner said. "That's what we are looking forward to."

The plant was unionized before it shut down in 2003. Campaigning for union representation began after it reopened. "In two weeks we had over 75 cards signed," Turner said.

Contract negotiations may still be a battle, she said. The company is owned by Global Foods in Fresno, Calif. "I know they are going to fight us," she said. "I just want to go ahead and get a contract they can live with."

The plant is located in rural northeast Mississippi. The little town of Water Valley, population approximately 4,000, has a long history of unionization that goes back to the days of railroad legend Casey Jones, a member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers who died trying to save his passengers in a train accident in Vaughn, Miss., in April 1900.

(To the left is a photograph of legendary train engineer Casey Jones, 1864-1900)

IWW balladeer Joe Hill put a twist on the legend with his song "Casey Jones--the Union Scab" in 1912. By all accounts that this author has found, however, the real Casey Jones was a loyal union man.

Walmart fires workers in Chile for joining general strike

Twenty-two Walmart workers in Chile have lost their jobs because they participated in a general strike by workers across the country protesting changes in labor legislation, social security, tax reform, and education and health policies.

Arkansas-based Walmart was the only company in Chile to fire workers because of their participation in the protest. The company, virulently anti-union at its U.S. stores, has union agreements at stores in other countries.

Students and professors in Puerto Rico protest tuition hikes and ongoing privatization efforts in public education

Off the radar for most mainstream media in this country is the ongoing crisis in higher education in Puerto Rico, where students have been beaten and arrested, professors threatened with firings, and the largest of the University of Puerto Rico's campuses, Rio Piedras, shut down after massive student protests.

Thousands of students agreed to strike rather than accept an $800 increase in tuition in April 2010, ultimately leading to the shutdown at different times of nearly the entire 11-campus system of the university. The university administration agreed to postpone the tuition hike, but as the year drew to a close it went ahead and imposed the hike. Protests led to a police occupation of the university, banning of political demonstrations, and hundreds of incidents in which "students have been arrested, beaten, and at times sexually assaulted or tortured," according to Academe, the publication of the American Association of University Professors.

Supporting students and opposing the police crackdown were the Puerto Rican Assocation of Professors and the Brotherhood of Nonfaculty Employees.

The tuition hikes fit well with Puerto Rico Governor Luis Fortuño's ongoing efforts to privatize public institutions. The University of Puerto Rico has lost $336 million in government funding since 1997, and the $800 tuition hike amounts to a 50 percent increase in the cost of tuition to students.

Although polls show he's very unpopular with Puerto Rican voters, Fortuño is a darling of the Republican right-wing, which views him as a potential ambassador to the Latino population. Academe reports that Fortuño participated events in California sponsored by the Koch Brothers and conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation.

Stetson Kennedy dies

One of the last of the firebrand activists from the 1930s, Stetson Kennedy, 94, died in August at the Baptist Medical Center in St. Augustine, Fla.

Kennedy was a veteran of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Federal Writers' Project, a Ku Klux Klan infiltrator, and fellow traveler with the likes of folksinger Woody Guthrie and author Zora Neal Hurston. Guthrie even wrote a song about him.

The Jacksonville, Fla., native was the author of Southern Exposure, The Jim Crow Guide, and I Rode With The Ku Klux Klan. He went undercover to expose the Klan in the 1940s, joining the organization, learning its secret rituals and code words, risking his life, and subsequently casting a light on that secret world.

"My ideology was the same as Woody Guthrie and Carl Sandburg," Kennedy said at the Oral History Association's 40th annual meeting in Little Rock, Ark., in 2006. "The people, yes! Democracy, of and for the people."

Alabama's anti-immigration law, called "the nation's cruelest", took effect September 1

Not content with letting Arizona get away with being the most regressive state in the nation on immigration issues, Alabama, as of Sept. 1, has what the New York Times calls "the nation's cruelest immigration law."

The law requires law enforcement agents to check anyone suspected of lacking immigration documents, threatens the license of anyone who hires undocumented workers, requires that public schools determine students' immigration status, and criminalizes anyone "concealing, harboring, or shielding" an undocumented worker.

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed suit against the law, and top church leaders in Alabama have condemned it as inhumane.

Anti-immigration measures in Georgia and elsewhere in the South have been discussed at length in this blog. In April of this year, Ashley Furniture Industries in Ecru and Ripley, Miss., fired more than 500 undocumented workers, a shock to many considering what writer Yasser Fernandez in the publication Mira en Accion says is the long trail of "supervisors, managers, and human resource employees" at the company who've "engaged in identity theft scandals, dubious hiring practices, and worker rights abuses against undocumented immigrants."

Tea Partyers love what government can do, too!

Despite all their ballyoo about the federal deficit, government spending, and just bad government in general, Tea Partyers among U.S. House freshman have proven they can manipulate government with the best of them.

According to a report by USA Today last week, U.S. Rep. Stephen Fincher, R-Tenn., one of more than a dozen freshmen members of the House Tea Party Caucus, raked in nearly $90,000 in contributions from agribusiness, a special interest he has pushed and promoted in his short tenure in Congress. House freshmen took in more than $37 million in contributions by mid-2011.

Fincher sponsored a bill to require quick federal approval of "genetically modified crops for commercial sale," USA Today reports. "Fincher has received more campaign money from agribusiness than any other industry."

The report indicates that Tea Partyers have in abundance something else that has long been a mainstay in Washington: hypocrisy.

Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad and his Nazi ties

Ikea, the Swedish firm that accommodated unions in Europe but fought them in Virginia, has a skeleton in its closet that's rattling to get out.

A new book by author Elisabeth Asbrink says Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad's Nazi ties during World War II were a lot stronger than he has admitted.

Kamprad, who has acknowledged his "stupidity" in being attracted to Swedish fascism as a youth in the early 1940s, was actually very much involved in recruiting followers to the New Swedish Movement, Asbrink says. The group, led by fascist Per Engdahl, was a pro-Nazi organization.

A spokesman for Kamprad says he has long disavowed any beliefs he might have had as a young man regarding fascism.

Ikea, the world's biggest furniture retailer, fought a unionization drive at its Danville, Va., plant, but workers there in July voted overwhelmingly to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.

Labor Day Post Coming Up

2011-09-02T11:58:00.000-07:00

Just touching base quickly to say that a Labor Day (although I still consider May 1 the real Labor Day) round-up is on the way with reports on a successful organizing campaign in rural Mississippi, labor rumblings in Puerto Rico (yes, that's part of the South), Tea Party pork-barrelers, and more.

Stay tuned!

"Crime pays" for the private prison industry and modern-day convict leasers

2011-08-25T08:46:00.000-07:00

(The photograph to the left is of convict laborers at Mississippi's Parchman Farm prison in 1911)

It all started in Mississippi. Of course.

Deprived of his slaves by the Confederacy’s loss in the War Between the States, wealthy, politically connected cotton grower and railroad magnate Edmund Richardson needed cheap labor for the 25,000 acres of cotton spread across his 50 plantations in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta.

With the help of his political friends, he engineered a scheme in 1868 to lease former slaves who had become prison inmates after the war. He put them to work in his cotton fields and on his railroads and levees. He worked them hard and grew even richer. Federal and state authorities were so pleased with the agreement they even gave him money to cover transportations costs and other expenses.

The system quickly spread across the South, a region whose leaders have always loved cheap labor whether it be slave, indentured servant, sharecropper, tenant farmer, non-unionized cotton mill hand, or undocumented worker. And they love to work them hard, too. Conditions were so brutal by 1882 that nearly one-fifth of Mississippi’s leased convicts died from overwork or related causes.

In 1906, Mississippi Gov. James K. Vardaman became so disgusted that he led a successful campaign to reform a system “rivaling in brutality and fiendishness, the atrocities of … Torquemada” solely to benefit “some political dictator’s Delta plantation.”

Convict leasing across the land finally ended in 1928 when Alabama joined the rest of the nation and ceased the practice.

Enter Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, a 21st century Republican who would’ve enjoyed sipping mint juleps with Edmund Richardson on the back veranda. After the legislature waged an Arizona-like assault on undocumented workers, the governor was bombarded by angry Peach State farmers who complained they stood to lose $300 million from the loss of labor in their fields.

That’s when Deal came up with a “partial solution to our current status as we continue to move toward sustainable results with the legal options available.”

Translation: Let’s put a chunk of Georgia’s 100,000 convicted criminals who are on probation to work on the farm. He instructed his commissioners of labor and agriculture to proceed.

Of course, making money on convicted criminals and prison inmates has become big business in modern-day America. The Corrections Corporation of America, which operates three of Mississippi’s five private prisons, reported $1.6 billion in revenues in 2008. It’s no accident that the growth of private prisons since the early-to-mid 1980s has paralleled a phenomenal growth in incarceration—and correctional outlays.

The United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. Russia and China, both with long histories as police states, pale in comparison. Nowhere is incarceration more popular than in the Deep South. Mississippi ranks only behind Louisiana in the nation, and 67 percent of Mississippi’s inmates are black.

“The majority of people incarcerated in private prisons are in the eleven states of the old Confederacy,” write social activist Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich in The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy. “This keeps the South imprisoned in its own tragic history of building an economy on the backs of unfree people.”

In neighboring Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal has proposed privatizing three state prisons as a money-saving measure. However, statistics show correctional spending—here in Mississippi and across the nation--has skyrocketed since the first private prisons appeared. Although some officials blame “truth-in-sentencing” and other tough-on-crime measures, the private prison industry lobbied hard for those same measures. In other words, “crime pays” for this particular industry.

Ron Welch, Jackson attorney and longtime defender of prisoner rights in Mississippi, says the state today actually compares well with other states in oversight of its private prisons. However, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Civil Liberties Union and civil rights attorney Robert McDuff have filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of 13 inmates against the Walnut Grove facility to protest what they say are barbaric conditions. Walnut Grove is owned by the GEO Group of Florida.

Finding out what actually goes on inside private prisons is not always easy. In fact, Congress took up legislation in 2007 to place the industry under the purview of the Freedom of Information Act. Lobbying by industry leaders killed the bill.

“Roughly 25,000 federal criminal prisoners are jailed in private facilities at any given time,” U.S. Rep. Tim Holden, D-Pa., said at the time. “Yet private prisons are not required to publicly disclose information about their facilities’ daily operations.”

New legislation was introduced this year and remains pending. The industry, I’m sure, is prepared.

Union members carrying the banner in Virginia, Florida, and the Gulf Coast

2011-08-18T16:47:00.000-07:00

Time for another Labor South round-up:

Verizon workers in Virginia join walkout

Virginia workers are among the 45,000 employees of Verizon Communication who have staged a walkout stretching from the mid-Atlantic states to Maine to protest a company that pays its chief executive officer 300 times what they earn, a company that reported $6.9 billion in net income during the first six months of 2011, yet it wants to cut wages and benefits amounting to $20,000 per employee.

Members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) decided their livelihood was on the line and that corporate crocodile tears about a decline in revenue were essentially a Verizon song-and-dance that's at odds with the facts.

The Wall Street Journal reported recently that Verizon "isn't under any financial stress."

FedEx wins a round with the Teamsters

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters this months withdrew a petition for an election at a FedEx facility in Brockton, Mass.

The union has been eyeing Memphis-based FedEx for some time and saw the Brockton ground facility as a place with potential for success. Earlier this month, however, union leaders decided they would wait and fight another day.

Professors unite in Florida

Faced with a governor every bit as anti-union as Wisconsin's Scott Walker, teachers in Florida's higher education system have wasted no time organizing.

According to Labor Notes, unionized faculty members at the University of Florida have seen their numbers rise from just 20 percent density last year to more than 40 percent today. At the state's unionized community colleges, union density has reached 70 percent and even higher. Florida State University professors are also organizing rapidly.

And among those fighting the good fight for laid-off faculty is the United Faculty of Florida organization.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott and other Republicans have pushed legislation to ease the decertification of public employee unions as well as make voting for the general population more difficult.

Unions remain strong on the Gulf Coast

On Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, Jim Couch, business manager of the 1,800-member International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 733, says organized labor remains strong despite layoffs, Northrop Grumman’s spinoff into a much leaner Huntington Ingalls Industries, and the U.S. Navy’s planned trimming of its fleet from 600 to just over 300 ships.

“We’re holding our own,” Couch says. “Even though we have a new company, we all know each other. We have a very cordial relationship. We do sit down and talk to each other, and we agree to disagree at times.”

The IBEW is just one of several unions that together represent more than 75 percent of the company’s 9,000-member workforce on the Gulf Coast. These include electricians, carpenters, boilermakers, and other skilled craft trades. In 2007, thousands of Northrop Grumman workers went on strike for better wages and benefits, and a contract was eventually approved.

CNN's August 14 Blair Mountain documentary: Where's the passion? Where's the justice?

2011-08-11T20:23:00.000-07:00

(To the right is a photograph from the Battle for Blair between miners and coal operators' private militia in 1921)

H.L. Mencken, the “sage of Baltimore” and old-school curmudgeon of journalism, once had this to say about journalistic objectivity: “I’ve been a reporter for many years, and I can tell you that no reporter worth a hoot ever wrote a purely objective story.”

As a professor of journalism ethics, I talk a lot about objectivity, how it means different things to different people, and how some notions of it typically give the ultimate word to the powerful or at best short-change the side of justice because “objectivity” means both sides get equal billing in the story--whether they’re equal or not.

That’s what happened in the early days of the civil rights movement. Racist sheriffs in the Deep South complaining about “outside agitators” got equal say with local blacks who were “sick and tired of being sick and tired” of a system that kept them at the bottom.

Where’s this leading? To this past Sunday evening, August 14, and CNN anchor and special correspondent Soledad O’Brien’s Battle for Blair Mountain: Working in America, a documentary that attempts to tell the story of the battle between neighbor and neighbor in Sharples, W. Va., over whether the Arch Coal and (unnamed in the documentary) Massey Energy coal companies should destroy nearby Blair Mountain in search of coal and profits.

“It’s us against the world,” coal company supporter Linda Dials tells O’Brien. Her husband, James, a modern-day “coal miner” who essentially tries to rebuild the mountains his employer destroys, puts it this way: “I’ve got to work. That’s the bottom line.”

O’Brien, paying homage to CNN’s notion of journalistic objectivity, threads a treacherous path through “both sides” of a complex, emotion-laden story. The Dials represent one side, and they get the first word and the last word.

They want the government to allow the coal companies to remove the mountaintop to get to the coal that lies underneath. Mountaintop removal is, as O’Brien says, a very efficient way of coal mining. Blast away, and there’s the coal! It only takes 25 workers to do what 80 workers would do in underground mining, an option the companies now feel is too expensive.

Arch Coal declined an interview with O’Brien. Officials at notorious safety-standard violator Massey Energy (which began calling itself Alpha Natural Resources after 29 miners at its Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia were killed in an explosion in April 2010), it would seem, were never asked for an interview. Both companies applied for as many as six permits to blow the mountain up.

James Dial earns $65,000 a year (nearly twice what local school teachers earn) doing “reclamations” on destroyed mountains—that is, taking his bulldozer and crew and trying to rebuild a mountain with the refuse of rock and sand mountaintop removal leaves. He’s a trained carpenter, but that line of work doesn’t pay $65,000 a year in rural West Virginia. He and his wife lead the effort to let the companies have their way.

On the other side of the equation are folks like: Jimmy Weekley, whose house is close to Blair Mountain; Billy Smutko, who worries about “what do you get” 30 years from now after all the mountains are destroyed, and along with them streams and other water sources; and Chuck Keeney, whose great-grandfather was one of the 10,000 coal miners who went on strike on Blair Mountain in 1921 to fight coal company tyranny and be able to join the United Mine Workers. That bloody battle was one of the key events in labor history in this country, and Keeney and others would like to preserve Blair Mountain for that reason as well.

O’Brien does an admirable job bringing together scientists, government officials, and activists who tell how destructive mountaintop removal is in Appalachia. It creates an environmental disaster, they say. This is where she frames the story: environment versus jobs, tree huggers versus blue-collar workers.

Yet the truth is that mountaintop removal destroys more than the environment. It destroys communities as well as jobs. In fact, the best quote in O’Brien’s documentary comes from Billy Smutko: “When mountaintop removal started, that’s when the community started disappearing.”

The New York Times and other media outlets have written about the destruction that mountaintop removal leaves. This is how the Times put it in its headline to an article on the issue this April: “As mountaintops fall to mining, towns disappear and people scatter.”

The Dials don’t see it that way. James Dial wants to keep his $65,000-a-year job. Nothing wrong with that, until a journalist puts that perspective on an equal level with a mountain of evidence and the perspective of nearly everyone else who has any real insight into what mountaintop removal ultimately means.

As is often the case with so-called “objective” stories, the real issue lies beyond the two sides presented. Where is there real scrutiny of the coal companies and their practices? Their involvement in the communities? Their past records? They hand O’Brien a press release and take a powder. Where is there a real look into the history of this area, the epic, century-old struggle of miners for social justice?

What comes to mind is TV journalist/celebrity Diane Sawyer’s prize-winning A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains broadcast on ABC in February 2009, the culmination of a two-year project by Kentucky native Sawyer about Appalachian poverty that said practically nothing about the role of industry in that poverty but tons about corporate media’s lack of zeal for real muckraking journalism.

Where is the passion that drove George Stoney, Judith Helfand, and Susanne Rostock in their riveting documentary about the Depression-era cotton mill strikes, The Uprising of ’34? Where is the passion that makes Alexandra Lescaze’s 2003 documentary about textile workers in North Carolina, Where Do You Stand?, fill the viewing room with righteous indignation against greed and injustice?

The facts in O’Brien’s story do indicate where justice truly lies, and, to her credit, she did a lot of legwork to gather and present those facts. However, the context is deeper and broader than what is presented in Battle for Blair Mountain: Working in America.

Ol' H.L. Mencken was a conservative (in many ways) Germanophile who probably would argue with me into the wee hours on most issues in politics. However, I have a feeling he would say this to Soledad O’Brien: “You were there. What did you see? What did it tell you? Did it make you angry? You got the facts. Did they tell a story, a story the people need to hear, a story of passion and tragedy? A story that might make a difference? Tell that story, and tell it with passion, dammit!”

Delta's role in the FAA shutdown, IKEA's Virginia workers vote union, and the Southern heart of the Tea Party Movement

2011-08-06T10:27:00.000-07:00

Here's the latest Labor South round-up, and once again much of it shows the South's profound influence on national politics today--whether it's Atlanta-based Delta Airlines conspiring with House Republicans in the shutdown of the FAA, or the Southern domination of the Tea Party movement.

FAA gets temporary retrieve but labor union issue remains

President Obama signed a bill Friday ending the partial shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration, but the central issue that made House Republicans willing to render 4,000 agency employees and thousands of airport construction project workers jobless--labor union rules--remains unresolved.

"The House Republicans freely admit that this is simply an effort to leverage one issue to hijack the legislative process and gain the upper hand on negotiating an anti-labor provision," U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., of the Senate Commerce Committee said on the Senate floor last week.

Indeed, the ongoing assault on both public and private labor unions waged by Republicans across the country continues, and it was at the heart of the two-week FAA shutdown, which cost the deficit-strapped federal government $350 million in revenues as a result of uncollected taxes on airline tickets. Congress went on vacation without authorizing the FAA.

Although some Republicans claimed the main issue was their opposition to the funding of rural air service that was included in the FAA budget, their desire to destroy unions was the primary mission.

At issue was a National Mediation Board ruling that non-votes will no longer count as "no" votes in union elections in the airline industry. As in practically every other kind of election, only those votes cast in a union election will now count as either "yes" or "no". The NMB oversees the airline industry.

Backing the Republicans in their anti-union mission is Delta Airlines, which actually benefited from the shutdown by pocketing the portion of ticket prices that would have gone to the federal government as taxes. Delta CEO Richard Anderson, whose salary is $9 million, has strongly criticized the NMB ruling.

Rockefeller specifically pointed to Delta as a culprit in the shutdown. "I wish I understood why the policy objections of one company--Delta Airlines--mattered more than the livelihood of thousands of people," the senator said.

The authorization signed by Obama Friday leaves the issue unresolved but one that Congress will have to face when its five-week vacation comes to an end.

Ikea workers vote union

In a 221-69 vote in late July, workers at Ikea's Danville, Va. plant chose the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers to represent them in future contract negotiations with the Swedish furniture maker.

The vote came after a tough campaign that included the company's hiring of the union-busting Jackson Lewis law firm. The workers' issues included "stretch-out"-like conditions at the work site, required overtime, eliminated raises, and low pay.

The campaign was marked by irony. Ikea had long enjoyed a stellar reputation as a good corporate friend to its workers in Europe, and it had cooperated with unions there. Its European workers also enjoyed wages that started at $19 an hour, compared to the $8 an hour its beginning Virginia workers earned.

The Southern heart of the Tea Party movement

Salon.com writer Michael Lind's August 2 and linked here story on the Tea Party movement exposes the Southern extremists who are its base.

"It should be called the Fort Sumter movement," Lind writes. "Today's Tea Party movement is merely the latest of a series of attacks on American democracy by the white Southern minority, which for more than two centuries has not hesitated to paralyze, sabotage or, in the case of the Civil War, destroy American democracy in order to get their way."

Despite the movement's Boston-evoking name and the media's association of it with the Midwest, the Tea Party is at its core the white Southern conservative elite, Lind writes, and he notes that the four states with the most Tea Party representatives in the U.S. House are: Texas, Florida, Louisiana, and Georgia.

"The fact that Tea Party conservatism speaks with a pronounced Southern drawl may have escaped the attention of the mainstream media, but it is obvious to members of Congress who have to try to work with these disproportionately-Southern fanatics," Lind writes.

So much for the much-ballyhooed New South. As the author of this blog has written before, today's South in some key ways isn't really so new after all, certainly when it comes to who rules and who serves.

Hope in Mississippi: Labor activists fighting the odds in a state that's the model for national GOP

2011-07-28T13:35:00.000-07:00

(To the left is Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance Executive Director Bill Chandler in his Jackson, Miss., office. He was first sent to Mississippi by United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez in 1971)

JACKSON, Miss. - A hardened, intransigent rightwing has taken over the Republican Party and proved its willingness to take the nation to the economic brink to protect its well-heeled financial backers. Legislators have targeted government workers and immigrants as the source of their states’ economic ills. Meanwhile, all three branches of the federal government pay homage to the nation’s true power: Wall Street.

So why are worker activists in the nation’s most conservative state—veterans like Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance Executive Director Bill Chandler, United Food & Commercial Workers organizer Rose Turner, and Mississippi Association of Educators President Kevin Gilbert--optimistic about the future?

They live in a state where “right-to-work” is embedded in the state constitution, where teachers cannot legally strike or even engage in collective bargaining, where, in other words, the nation as a whole seems to be heading.

“There’s a sense of people coming together,” says Chandler, a veteran of labor wars going back to the 1960s. “It’s reminiscent of the ‘20s and ‘30s, when people were excited about the sense of unity, but this is more divergent and bigger.”

“You can take one of two philosophies and look at it as an obstacle,” Gilbert says. “We look at it as an opportunity. We could say, `Oh, woe is me,’ but we look at it and say, `What can we do?’”

Turner, a veteran of the historic and successful 1990 strike by catfish workers in the Mississippi Delta, puts it this way: “We are just clucking along like little chickens, hoping everything turns out all right.”

(To the right is labor activist Rose Turner)

It’s hard to see the reasons for any optimism from the national headlines.

The power of money in today’s politics cannot be overestimated. Billionaires Charles and David Koch, the corporate-backed, money-doling group known as ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), and their lobbyist friends such as former U.S. Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi have now become the fulcrum for what gets debated and what gets done—whether in Washington or in the state capitols.

Bolstered by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that opened the floodgate to corporate funding of political campaigns, these financiers are why the same white-collared Wall Street thugs who nearly destroyed the economy in 2008 are still holding the true reins of power. They’re also the brains behind the so-called Tea Party Movement, which despite the faux populist rhetoric about “big government” by its frontline soldiers is really only about one thing: the complete corporatization of American society.

The trick is many of those frontline soldiers don’t know this. Years of ingesting Fox News propaganda has made them really believe that it’s all about getting back to America’s roots. What are they going to do when they find out the truth?

And herein lies one of the sources of the activists’ optimism.

For most Tea Party soldiers, immigration is nearly as crucial an issue as big government.
They helped push nearly 1,400 legislative bills and resolutions in the first half of 2010 targeting immigration policy and undocumented workers.

However, many in the GOP establishment don’t want immigration reform. They actually like the status quo. Why? The status quo supplies an endless source of cheap labor to industry. Undocumented workers get the least pay and benefits, have trouble organizing, and can always be replaced if they complain. In other words, they’re the perfect employees!

Thus a major split within the Republican Party regarding immigration looms on the horizon. Just wait and see.

Another source of optimism is this: Most young people don’t buy the Tea Party rhetoric or the establishment GOP’s mantras to big business.

Chandler, who worked with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in the 1960s and 1970s, first came to Mississippi to help with civil rights leader Charles Evers’ unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign in 1971. “There was nothing for the youth” in the state to encourage political activism or even awareness, he says.

“Look at the 2008 election, a majority of the under-25 age group (in Mississippi), 52 percent, voted for (President) Obama. That’s very interesting. That shows more of an awareness among the youth of another world. I think that presents an opportunity.”

Here in Mississippi, named the nation’s most conservative state in a 2011 Gallup Poll, the opportunity Chandler sees is compounded by changing demographics. More than one-third of the population is African American, a number likely to grow given recent statistics showing more African Americans leaving the North and returning to their Southern roots. Add to them other minorities such as the greatly increasing Latino population---from 10,000 in 1990 to an estimated 150,000 today. Many may be undocumented now, but they are here and are likely to stay. So are their children.

If just a quarter of the state’s struggling working-class whites were ever to realize that their best political alliance is with blacks and Latinos, not billionaires on Wall Street, Mississippi would undergo a revolutionary change.

Chandler’s MIRA organization, however, isn’t waiting for the revolution. MIRA has already earned national kudos for the alliances it has forged with the 50-member-plus state Legislative Black Caucus and with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and thus far it has been able to keep an Arizona-like bill from passing the state Legislature. In fact, it has been key to passage of six pro-immigrant bills in the Legislature, including provisions for court interpreter services and in-state tuition for college students.

The UFCW’s Turner is as battle-savvy as any organizer in the state. She helped rally hundreds of workers at the Delta Pride catfish plants in the perennially poor Mississippi Delta in the summer of 2010 when they threatened to strike rather than accept a contract offer that would have returned them in many ways to the same conditions that forced them to strike in 1990. The company relented, and a fairer contract was negotiated.

Turner is busy now with an organizing campaign at a re-opened 150-worker poultry plant in Water Valley, Miss., that was union-represented before it shut down in 2003. “In two weeks we had over 75 cards signed,” she says. “I feel good about it. Most of the people worked there before. They see the difference between having a contract and not having a contract, in working in a union plant and in a non-union plant.”

MAE President Gilbert says education activists in other states like Wisconsin and Ohio have contacted his office in recent months to ask about strategies for dealing with a powerful and intransigent political-business alliance totally hostile to unions, something Mississippians have dealt with since “right to work” legislation was adopted in 1954 and embedded in the state constitution in 1960.

“They are not used to this,” says Gilbert, whose organization represents 8,000 teachers and other school workers across the state. “They are used to having payroll deductions for union fees, collective bargaining. … Sometimes it’s hard to make lemonade out of lemons, but we try. The more people we have, the more talent and ability we have to be able to do the things we want to do.”

Although prohibited from striking or collective bargaining, his organization lobbies legislators, trains teachers, provides them legal assistance and other benefits, and works with other organizations to make the state keep the commitment to education it made in the historic 1982 Education Reform Act.

Although under the radar of the mainstream press, change is taking place in many parts of the South, which legendary labor leader Sidney Hillman once called a “venture into unplowed fields” for union organizers. The Farm Labor Organizing Committee recently won a three-year battle to get tobacco giant Reynolds American to agree to meet with it and to survey the abuse of workers—most of them migrants--on tobacco farms across North Carolina, the state with the nation’s lowest union membership rate. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida has won similar battles and is now pressuring the grocery story chain Publix to do more to improve wages for tomato pickers.

If catfish plant and poultry workers, migrant workers and teachers--those at or near the bottom end of the supply chain in this modern-day economy--can score gains or at least hold their own against the formidable powers-that-be in Mississippi, then maybe some optimism about the future is justified—and not only here.

Let's keep the history of working people from being erased

2011-07-20T16:53:00.000-07:00

(To the right is the monument at Haymarket Square in Chicago with labor historian Jeffrey Helgeson talking of its history)

As a young boy growing up in Sanford, N.C., I recall often standing in awe in front of the giant Depression-era mural that dominated one of the walls in the city's post office. The larger-than-life people and warm, dramatic colors made an impression on me, and I somehow felt connected to it. Isn't that what good art does?

Lucky for me Paul LePage wasn't mayor of my town at that time. Likely he would have blasted the mural as an example of New Deal socialism and ordered it to be removed.

The people of Maine aren't so lucky, however. LePage is their governor, and he's apparently a typical modern-day Republican who sees anything that even hints at challenging his own religion of Darwinistic capitalism as smacking of socialism and communism.

That's why he ordered an 11-panel mural by artist Judy Taylor depicting the history of Maine's working people taken down from the lobby of the Maine Labor Department. Depictions in the mural included cobblers, textile workers, labor strikes, and, horror of horrors, 1930s-era U.S. Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, one of FDR's closest aides and a comrade-in-arms on worker issues.

A legal battle is still underway to restore the mural to its rightful place, but the nation's judiciary is hardly a refuge these days of pro-worker sentiment.

The irony is LePage, who (according to the Associated Press) never even saw the mural in person, brings to mind what Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin would do when officials, even close aides, fell out of favor. They simply disappeared from the history books and even from official photographs. They were erased as if they had never existed. Of course, Stalin often took it further, relocating them to Siberia, or worse.

A similar battle is now being waged in West Virginia, where activists are fighting to save Blair Mountain--site of a historic nine-day strike by 10,000 coal miners in 1921 who wanted to join the United Mine Workers. Massey Energy, owner of the mine where 29 miners died in an explosion in April 2010, and Arch Coal want to remove the mountain top--in other words, destroy the mountain--so they can search for coal.

These actions by LePage and the mining companies are simply the latest chapter in the attempted rewriting (or erasing) of history that conservatives commissioned long ago. It leaves us a history with many blank pages. You can see it by the dearth of statues in the United States honoring true American worker heroes, people like Mary "Mother" Jones, Ella May Wiggins, Mary Heaton Vorse, Jock Yablonsky, and Walter Reuther.

Travel across this nation and tour the handful of landmark sites in its labor history. The battles to erect monuments were often as fierce as the events that inspired them.

I've just returned from the Working Class Studies Association Conference in Chicago, where participants were given a tour of that great city's labor sites. One of the most important such sites in the nation is Haymarket Square, where in 1886 workers demonstrated for the eight-hour day and were met with a huge show of force from local police. Someone tossed a bomb, killing one and injuring dozens, and prompted a battle that left nearly a dozen people dead, seven of them policemen. Eight anarchists were tried for the incident, and four were executed, none of them as a result of "a shred of evidence," according to historian Thomas R. Brooks.

A monument finally exists on the Haymarket Square site today, but it came after many, many battles that included an earlier monument to the police at the site that was dynamited allegedly by the radical Weather Underground group in 1969. Even today it's a monument that causes much dispute and disagreement.

Another important labor site is the Ludlow Monument in Ludlow, Colo., commemorating the massacre there during a major strike at the Rockefeller-controlled Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in 1914. As many as 19 died, including eleven children and two women but only one of the militiamen who'd descended en masse on the workers with rifles, machine guns, bombs, and coal oil (which they poured onto the striking workers' makeshift tents and set on fire).

The monument was erected in 1918, defaced by unknown parties in 2003, and repaired and unveiled again in 2005.

Several years ago, I traveled back to my native North Carolina to do research for my book Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press. One of my stops was in Gastonia, N.C., at what I believed to have been the old Loray Mill, an abandoned, five-story, red-brick shuttered building when I saw it in 2003, but in 1929 it was the site of one of the most dramatic textile strikes in Southern history.

It was near here that minstrel Ella May Wiggins met her death at the hands of anti-labor goons, her last words being "Oh, Lord-a-mercy, they done shot and killed me." She was a 29-year-old mother of five who would serenade the workers during their strike against the grueling "stretch-out" (in which production requirements for workers were doubled, tripled and even quadrupled) on the factory floor and huge cuts in their wages.

I took lots of pictures on my old, now-discarded Olympus camera, but I'm still not absolutely sure it actually was the Loray Mill. I asked folks in the neighborhood, and no one knew.

That's what happens when history is discarded. People forget. Yet, I wonder if ghosts haunt that old building at night, one of them maybe even Ella May Wiggins, looking for the justice they never found in life. Call me irrational, but I'm inclined to believe that sort of thing.

FLOC's latest victory against Reynolds American may justify organizer's optimism

2011-07-13T12:51:00.000-07:00

(To the left is a picture of FLOC leader Baldemar Velasquez during an early march in the Reynolds American campaign)

Last summer Farm Labor Organizing Committee activist Diego Reyes Jr. told me he was hopeful about the future for migrant labor in North Carolina and elsewhere in the South despite all the odds. "I believe there is going to be a change," he said. "That's where change begins."

Reyes' faith in the future may be justified. FLOC scored another in a long line of victories for migrant workers in May when tobacco giant Reynolds American announced it would meet with FLOC and other groups in an effort to assess working conditions in the fields. The agreement was a milestone in a three-year effort by FLOC to get Reynolds to take action.

"We want Reynolds to understand ... they have the power and the money to influence the system," Reyes said. "We need Reynolds to understand they have a lot of responsibility."

FLOC officials said they plan to make sure the company lives up to its agreement to look for abuse in its supply chain and to work with FLOC and other groups. "While this is a vindication of the past three years of struggle, the campaign will continue until real progress is made," FLOC officials said in a statement.

Statistics from FLOC and the National Farm Worker Ministry indicate that 24 percent of tobacco pickers (traditionally known as primers in the world of tobacco) suffer from nicotine poisoning each season. Exposure to harmful pesticides and crowded, unsanitary living conditions in labor camps and remote, substandard trailers add to the woes of an estimated 100,000 immigrant tobacco workers in North Carolina.

"As workers, we have suffered a lot in the field," said Reyes' father, Diego Reyes Sr., a 46-year farm worker who travels each year from his home in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, to work on a farm near Sanford, N.C. (In this photo are Reyes Jr. on the left and Reyes Sr. on the right. They are sitting in the remote trailer that Reyes Sr. shares with five other Latino workers.)

During the past three years, Reynolds consistently refused to meet with FLOC officials, saying it wasn't responsible for what happened in the fields of its suppliers. "We cannot enter a bargaining agreement on the workers' behalf," a Reynolds Board of Directors statement said. "They are not our employees."

It's a view that's typical in the neoliberal model for the global economy followed by Reynolds American and other major corporations, and it echoes a tactic used during the era of U.S. and European colonialism: hiring subcontractors to supply workers and thus avoid responsibility for worker abuses. During the days of the East India Company in British-controlled India this was known as the sardari labor system, and while possibly effective in alleviating guilt feelings among absentee landlords in Britain it only worsened the lot of the dark-skinned workers on the plantations and in the mines of the colonies.

Last fall FLOC intensified its campaign against Reynolds American by launching a highly public divestment campaign against major Reynolds lender, JPMorgan Chase. The Wall Street firm is a leader in the consortium of lenders that funnels close to $500 million in credit to Reynolds American.

JPMorgan Chase itself has been fighting battles on several fronts in the wake of the 2008 Wall Street crash and the ongoing recession. Hundreds of activists, workers, and religious leaders have protested in more than 200 cities against the company's role in massive home foreclosures. According to the Wall Street Journal, JPMorgan Chase has nearly $20 billion worth of home loans in foreclosure.

In late April, FLOC was successful in getting the British American Tobacco company to agree to a meeting. BAT owns 42 percent of Reynolds American.

Founded and led by the charismatic Baldemar Velasquez, FLOC has scored a number of agreements with major firms, such as Campbell, Vlasic, Heinz and Deans Foods. Perhaps its largest and most significant victory came in 2004 with its agreement with North Carolina-based Mt. Olive Pickles, the largest labor agreement in the South.

A rising movement of the "least of people" to challenge the neoliberal gods

2011-07-06T13:48:00.000-07:00

(In this modern world where the ideology of neoliberalism has replaced the "old-fashioned" ideas of Karl Marx and Adam Smith, we have Marx on the left (from a Chicago Tribune interview in 1878) looking to the right, and we have Adam Smith on the right below looking to the left. Maybe both would say today, "What happened?")

I'll soon be filing a report from my recent trip to Chicago, where I participated in the Working-Class Studies Association 2011 conference and presented a paper titled An Under-the-Radar Labor Movement Taking Root in the Global South.

This paper, which I'm converting into a magazine piece, details some of the work that is going around the Global South, including the U.S. South, on behalf of migrant workers and other workers at the bottom of the supply chain in today's neoliberal economy. In the U.S. South, the Farm Labor Organizing Commmittee, Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, and other groups are making headway against enormous odds, forcing mega-corporations to pay attention and act to preserve a good corporate image. This blog has tracked many of these efforts, which get little attention in mainstream media.

However, similar actions are taking place around the world, particularly Asia, that region where the once-Southern textile industry now resides and where the lowest wage workers on the globe are rising up and asserting their rights. Just one example is the Asia Floor Wage Alliance, a grassroots movement founded in India to establish a pan-Asia minimum wage for garment workers. The alliance now claims member organizations from 11 Asian nations as well as from the United States and Europe.

This blog has already reported on groups within the Migrant Empowerment Network in Taiwan (MENT) and on the Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2) in Singapore and their successful efforts to get government involved on behalf of "the least of people," to use the words of Father Peter Nguyen Hung Cuong of Bade City, Taiwan.

More will be coming. However, to understand the challenge these groups and their under-the-radar movement face one must understand neoliberalism, the true religion of modern-day global capitalists, the mantras of which politicians ranging from Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Tony Blair, to, yes, it sadly appears, Barack Obama have chanted and are chanting with the passion that only high-dollar campaign contributions can inspire.

What this religion preaches is free trade, the free, unfettered flow of capital to promote investment, and ultimately the accumulation of yet more wealth by its practitioners. What it depends on, however, are the same peasants who provided the backbreaking labor to build the infrastructure for the mercantilism that Adam Smith so despised, those docile peasants whose cheap labor enables the vast accumulation of wealth of the few.

Yes, neoliberalism reaches beyond the old ideologies of Smith and Marx in its utter sanctification of greed, and that's why you have the leaders of the world's largest communist country, China, embracing it enthusiastically.

But read about neoliberalism from someone much more astute that this writer. Very informative is Anup Shah's essay A Primer on Neoliberalism, which I've now linked to this page. Here is the link as written: http://www.globalissues.org/article/39/a-primer-on-neoliberalism.

New Orleans jazzman Steamboat Willie plays and sings from the heart

2011-07-02T07:18:00.000-07:00

(To the right you see a photo of Steamboat Willie playing his horn at the Cafe Beignet on Bourbon Street. The photo was taken by my wife Suzanne Centenio Atkins.)

Here's a little July 4 feature about a hard-working jazzman in New Orleans.

NEW ORLEANS – When the goateed man in the Panama hat puts his trumpet to his lips and plays Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans, you know he knows. You hear it in every note--when he plays and when he sings. You miss it, he tells you, “because that’s where you left your heart.”

I never go to this city without stopping at the Café Beignet in Music Legends Park on Bourbon Street, where, just beyond the statues of Pete Fountain, Al Hirt and Fats Domino, Steamboat Willie performs every night. Check out this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0trKp_3SEQ

On Bourbon Street, it can be hard to find the music that made this city famous. Along the daiquiri bars and strip joints you’re more likely to hear electric blues, rock, and Memphis soul. What Steamboat Willie gives you is in the song.

the moss-covered vines, those tall sugar pines
… that lazy Mississippi … that moonlight on that ol’ bayou

“I’m in a lovely little park, with children, people in wheel chairs, people who might want a cup of coffee, not necessarily a drink, little children dancing in front of my stage,” Steamboat says about his nightly gig. “The music is as lovely as we can make it. … I am doing what I’m supposed to be doing. I am in the right place. God gave me something that I could do, and I am giving from the heart.”

It was a long, convoluted path that led the 60-year-old East St. Louis, Ill., native to Music Legends Park, however, and even after he got there, he almost lost it all. It’s a story worth telling.

Born Larry Stoops “on the poor side of the tracks,” he was the son of a mechanic and a homemaker. He learned to sing and play in the Pentecostal Church. “I was eight when I started playing. My brother had a cornet in the house. We just taught ourselves how to play.” As for singing: “my two sisters put me on a slab porch and wouldn’t let me off till I sang harmony.”

With the $50 Nash Rambler his father bought him—on condition that he himself re-build the motor—he took off to Tupelo, Miss., to study at the Pentecostal Bible Institute. He sold Kirby vacuum sweepers and worked at a local Big Star Grocery for $1 an hour to put himself through school. His first job after graduation was selling Bibles.

Married at 20, he got a post as an assistant pastor in Maine but “just couldn’t make it,” he says. “I couldn’t make enough money to feed myself or my wife. One day I got a six-pack of beer, called the pastor, and let them know I quit. I didn’t even drink. They bought me a bus ticket … and sent me back to Illinois.”

Then God gave him a cornet. “I was making car seats and coming out of the office when this lady put a cornet in my hands and said, `I can’t play it. You keep it.’” He took the instrument and one night sat in with a jazz band at a country club in St. Louis. That was his start. Eventually he found his way to New Orleans, picking up his nickname “Steamboat Willie” during a gig in Biloxi, and he figured he never leave the Big Easy—at least until 2005 when Hurricane Katrina sent him on an itinerant journey from Texas to Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, and Oregon.

“A nightmarish situation,” he recalls. “You don’t want to talk about it too much. Every time you look on the news and see water on top of everything, to realize that your life has ended and you don’t know if it is ever going to come back. I cried a lot. I still cry sometime.”

The stress from Katrina eventually contributed to a heart condition that might have killed him if he hadn’t met Dr. Sam Fillingane, a Jackson, Miss., physician who treats cardio-vascular illnesses. “He nursed me and got me back” to good health, Steamboat says.

“Steamboat’s a good fella,” Fillingane says about his former patient. “Let’s keep him tooting that horn.”

That’s what Steamboat plans to do. “I want to use my music to help children, or (treat) cancer … doing something in a bigger way, so that when I lay down to die, I feel I’ve done something that God wanted me to do. That’s my goal in life.”

Memphis City Council rejects privatization plan for sanitation workers

2011-06-28T14:52:00.000-07:00

The Memphis City Council has rejected a plan to privatize the city's sanitation services and thus avoid what might have become a national protest against an obvious anti-union ploy that had historic and racial dimensions.

Proposed by councilman Kemp Conrad, the plan claimed to be able to save the hard-strapped city as much as $25 million a year. However, leaders of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which represents the sanitation workers, questioned how the city could recently pledge $6 million to subsidize a privately built parking garage at the same time it cut vital services.

The city's sanitation workers are part of the nation's labor lore. It was their strike in 1968 that Martin Luther King Jr. came to support and ultimately lost his life as a result.

Although the services remain under city government, the council did approve a budget that includes plans to fund a buyout of sanitation workers and the elimination of positions.

High Court's corporate majority makes Wal-Mart smile, Memphis may make MLK turn over in his grave, and What's With Georgia These Days?

2011-06-21T12:44:00.000-07:00

A Southern front has opened up in the corporate-GOP war on workers.

Just look at some recent headlines:

"Supreme Court Conservatives Thwart Wal-Mart Sex Bias Case" (Associated Press, June 20)

"Memphis sanitation workers are volatile city budget target" (Memphis Commercial Appeal, June 19)

"Georgia sends criminals to replace undocumented immigrants" (Politico, June 14)

Let's look behind the headlines:

Wal-Mart gets Scalia & Co. pass on sex bias case

In a 5-4 ruling with Justice Antonin Scalia writing for the "corporate" majority, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a huge sex discrimination case against Wal-Mart that claimed to represent as many as 1.6 million female workers at the global retail giant. Although the court unanimously agreed that the class action suit could not proceed as presented, the 5-4 ruling said one lawsuit couldn't represent so many women in so many jobs.

Dissenting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said it was clear that "Wal-Mart's delegation of discretion over pay and promotion is a policy uniform throughout all stores," but Scalia and the court's conservative wing were having none of it. Nothing really tied the cases together and each should be considered separately, Scalia said.

In other words, go forth, ye daughters of David, and each take up your slingshot against Goliath. And good luck, by the way.

Key plaintiff Betty Dukes, a Wal-Mart greeter in Pittsburg, California, said she and others indeed do plan to go forth and pursue their cases.

They represent a rising fighting spirit among Wal-Mart "associates." As reported recently by the New York Times' Steven Greenhouse, thousands of Wal-Mart workers have signed up to join the Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) and hope to raise consciousness among employees about their rights and the need for fairness at the workplace.

The group is supported by the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which thus far has been unable to break the staunch anti-union policies of the 1.4 million-worker company. OUR Walmart has launched a web site--ourwalmart.org--to spread the news.

Walmart officials' response? The group's nothing but a ruse to get unions' foot in the door.

Martin Luther King Jr. would turn over in his grave

Memphis City Councilman Kemp Conrad, aping his hero, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, has proposed that the city privatize its sanitation services and save as much as $25 million per year. This obviously has raised some eyebrows given the history of those sanitation services.

After all, Martin Luther King Jr. came to Memphis in 1968 and lost his life while supporting city sanitation workers. They had gone on strike to protest unfair treatment at the workplace and then faced the anti-union intransigence of then-Mayor Henry Loeb. Just as the workers had done in 1968, protesters against Conrad's proposal vowed to show up at budget hearings carrying signs declaring, "I AM A MAN".

At a press conference last week, leaders with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees said Conrad has been involved in conflicts of interest involving recent city contracts. Conrad denies this. The leaders also noted the $6 million in subsidies the city has promised to Loeb Properties to build a parking garage in Memphis' Overton Square. How can the city pay out such subsidies at the same time it wants to cut services, they asked.

Loeb Properties? Yep, same family as the mayor from 1968, Henry Loeb, who tried to block sanitation workers from joining a union.

What's the Matter with Georgia?

Just what is going on in Georgia these days? Has the state that once boasted enlightened leaders, intellectuals and writers like Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph McGill, and Claude Sitton, the premier reporter of the civil rights era, now turned back the clock to the days of Lester Maddox and Gene Talmadge?

After signing the state's repressive, Arizona-style anti-immigration law and quickly finding himself confronted by disgruntled farmers bemoaning the loss of labor in their fields, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican, vowed to send thousands of convicted criminals into the fields to pick beans, berries, and peaches.

Deal said as many as 25,000 of the state's convicted criminals on probation are jobless, and farmers say they expect to have more than 11,000 unfilled jobs if the state proceeds aggressively to round up undocumented migrant workers.

So the state of Georgia will provide labor for the private profit of the state's farmers. Imagine the lobbying--and backroom dealing--that's going to take place to become of one of those lucky farmers. Will there even be any reporters to cover it given the emaciated local coverage of today's media?

(To the left you see an early 1920s James K. Vardaman campaign poster. This is from my personal collection)

That sets up perfect conditions for exactly the same kind of abuse that once haunted the South and even prompted an outcry of protest from one of the region's most notorious racist politicians, turn-of-the-century Mississippi Governor James K. Vardaman. As reported before in this blog, Vardaman shamed himself forever with his racial shenanigans on the campaign trail, yet he was amazingly progressive as a governor, aiding black education, riding herd on greedy corporations, and attacking fraud and abuse in the state's prison system and ending convict leasing.

Convict leasing had become a popular recourse for plantation owners in Mississippi after they lost the labor of their slaves as a result of the Civil War. Their political friends in Jackson were only too willing to help them fill the gaps in their workforce.

What evolved was a system that forced convicts to live amid filth and vermin and often work until frostbite took their hands and feet or sunstroke took their lives.

"Compared to the treatment accorded these convicts, an overwhelming majority of whom were Negroes, slavery was a mild and humane institution," writes Albert D. Kirwan in his classic book on the era, Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics, 1876-1925. "If he were sick or disabled, he was replaced by a healthy substitute. Under such a system economy would call for the greatest extraction of labor from a convict in return for the least expenditure for his welfare."

Another historian, J.H. Jones, put it this way: "This brutal system left its trail of dishonor and of death which could only find a parallel in some of the persecutions of the Middle Ages."

Labor South Roundup: Walmart hypocrisy, Delta Air Lines trickery, and Anti-Immigrant buffoonery

2011-06-08T18:39:00.000-07:00

The latest Labor South Roundup shows that Southern companies remain at the forefront of anti-labor activity in the United States even when at least one is willing--if forced--to tolerate unions abroad.

First and foremost, of course, is Arkansas-based Walmart, that dear corporate friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the most virulently anti-union company in modern-day corporate history. Walmart has shown on a number of occasions it would rather shut operations down than allow a union to set up shop.

That's what it did in Jacksonville, Texas, in 2000, when a majority of its butchers voted to join the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. In a move later deemed illegal by the National Labor Relations Board, the company either fired or transferred the pro-union workers and vowed to sell only pre-cut meat in the future.

When Wal-Mart workers in Jonquiere, Quebec, voted to join the UFCW in 2004, the company simply closed the 190-worker store.

Fast forward to 2011 in South Africa, where the mega-corporation has won the nod from the government's Competition Tribunal to purchase a 51 percent share of the Massmart retail store chain and thus establish a very heavy footprint on the African continent. Unions opposed the deal--and unions remain quite strong in South Africa--and thus Walmart agreed to tolerate what former Walmart Executive Vice President and board member John Tate once referred to as "blood-sucking parasites" (union members) in its South African sites--at least for the next three years. That's when union contracts can be renegotiated.

As writer and Walmart watcher Travis Waldron has detailed, the company has made similar accommodations in other countries, such as China, Brazil, and Argentina.

As for Walmart workers in the United States, however, the attitude remains best expressed by Tate: any union supporters are nothing but "blood-sucking parasites."

In another part of the world, Walmart's anti-union bias may best be seen by its silence. According to Change.org, labor activists Babul Akhter, Kalpona Akter, and Aminul Islam have been "imprisoned and tortured" in Bangladesh for their efforts on behalf of workers at Walmart suppliers. They face possible death by execution on what are "demonstrably false" charges such as destruction of property. Walmart is in a position to stop this injustice.

Change.org last month launched an international petition to pressure Walmart to act on behalf of the activists in the case.

Another firm with Southern ties, Yum! Brands, Inc., which owns Kentucky Fried Chicken, made labor news recently in Thailand when KFC fired three labor activists who had been pivotal in getting more than 200 workers to sign up to join a union and push for higher wages. Siwaporn Somjit, Krit Suang-aranan, and Apantree Charoensak all got fired summarily.

Workers had to attend anti-union corporate meetings, yet management refused to meet with the union. An official with the Thai government said the company was in clear violation of Thai and international labor laws and regulations.

Meanwhile back here in the States, Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines, Inc., is under investigation by the National Mediation Board (which handles labor issues in the airline and railway industries) in connection with claims that it interfered with union elections involving the International Association of Machinists and Association of Flight Attendants last year. The unions lost both elections.

The IAM claims the company pressured workers to vote against joining it by using "anti-union propaganda ... surveillance and intimidation."

On one last issue, a spokesman for the Baton Rouge (La.) Police Union last week criticized a bill making its way through the Louisiana Legislature that would crack down on illegal immigration, making it a crime to (among many other things) even give an undocumented worker a ride. "We would be in violation of the law" by not making checks, BRPU representative Brian Blake complained to the New Orleans Times-Picayune. "It would direct law enforcement away from doing our (regular) jobs."

Race & Immigrants on tap as issues in the 2012 presidential election

2011-05-30T13:10:00.000-07:00

(To the right is a photograph of Newt Gingrich speaking at CPAC in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 10, 2011. The photograph is by Gage Skidmore)

Would-be president Newt Gingrich calls Barack Obama our “most successful food stamp president,” Santana gets booed at the “Civil Rights” baseball game in Atlanta for criticizing Georgia’s new immigration law, and politicians in Alabama forbid undocumented children from attending the school prom.

Welcome to the opening act of the 2012 presidential election, an event guaranteed to inundate voters with an ocean of talk about the evils of government handouts, the hordes of immigrants who take our jobs and whose children threaten our schools, the president who may still be a foreigner despite that Hawaii birth certificate he recently produced.

And if that doesn’t work, surely there’ll be a gay marriage or two somewhere in the West to reignite those never-resolved fears of a homosexual takeover of the nation.

We all need distractions, don’t we? Is there a better time than a presidential election? We don’t want to have to think about some of the real issues that are out there—the 44 million Americans (one out of every seven) who live in poverty, the 50 million Americans either foreclosed out of their homes or facing possible foreclosure, the deepening divide between Wall Street and Main Street.

Let’s indeed not focus on what crusading journalist Robert Scheer calls the “Wall Street casino”, the bankers, investors, and speculators who created the “trillion dollars’ worth of toxic mortgage-based securities at the heart of the nation’s economic meltdown,” or their enablers in Washington—both Democrat and Republican—who’ve worked to take down the protective wall of regulation FDR established to prevent such disasters.

Former Georgia congressman and U.S. House Speaker Gingrich helped set the stage for the presidential election this month when he called it the most important since 1860 and derided Obama as a left-wing “food stamp president.” A year ago he criticized what he called Obama’s “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.” Please tell me: When did “anti-colonial” become a bad thing?

Gingrich went on to praise General Electric for paying no corporate taxes last year, and he endorsed the defunding of the National Labor Relations Board for ruling against Boeing’s effort to punish strikers at its plant in Washington state by setting up operations in South Carolina. Let’s see if he’ll campaign on getting rid of Medicare, like some of his fellow Republicans want to do.

On the same day Gingrich gave his speech at the Georgia Republican Party convention, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal signed into law an Arizona-style anti-immigration bill that gives local law enforcement power to demand immigration papers from anyone they suspect to lack such papers. Those without papers will be jailed.

Two days later, rock musician Santana appeared before thousands at major league baseball’s annual “Civil Rights Game” and used the opportunity to blast the Georgia law. The crowd booed him loudly, but Santana held his ground and told them “you should be ashamed of yourself.” My response was to start humming Black Magic Woman with new appreciation.

Georgia, Alabama, and Florida are doing their best to get on the Arizona bandwagon, and it seems children are often the target. In the spirit of those Arizonans who’ve pushed to overturn the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and deny citizenship to Latino children born here to undocumented workers, the Alabama state Senate passed a law denying prom participation, the 4-H club, and other extracurricular activity to undocumented children.

It’s all a prelude to what’s to come. Politicians like Gingrich will base their campaigns on fear, on thinly veiled allusions to race, including Latinos, and the sense of “us against them.” Was this not the heart of the “birther” issue regarding Obama’s own citizenship, an effort to make the president someone who’s not one of “us”?

Polls show that 72 percent of Americans support sensible immigration reform, and most Americans don’t feel threatened or alarmed by the presence of immigrants in their midst unless politicians and the media stir up such feelings.

Gift wrapping operation shifting to "foreign suppliers" and cutting 600 jobs in Memphis

2011-05-26T09:12:00.000-07:00

Six hundred union workers at Cleo Inc. in Memphis, a company that makes gift wrap products and is owned by Pennsylvania-based CSS Industries, is shutting down and shifting to "foreign suppliers" to do the work, according to a company report.

As reported in the Memphis Commercial Appeal today, the company has been in Memphis since 1953 and has maintained a 1.75 million-square-foot plant in the city.

It also has a ribbon-making plant in Maryland, the only other unionized plant run by CSS.

This is yet another reason why workers have to organize on a global scale if they're going to hold on to their rights in today's global marketplace. They have to meet neo-liberal dogma with an ideology of their own that says workers have a right to be in a union and someday corporations are going to have no place to run away to that doesn't recognize that fundamental principle.

GOP targets teacher union in Tennessee for destruction

2011-05-24T15:13:00.000-07:00

The seed that was sown with huge Republican victories in the Tennessee legislature last November has produced its fruit: passage of a bill to end 33 years of collective bargaining by school teachers.

Both the state Senate and House have passed versions of legislation to repeal the 1978 Education Professional Negotiations Act and replace it with a complex new process worked out in secret by Republicans with no Democratic input and which essentially ends most union-related rights for the 52,000-member Tennessee Education Association.

The new act, called the Professional Educators Collaborative Conferencing Act, is a contradiction in terms, both in its birth and in its projected implementation. One key provision is to outlaw payroll deductions that might be used by employee associations for political purposes.

That provision is an obvious effort to cut off a traditional source of funding for Democratic candidates.

Under the new act, school boards become the ultimate authority in most decisions regarding teachers. The legislation is expected to get the nod of the state's Republican governor, Bill Haslam, and become the law of the land.

It's another advance in the march of Republican legislators across the country--from Wisconsin to Tennessee--to strip public employees of their right to be part of a union.

It hasn't been unusual for union members in past elections to vote for Republican candidates despite the long history of animosity toward unions within the GOP. That animosity is more clearly visible today than it has been in a long time, and let's hope union members see it just as clearly.

The ghost of Henry Grady hovers over the GOP's drive to undermine the NLRB / A tale of Boeing's "run-away" plant in South Carolina

2011-05-15T12:54:00.000-07:00

(To the left is a portrait of Henry W. Grady, 19th century champion of the first New South.)

The recent battle between Boeing and the National Labor Relations Board raises an issue that goes to the heart of the way Southern pols have recruited industry since Henry Grady of the Atlanta Constitution preached a "New South" after the Civil War.

The National Labor Relations Board, an ineffective protector of workers' rights under the Bush regime, has finally regained a sense of its original mission under President Obama and is showing a new feistiness that is driving Southern Republicans ballistic.

After Boeing reacted to a strike by union workers at its Puget Sound facility by announcing it was moving a production line to a nonunion operation in South Carolina, NLRB General Counsel Lafe Solomon ruled the company had violated the National Labor Relations Act. Companies can't relocate plants as a direct response to a strike by workers, Solomon said.

The reaction to Solomon's ruling has been fierce. U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., proposed legislation to strip funding for the complaint against Boeing, a bizarre idea to begin with but one with the clear intention of frightening the NLRB into a more submissive role. See union organizer Mike Elk's recent article in In These Times for a more detailed breakdown of the tug-of-war going on in this story.

Like the rest of the South, South Carolina is a "right-to-work" state, or as labor activists say, "right-to-work-for-less", which makes it attractive to corporations wanting to establish "run-away" plants to get away from unions.

Although the South has been promoting its low wages and docile workforce since the days of Henry Grady, that type of promotion continued to be a founding principle through what was to become the "Sunbelt South" in the 1950s through the 1990s. Here's how Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais described the practice in their 1955 book, Labor's Untold Story:

"The run-away-plant movement ... has become the accepted policy of big business. ... (It) was to have a two-fold effect: the attainment of maximum profits through lower wages in newer areas and weakening of unions through unemployment in older areas. The run-away-plant movement was underwritten by the government which under the Defense Production Act allowed the issuance of `certificates of necessity' carrying a high amortization tax so that the plants could be paid for out of untaxed profits."

For the government now to be on the side of union workers is an unbearable outrage to pro-corporate Southern elites like U.S. Sen. Jim Demint, R-S.C., who said the NLRB members were acting like "thugs".

Turn back the clock just a year or two and what you have is a Republican-dominated NLRB that allowed plenty of corporate anti-union thuggery. In the so-called Kentucky River cases, the NLRB made it easier for companies to designate workers as "supervisors" and thus strip them of their right to organize. One company in Mississippi, Croft Metals, Inc., of Magnolia, Miss., refused to count the results of a union election at its plant for more than four years, and got away with it, waiting long enough to be able to name its workers "supervisors." Union observers said a majority of the workers supported joining a union.

It's no accident Southern workers earn less and have fewer benefits and workplace protections than any other workers in the country. Boeing is acting much the same way as the textile industry when it set up shop in the "Cheap South" a century ago.

Come South where there's a "plentiful supply of cheap labor," Henry Grady told Northern businessmen after the Civil War. Soon the textile industry would re-locate from New England to the South, and a century later it would relocate again to Mexico and then China.

The same principle is driving the bulk of international trade agreements, from NAFTA on. The agreements, for all the high-faluting ballyhoo about their benefits, essentially seek to take advantage of the cheap workers in Mexico, Asia, and elsewhere across the Global South.

However, there's a rising consciousness about these unprincipled principles, and that's the good news. For a poor region or nation to want jobs and industry is understandable, and so is aggressive recruitment of industry, but why do cheap labor and a docile workforce have to be part of the package? At what point does that become a Faustian bargain?

The passing of Hazel Dickens, and the ongoing grand tradition of the music of the people

2011-05-04T19:07:00.000-07:00

(The painting you see is Thomas Hart Benton's 1934 The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley, which is located in the University of Kansas Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas.)

I remember the first time I heard Hazel Dickens sing her classic Black Lung and thinking how rare it is you hear such raw, honest emotion in a song. It's a song that's primitive, like honesty often is, and angry and full of good old righteous indignation at social injustice.

"He went to the boss man, but he closed the door," she sings about the worn-out coal miner who's the subject of her song. "It seems you're not wanted when you're sick and you're poor." Later, after that coal miner dies, the boss man shows up "with his little bunch of flowers." To that, she says, "take back those flowers. ... The die has been cast."

Dickens died April 22, another milestone in the rich history of people's music in this country. A lot of people may have never heard of her. One of a family of thirteen who lived in a three-room shack in Montcalm, West Virginia, she was a living link to singers like Ella May Wiggins, the labor minstrel during the Depression-era textile strikes in North Carolina who was shot to death by anti-labor goons. The last words of the 29-year-old mother of five were: "Lord a-mercy, they done shot and killed me." Her murderers were never brought to justice.

This is the real America, the one beneath the shiny veneer the Wall Street public relations types put out there.

It's a tradition goes at least back to John Henry, and it's one that should be taught be in schools. Did you learn about it when you went to school? I doubt it. There's about as much chance of that as there was you got a scintillating lesson on what happened at Haymarket Square in Chicago in 1886.

How rich is this tradition? Listen to Sarah Ogan's Come All You Coal Miners from 1944. The first time I heard that song I wondered, "How in the world did she get away with that?" Talk about class consciousness in the Southern working class. Listen to her lyrics:

Coal miner, won't you wake up and open your eyes and see
What the dirty capitalist system is doing to you and me.

Of course, the tradition includes Florence Reece and her Which Side Are You On?, the anthem of labor protest that has reached far beyond the coal mine industry injustice that inspired it. Like Dickens and Ogan, Reece knew whereof she sang. She was the wife of a coal-mining labor organizer who was hunted by Sheriff J.H. Blair's thugs.

Better known are Woody Guthrie, Joe Hill, and their many labor songs. They're all part of an international tradition that goes back to the French Revolution's La Marseillaise and the Paris Commune's L'Internationale. When the Polish shipyard workers created the anti-Soviet, freedom-seeking Solidarity movement in the 1980s, their minstrel was Jacek Kaczmarski, the Bob Dylan of Poland, a poet as much as a musician.

One of my prize possessions is a rendition of the immigrant song "De Colores" by Baldemar Velasquez and Aguila Negra, itself an anthem for Latino workers in this country.

All forms of music have had their rebels who composed, sang, and performed on behalf of the people--Beethoven and Mussorgsky in classical music, Kurt Weill in popular opera, Charlie Haden in jazz, Jimmy Reed's Big Boss Man in the blues, Steve Earle in country music, Rage Against the Machine in rock. These are some who come to mind, but the list is too long to include all.

This is the tradition Hazel Dickens represented. Too bad you didn't read this in your newspaper or see and hear it on the TV and radio news.

"Uncle Earl" would tell Walker, Ryan & Co. a thing or two

2011-04-30T07:36:00.000-07:00

(To the left you see a photograph of Earl K. Long on the stump, provided with permission from the Leon Trice Political Photographs Collection, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University. You can check out the collection online.)

“Uncle” Earl K. Long, three-time governor of Louisiana and premier Southern prophet and philosopher, once gave a speech in Alexandria, La., that blasted the “fiscal conservatives” of his day who ranted and raved about too much government and high taxes at the same time they were stuffing the people’s money into the pockets of the rich.

“Some sapsuckers talk about cutting down taxes,” Earl bellowed to an approving crowd of thousands one hot day in 1959. “Where are they going to start cutting expenses? … On the little children, enjoying the school lunches? Or on those fine old people, white-haired against the sunset of life?”

Meanwhile, Earl said, the wealthy “sit there swallowing hundred-dollar bills like a bullfrog swallows minners—if you chunked them as many as they want they’d bust.”

Re-reading A.J. Liebling’s classic book, The Earl of Louisiana, recently gave me a new appreciation of Earl Long, and it made me realize how much the South and the nation are slipping back to the days that gave rise to Longism in Louisiana and populist revolts across the land, days when a handful of financiers and other Wall Street types controlled the legislatures and Congress while people struggled to survive on low wages, no benefits, and no protection from government.

Earl Long never met the billionaire Koch brothers, but he knew their kind, the behind-the-scenes backers of anti-union, corporate boardroom politicians like Wisconsin’s current Republican governor, Scott Walker, the man who pushed through $140 million in tax breaks for corporations and then went after public employee unions on the pretext of fixing his state’s failing budget.

Later, Walker’s colleague from Wisconsin, U.S. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., got his fellow Republicans in the House to back a budget deal that finances a $4 trillion handout to corporations and the rich by cutting $6 trillion from programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Don’t doubt for a minute that Social Security is next on the GOP chopping block.

In other words, “those fine old people, white-haired against the sunset of life” get the shaft while Charles and David Koch get richer.

And what an inspiration Walker has been for his fellow Republicans in the South.

Georgia, the state that recently aped Arizona’s anti-immigrant, circle-the-wagons hysteria by cracking down on brown-skinned construction workers and field hands, has a state House-passed budget under consideration that slashes education funding at the same time it lowers income taxes for the rich. Florida and South Carolina are considering similar proposals.

Mississippi, the nation’s most conservative state according to some polls, continues to be an inspiration, too. Politicians in Virginia are hoping to embed the state’s anti-union “right-to-work” law in its constitution, much like Ol’ Ross Barnett was able to do here back in the early ‘60s.

Thank goodness, people are finally standing up to these assaults. Everyone knows about the 100,000 protesters who filled the state Capitol in Madison, Wis., during Walker’s attack on workers there. Other protests have followed in other states, including Southern states like Tennessee. Here in Mississippi, striking steelworkers with Omnova Solutions in Columbus recently marched to a shareholders’ meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, to protest a company that could give its CEO a 90 percent pay raise (to $3.5 million a year) at the same time it moved to strip seniority and other worker rights.

Teachers unions in Alabama have helped block anti-union legislation in that state, much like the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance helped kill proposed Arizona-like anti-immigrant legislation here.

In the South, these clashes have given rise to some of the age-old issues that have always plagued the region. Some have questioned whether the GOP’s anti-public employee campaign might have a racial angle. Some 14.5 percent of public employees are black, and 23 percent of working black females are in public administration. The myth of the pampered, overpaid, underworked public employee isn’t that far removed from Ronald Reagan’s depiction of the “welfare queen.”

Race is another issue Uncle Earl would recognize. Too bad we don’t have him on the stump telling it like it is.

Mississippi workers protest pro-management bias in the state Workers' Compensation Commission

2011-04-20T15:03:00.000-07:00

Mississippi workers today began a three-day protest on the Gulf Coast against the state Workers' Compensation Commission and its reported bias in favor of employers and against workers.

A source close the labor action told this blog today that members of the Gulf Coast building trades associations, frustrated by what they see as workers' inability to get a fair hearing before the commission, formed a picket line this morning near the Beau Rivage casino in Biloxi, Miss. The source also said that casino officials have threatened the picketers with arrests if they didn't move.

The protesters plan to continue their picket until Friday at 12 noon.

This blog has been at the forefront in reporting on the Mississippi Workers' Compensation Commission and its rulings. According to a study by Jackson, Miss., attorney Roger Doolittle, members of the commission voted to reject administrative law judge decisions favoring workers between 75 and 91 percent of the time.

Stay tuned to Labor South. More will be coming on this story.

IKEA: Work with Unions at Home, Fight 'em in the South / The Southernization of Another Foreign-Owned Plant

2011-04-14T15:33:00.000-07:00

If you get a job at IKEA, the famous Swedish-based furniture manufacturer, you’ll do a lot better if you’re Swedish and not a Southerner from the United States.

At IKEA’s 335-worker plant near Danville, Va., workers start at $8 an hour and get 12 vacation days. They don’t get a choice on eight of those days. The company makes that decision.

However, if you work at one of IKEA’s plants in Sweden, the minimum wage is $19 an hour and you’re guaranteed five weeks of paid vacation.

These and other interesting facts reported recently in the Los Angeles Times point to an unsettling fact that most American workers—particularly Southern workers--wouldn’t like to admit but know deep down inside to be true: To foreign-owned companies opening or operating plants in their midst, they’re the same as the Mexicans and the Chinese who now do the cutting and sewing at the textile mills that once were here. In other words, cheap.

One of the many ironies of this is the fact that the community leaders in Danville and the state of Virginia put forth a $12 million incentives package to get IKEA, a plant they hoped would turn the tide of an area that once depended on tobacco and those long-gone textile mills.

They figured IKEA is a class act that will offer better wages and working conditions that any mill worker can could ever hope for. Even with the economic downturn, Danville’s median wage is more than $15 an hour.

After all, IKEA reported a 6 percent plus hike in profits in 2010. The company is an international giant.

What they got is a company that peopled its factory floors in Danville with temporary workers—one-third of the entire workforce—who come even cheaper and more docile because they never know how long the pay checks will keep coming in. They got a company that last fall dropped pay for its packing department workers from $9.75 an hour to $8 an hour.

Workers are so frustrated with the pay situation and also working conditions—unannounced-but-mandatory weekend shifts, strict and threatening workplace rules, intense pressure at the worksite—that a majority of them have said they’re interested in forming a union, Nathaniel Popper’s article in the L.A. Times says.

Most Swedish workers are unionized, and IKEA has a code of conduct that recognizes workers’ rights to organize. However, in Virginia, IKEA has hired a union-busting law firm to keep the union out, and it has required workers to attend anti-union meetings, much like Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn did with his workers in Tennessee some years back when they started talking union.

IKEA has an interesting history. It was founded by Ingvar Kamprad, a Sam Walton-like figure in Sweden’s furniture industry who undercut competitors with super-low prices as he made his company a global retail giant.

Like Mr. Sam in Arkansas, Kamprad was so driven to beat the competition that he cut secret deals with hardline Communist rulers in Soviet-dominated Poland in the early 1960s to transport factory equipment to that country so he could take advantage of its dirt-cheap workforce and conditions. Read Malcolm Gladwell’s account in the March 28 edition of New Yorker magazine.

Of course, Kamprad is not the first industrialist to sign a deal with the devil to get a good return on his investment. As Gladwell recounts, L’Oréal’s Eugène Schueller collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. Crusading journalist George Seldes long ago chronicled how Henry Ford, Standard Oil, J.P. Morgan and William Randolph Hearst did business with and provided funding and other support to Hitler, Mussolini, and Spain’s Francisco Franco before World War II.

The two-faced hypocrisy of many foreign industrialists who invest in the U.S. South was demonstrated in a 1981 essay by corporate consultant Richard A. Beaumont. “It’s incredible but true that I will sit in the office of a large chemical company somewhere in Germany and the guy will tell me with a straight face the trouble with American employers is that they are anti-union and that they don’t understand their social responsibilities. Five minutes later he’s saying, `Now, when I go to the South, how do I operate on a non-union basis.’”

A tribute to good friend Marty Fishgold and others in a passing era of New York City's labor movement

2011-04-09T10:42:00.000-07:00

The recent death of Robert “Bob” Fitch, a longtime New York City labor activist and writer, was another marker in the passing of an era in the Big Apple. It brought back a personal and painful reminder of an earlier marker, the death of veteran labor editor Martin Fishgold last August, and also that of organizer Charles Ensley last June.

Bob Fitch

Bob Fitch, who died on March 4, was a rarefied soul, a true intellectual whose brilliant exegeses and analyses on the various labor conference panels I served with him—the most recent being at the “How Class Works” conference in Stony Brook, N.Y., last summer—often left me scratching my hand with wonder.

A man who looked at least 20 years younger than his 72 years, Fitch was the author of many papers, essays, and other works, including the 1996 book, The Assassination of New York, an account of the power of real estate moguls and Wall Street in his city. “So much of what’s attributed to anonymous global forces—like the deindustrialization of the city and its transformation into a global postindustrial metropolis—were consciously guided by bankers, developers and their hired hands,” wrote Doug Henwood in his recent tribute to Fitch in The Nation magazine. “They used all the instruments of state power—subsidies, zoning laws, eminent domain—to get their way.”

But they didn’t escape the scrutiny of Bob Fitch, who knew that Democrats were just as guilty as Republicans in caving to such powers. His was a voice that will be missed.

Martin Fishgold

(To the right you see my "impressionistic" photograph of Marty Fishgold from our trip in June 2009 to Pittsburgh, where we both spoke at a labor conference. Here Marty is his cool-looking self at a bridge near PNC Park, where we'd just watched my beloved Pirates beat the New York Mets. The photograph was copied from a shot I took with my old Olympus Superzoom 90, thus what I choose to call its "impressionistic" quality.)

After receiving a call from a mutual friend last August that Marty Fishgold had died, I quickly contacted Bob Fitch for confirmation. “Yes, Joe, I think it’s as bad as you’ve heard,” Bob said. Fishgold had indeed died at the age of 70.

As I’ve written in earlier postings for this blog, Marty Fishgold was a personal friend, an unlikely friend, in many ways, for this born-and-bred Southerner.

Marty was a Brooklyn-born New Yorker who grew up in one of the multi-level brick apartment buildings in what is now the city’s Russian section in Brighton Beach, near Coney Island. He gave my wife Suzanne and me a tour of his old stomping grounds during one of our trips up there. He was the descendant of Russian Jewish immigrants himself, socialists who opposed the Czar and brought their radical ideas with them to their new homeland.

A former president of the International Labor Communications Association and longtime editor of The Unionist, the publication of AFSCME Local 371 in New York, Marty carried on the torch of his father and grandfather, championing the cause of the working man and woman all his life. He could be a tough, even severe, critic, as much of the labor movement itself as of the corporate bosses and their political operatives.

Again and again he called for more democracy within the labor movement, and for a freewheeling labor press that’s not beholden to and subjugated by the movement’s own overpaid bosses.

I first met him at a conference in Chicago, and I immediately had a good feeling about the guy, his honesty, his integrity, his lack of pretense, and his convictions. We later met and joined forces at labor and media conferences in Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, and New York.

“Hey, Joe, I figured out what defines the working class,” he once told me over the phone. “The working class mows its own lawn.”

I agreed and laughed and thought about the countless yards I’ve mowed. Then I remembered my own big yard at my house outside town and the fact that my wife and I now hire somebody to mow it. Have I lost my credentials? I asked myself. Marty may not have intended it that time, but he always made you think.

I brought him down to Ole Miss once to speak to students here. He liked the South, poked fun at our food---“Whaddayu call that stuff, chili-cheese what?” he asked after my wife introduced him to that artery-choking Southern delicacy known as chili-cheese fries. He came down to visit several times, and whenever he did, he always brought with him a load of real New York bagels. They were delicious.

My best memories of Marty are those when we visited him and his late wife Karen at their home on Long Island. I loved the literature at his house—the rare collection of early editions of Jack London’s books, the collection of early 20th century articles from the radical magazine The Masses. On a table across the room was a photograph of the young Marty, a Brando look-alike, I remarked, and Karen agreed.

Marty was a writer as well as an editor and activist. I know he was working on a novel, The Portuguese Poet, and sent me excerpts. I was impressed.

Karen died not very long before Marty’s own death. A sweet lady and quiet, steadying force in her husband’s life, she had fought a valiant, years-long battle against cancer. It was a huge blow to Marty to lose his lifelong partner. Soon after she died, their beloved Siberian husky, Natasha, also died. I’m sure Marty spent many hours on his sailboat thinking through the losses in his life.

He was a good friend even though we had our disagreements, even some strong ones toward the end. He was one of the tough guys, big and headstrong, but with a heart just as big and just as strong in its empathy for regular folks.

Charles Ensley

I didn’t know Charles Ensley, but I remember hearing Marty Fishgold and others in the New York movement talk about him. Like Marty, he was a fighter on the frontlines, a champion of the city’s social workers for decades as president of the 15,000-member Social Services Employees Union Local 371 (Marty’s local).

“Mr. Ensley was independent, outspoken and often irascible, clashing with other union leaders as well as mayors of both major parties,” labor writer Steven Greenhouse wrote in his obituary in the New York Times.

Ensley, 69, died in June 2010.

A native of Alabama, Ensley was committed to rooting out corruption within labor’s ranks, whether it was vote fraud or embezzlement. He also championed racial equality, and as a black man even took on a top official within Mayor David Dinkins’ administration when he felt she was unfairly bypassing qualified whites—and the city’s civil service rules--in an effort to hire more blacks.

Ensley’s father had worked at the Birmingham News in Birmingham, Ala., and “fought for equal pay for the newspaper’s black employees,” Greenhouse wrote. That’s where the son “learned to stand up for the rights of the downtrodden.”

Judge sides with labor and against union-buster

2011-04-08T07:27:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick item for Labor South:
A federal judge has ruled in favor of labor and against a union-busting outfit in Memphis. See this article that appeared today in the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Given the Republican tilt in the nation's judiciary these days, victories like these are reasons to celebrate.

A view from Taipei of Japan and man's resilience

2011-04-04T17:23:00.000-07:00

(To the left you see a photograph of Taipei 101, taken by my wife, Suzanne Centenio Atkins)

TAIPEI – I’m sitting in my room on the 17th floor of my hotel, looking out the window at the world’s second tallest building, the Taipei 101. Behind me, the BBC news continues to report on the unfolding catastrophe in Japan—earthquake, tsunami, nuclear plant explosions, thousands dead or missing.

A former journalism student at Ole Miss (and my very able graduate assistant), Takehiko Kambayashi, now a correspondent for the German Press Agency (DPA) living in Saitama, just north of Tokyo, sent an e-mail that he “thought the roof would collapse” after the initial 8.9 earthquake that hit northeast Japan.

“Many aftershocks while I kept filing,” he reported. “I will keep filing. … The quake-stricken area was a lovely part of Japan. We’ve been there many times and, in fact, my family was planning to visit there in May.”

Here in Taiwan, 1,400 miles to the south, President Ma Ying-jeou placed the entire island on tsunami alert. However, by the time the tsunami reached Taiwan it was only a half a meter high. The Taiwanese take no chances. This is a country prone to earthquakes and typhoons. An earthquake in 1999 killed 3,000 people here. In 1963, a typhoon named Gloria flooded the city of Taipei for three days.

Taipei today is a city of roughly 3 million people.

When the tsunami hit Japan, I could hardly tear my eyes from the television.

This was a disaster of biblical proportions--whole towns washed away, multi-story buildings collapsed like stick houses, sea-hardy boats capsized as easily as a child’s toy in a bathtub, and then all the people caught in an unfathomable maelstrom. I was in my hometown of Oxford, Miss., roughly 300 miles north of the Gulf Coast, when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, and I remember winds still fierce enough to take down nearby trees. I feel a similar helplessness and anguish for the distant suffering that I know is taking place.

The earthquake hit on the day of my arrival here, and it has been the topic of everyone’s conversation ever since. Taiwan was once part of Japan. The Chinese ceded it after losing a war to its eastern neighbor in 1895. Once known as Formosa, Taiwan stayed under Japanese control until 1945. Four years later, it became the refuge for Chiang Kai-Shek’s army fleeing the Communist takeover of the mainland and was declared the national Republic of China.

The early years of rule by the Generalissimo and his Kuomintang party were so utterly corrupt that a London Daily News reporter claimed that “the Formosans are probably the only Orientals who wouldn’t be sorry to see the Japanese back.”

(At the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall)

Yet the culture here has always remained resolutely Taiwanese and Chinese, seen everywhere in the flourishing night markets, the world-famous cuisine, the performances of traditional opera, dance and music, and in the Buddhist and Tao shrines and temples across the land.

(One of Taipei's thriving markets)

“Taiwan represents an unbroken line of five thousand years of Chinese culture,” says Martin Kriegel, a New York-bred attorney and now expatriate who has been living in Taiwan for a year. “In Mainland China during the Cultural Revolution many aspects of traditional Chinese culture were suppressed, or were attempted to be eradicated entirely. Today both the Taiwanese and Chinese cultures seem alive and flourishing.”

Back in my room, night has fallen, and I’m still staring at the Taipei 101 building, 101 floors, 1,667 feet, rising high above the rest of Taipei, dwarfing everything around it, a monument to a land once seen as a bulwark against world communism, a place where American presidents raised toasts with the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang to communism’s eventual defeat. Today the United States recognizes mainland China as the true and legitimate China.

Taipei 101, completed in 2004, was built to “let the international community see Taiwan’s limitless potential,” a placard inside the building proclaims. Six years later, Dubai built the Burj Khalifa, 162 stories and 2,717 feet high, another testament to those dreams, hopes, ambitions of man that are so vulnerable to the destructive whims of nature and politics but are also so ever resilient. That human resilience will be seen in northern Japan, as it was in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast, when the tears have abated, and man inevitably returns to rebuild.

Look to Fritz Lang's Metropolis to understand Scott Walker and the worker movement rising against him & his ilk

2011-03-31T08:07:00.000-07:00

(To the right you see the original 1927 theatrical release poster for Metropolis, subject to U.S. fair use copyright law and used here to illustrate points cited in this posting.)

A scene in Fritz Lang's landmark 1927 silent film Metropolis perfectly characterizes the mindset of Republicans like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker who are bound and determined to destroy unions. In the scene, Joh Frederson, the industrialist ruler of the hellish futuristic city of Metropolis, has learned that some among the armies of workers who built his city are secretly meeting in its lower depths.

"I should like to know what my workers are doing in the catacombs," Frederson says in a sneering, sinister tone.

Well, "his" workers are meeting with their leader Maria in the hope of their eventual delivery from the misery of their dehumanized lives.

Lang's great testament to workers' humanity and against the autocratic rulers who would deny them their rights provides a good analogy to what is taking place across the land today as Republican governors in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and elsewhere, backed by well-heeled financiers like the Koch brothers, proceed with their slash-and-burn policies aimed at destroying every gain workers have made since the 1930s.

In a way, they've done organized labor in this country a good deed, because they've awakened a sleeping giant. Thousands of protesters in Wisconsin suddenly made the nation and world aware that workers in this country are not the sheep-like herds depicted at the beginning of Lang's Metropolis.

A movement is unfolding in this country that faces enormous odds--an entrenched anti-union phalanx of political, industrial, media, and religious corporatists--but which may yet again prove the power of the people in what's left of our democracy.

Here in the U.S. South, which the above-mentioned phalanx has always considered its own very special turf, labor soldiers are marching forward. Long-striking steelworkers with Omnova Solutions in Columbus, Mississippi, recently marched all the way to Cleveland, Ohio, to protest a company that could give its CEO a 90 percent pay increase (to $3.5 million a year) at the same time it moved to strip seniority and other worker rights. See Mischa Gaus' story in Labor Notes about the issue.

Teachers unions in Alabama have helped block anti-union legislation in that state, just as the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance (MIRA) and its allies in recent days were able to kill Arizona-like anti-immigrant legislation in the Mississippi Legislature.

The sex discrimination lawsuit on behalf of Wal-Mart worker Betty Dukes and hundreds of thousands of other women against the Arkansas-based retail giant has finally reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where their battle now promises to get the national attention it deserves. Other corporate giants like Fed-Ex, Del Monte, Bank of America, Microsoft, and Costco have rallied to Wal-Mart's side, of course. And let's not forget the U.S. Chamber of Commerce--as if all this support were necessary before this pro-corporate Supreme Court. Let's just see if the scales of justice tilt toward workers or the Joh Fredersons of the world.

At least in South Africa Wal-Mart is getting its comeuppance. The nation's Competition Tribunal has delayed a hearing on Wal-Mart's bid to merge with the huge South African retailer Massmart for up to two months.

Meanwhile, the United Auto Workers is moving ahead with a proposed boycott of at least one of the foreign transplant companies that have located in the U.S. South to avoid unions. This will be a global boycott, utilizing ties that the UAW has made with labor and political leaders around the world, to force the company or companies to recognize worker rights and allow for fair elections.

Some have compared the UAW's pending boycott to that of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers back in the 1960s.

Even in the stark world Lang depicted in his movie, the spark of human justice would not die. Frederson's own son sees the evils laid upon the workers who fuel the engines of the monster city and joins Maria on their behalf. Frederson himself, after inflicting so much suffering, even has a change of heart at the end, although Lang later said he hated the ending of his movie. It was too false, he said.

Politicians like Scott Walker are fond of saying, "Oh, unions once had their role, but they're obsolete today."

Tell that to the public employees, teachers, steelworkers and Wal-Mart workers, to the demonstrators, marchers, and strikers, not only in Wisconsin but also in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and other places we'll be reading about tomorrow.

Workers and students protest in Tennessee as workers' rights are threatened--not only in the U.S. but in Asia, too

2011-03-15T19:08:00.000-07:00

(To the right is Father Peter Nguyen Hung Cuong of the Vietnamese Migrant Workers & Brides Office in Taipei)

I'm thousands of miles away in Taipei, but I'm heartened to see brave young students join union members in taking a stand against anti-union bills before Tennessee's state legislature in Nashville.

Seven protesters were arrested Tuesday and accused of resisting arrest and disorderly conduct after they tried to make their voices heard before a state Senate committee considering the bills.

Most of those arrested were from Memphis, and several were University of Memphis students and members of the Progressive Students Alliance there.

Joining the student protesters were hundreds of union members rallying outside the state Capitol.

It's one thing for demonstrators to make a show of force in a historically pro-union state like Wisconsin. Quite another to do it in the South, where a solid phalanx of the political, industrial, religious, and media elite has remained virulently anti-union for decades. It is that same union-busting phalanx--not Southern workers--that has given the South it's anti-union reputation.

Southern politicians don't want to be outdone by Wisconsin Republicans, so Southern workers need to be prepared for an assault on their rights that goes even beyond the assaults they've already weathered in this region of poor pay, poor benefits, and a rich-poor divide unequaled anywhere else in the nation.

I'm here in Taiwan, where I've been talking to migrant workers from Vietnam and the Philippines, who've come here to earn a decent living for their families back home. They have their proper documents, but that doesn't protect them. They are subjected to the vicious greed that pervades the globe's neo-liberal economies and which depends on keeping workers down and their corporate bosses on top.

It's an old story in the U.S. South and in the Global South, and only an awakening of worker consciousness is going to change things. We're seeing that happen in Wisconsin, Tennessee, and elsewhere. It's even happening here in Asia, where the elite wax nostalgic about the coolie past but even the lowest of workers are beginning to demand their rights.

"The employers treat us like slaves," Filipino worker Nelva Baldon told me Sunday."We understand we are workers, and we have to work, but they treat us like slaves."

An activist with several migrant worker organizations, Baldon has worked as a caregiver for Taiwanese families for the past six years, a job that she describes as "24-7" with few legal protections against exploitation. She spoke to me during her one partial day off during the week, right after mass on Sunday morning. She said she would have to return to work at 5 p.m. that day.

Female migrant workers have it the hardest over here, being vulnerable to sexual as well as workplace exploitation. Father Peter Nguyen Hung Cuong of the Catholic Church Hsinchu Diocese and Vietnamese Migrant Workers & Brides Office told me some hair-raising stories about such exploitation in an interview Tuesday. I'll be relaying those later.

The Catholic Church in Taiwan is at the center of the migrant worker issue, providing a place of refuge as well as legal assistance to workers.

In the long-term neo-liberal game plan, how many more years will it be before U.S. workers are in the same boat as these migrant workers? Will they someday be forced to leave their homes and country to find work in a foreign land, amid the hostility that Mexican and Guatemalan workers face today in the United States?

It's not as far-fetched as you might think.

A report from Taipei: Watching Japan closely

2011-03-13T20:28:00.000-07:00

Just a quick report from Taipei, Taiwan, where I've been researching the migrant worker issue here. Of course, here as elsewhere the topic of concern and conversation is the horrible earthquake and subsequent tsunami and nuclear threat from damaged reactors in Japan.

My good friend, Takehiko Kambayashi, a journalist living north of Tokyo and correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and other publications, sent an e-mail out to me and others that he felt the shock and the aftershocks from Friday's earthquake at his home in Saitama. "Thought the roof would collapse. Many aftershocks while I kept filing stories. I will keep filing."

Thank goodness, Takehiko and his family are safe. Our hearts go out to the Japanese people.

Here in Taipei, a tsunami alert was issued but thus far no problems have been reported. The mountains along the Taiwanese coastline offer some consolation in such situations, but this is a typhoon-and-earthquake-prone land and no one is taking what has happened in Japan for granted. An earthquake in 1999 took over 3,000 lives in Taiwan. The typhoon Gloria flooded the city of Taipei for three days back in 1963, a flood that began on September 11 of that year.

I will be back reporting back with more details later.

Labor South Travels to Taipei, Taiwan

2011-03-08T14:52:00.000-08:00

I will be traveling to Taipei, Taiwan, over the next week and a half, conducting research into an issue that seems to be everywhere: migrant workers.

It's certainly an issue here in the U.S. South, where migrants from Latin America are now tending the fields and working the assembly lines while politicians utilize them as a convenient scapegoat in these hard economic times.

Migrant workers find themselves in similar situations everywhere in the Global South, and beyond. Recall my reportage for this blog from my trip to Singapore last May.

Lawmakers in Taipei in recent months proposed a law eerily similar to the pre-U.S. Civil War "Fugitive Slave Act", penalizing migrant workers who try to escape 14-to-16-hour work days and the often slave-like working and living conditions of their lives.

Hundreds of thousands of workers from Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines have come to Taiwan in recent years to work in construction or as domestic workers, often arriving deep in debt from the exorbitant brokers' fees charged them to be able to come. Organizations such as the Vietnamese Migrant Workers and Brides Office and the Migrant Worker Empowerment Network have worked on their behalf, and the Taiwanese government has tried to put some restrictions on the brokers' fees.

However, many brokers have been able to circumvent these through deals with agents in the migrants' home countries.

I'll be reporting on these and related issues very soon. Keep posted!

Big Brother Is Watching You, Migrant Workers!

2011-03-03T14:38:00.000-08:00

Immigrants in Mississippi must feel like a giant eye is watching their every move these days.

Officials with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency recently conducted four days of raids in Jackson and surrounding towns, arresting 58 immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and other Central American countries and prompting calls of protest for their heavy-handed methods.

The Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance (MIRA) reported that the ICE agents conducted raids pretending to be Domino Pizza delivery men and Avon representatives and thus convincing immigrants to open the doors of their homes.

ICE agents said some of those arrested had criminal records, including some who had been deported before and who returned illegally to this country. These face long prison terms if convicted.

MIRA organizers said they received reports of ICE agents holding guns to people's heads, threatening witnesses, and pushing and shoving suspects. "We believe ICE is targeting the leadership and economic base of the immigrant community," MIRA spokeswoman Cynthia Newhall said in a statement.

The raids come at a time when the Mississippi Legislature is considering Arizona-like proposals to force a major crackdown on workers without proper documentation and, some say, expose any non-native to prejudicial treatment from law enforcement agents.

The nation's largest workplace raid on undocumented workers in history took place at Howard Industries' electrical transformer plant in Laurel, Mississippi, in 2008. More than 600 workers were detained, and most of them were eventually deported.

After denying knowledge that the company's workers lacked documentation for more than two years, Howard recently pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate federal laws on immigration. The plea was entered in U.S. District Court in Hattiesburg February 24. The company agreed to a fine totaling $2.5 million.

Four African-American women subsequently filed a lawsuit against Howard for discrimination by repeatedly refusing to hire them at a time when the company was hiring workers without proper documentation. The four were eventually hired after the 2008 raid.

The Southern Roots of the Battle in Wisconsin

2011-02-24T14:26:00.000-08:00

The battle between public workers and union-busting Republicans in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and other states has its roots in a region where union-busters, with few exceptions, have held sway since the Civil War.

The Southern threads to the confrontation now taking place in the Wisconsin capital of Madison are many and complex, but you can start with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker himself. When he says he needs to gut workers' rights to preserve fiscal integrity, he's echoing every rant and rave that came out of Gene Talmadge's mouth in 1930s Georgia. Talmadge was pretty typical of most Southern political demagogues. They hated unions every bit as much as they despised an uppity black.

Helping to finance the current assault on workers' rights in Wisconsin--as well as similar assaults in other states--are behind-the-scenes bigwigs like David and Charles Koch, the anti-union billionaire oil men who've taken the U.S. Supreme Court's pro-corporate Citizens United ruling and run with it. They and their Virginia-based Americans for Prosperity organization have pumped millions of dollars into GOP coffers, and they're at the heart of a so-called "network" that includes enough corporate, media, and judicial powerhouses to entrench the corporate state in this nation for decades to come.

Social gatherings of the network--as reported by national columnist Joe Conason--have included celebrities such as U.S. Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia as well as media corporate mouthpieces Glenn Beck and Charles Krauthammer.

As Nation columnist Eric Alterman pointed out recently, this latest wave of right-wingers is simply realizing the corporate takeover of the country that former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell (a Virginian) envisioned in his notorious 1971 memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce director. Powell essentially called for the establishment of a bona fide plutocracy.

Workers, however, are taking a strong stand. The world has heard the protests in Madison, Wisconsin. Similar protests in Indiana this week forced Republican legislators to back away from a proposed "right-to-work" law that would have barred unions from requiring all employees to pay dues in exchange for representation.

These so-called "right to work" laws--the result of the GOP-and-Southern Democrat-backed Taft-Hartley Act of 1947--exist in most Southern states today and are a major impediment to union organizing.

Conservative Southern pols aren't just idly tuning into Fox News and watching the goings-on in Wisconsin with detached amusement, however. They know an opportunity when they see one.

Virginia lawmakers are hoping to embed that state's right-to-work law in the state constitution--much like Mississippi did during the administration of arch-segregationist Gov. Ross Barnett.

Earlier this year Alabama banned public employee union dues that might be used in political campaigns. In North Carolina, of course, public employees don't even have the right to bargain collectively, the reason for a rally by labor and civil rights organizations in Raleigh just this week.

Whether people are union members are not, they'd better be aware of the ultimate goals of these right-wing organizations and their leaders. Those goals stretch far beyond unions.

Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush are wanting states to declare bankruptcy so they can nullify existing pension agreements, according to Jane McAlevey of Nation magazine.

As for the Koch brothers, listen to these goals expressed by David Koch when he ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket back in 1980:

- Eliminate corporate and personal income taxes
- Eliminate minimum-wage laws
- Eliminate Social Security

In other words, the Koch brothers and their ilk would like to turn the nation into the Old (sometimes called New) South, a place where workers have few rights and earn bottom-level wages with minimal benefits, political decisions come out of the corporate boardrooms, and environmental and other protections are scant or just plain non-existent.

Is this what the nation wants? Is this what was meant by the saying, "The South shall rise again"?

US Uncut plans major protest Feb. 26 to hold corporations accountable

2011-02-23T12:00:00.000-08:00

Protest is in the air, and it's about time!

The US Uncut organization is planning a nationwide and international protest on Saturday, February 26, to "hold major, multinational corporations accountable for dodging their income tax obligations and then leaving average American workers to bear the burden of their negligence," says US Uncut activist Betsy Chapman.

An offshoot of UK Uncut, the organization actually was started by Carl Gibson of Jackson, Miss., and it is now operating in 29 U.S. cities, including Jackson. It is hoping to set up many more local offices across the country, including in my own hometown, Oxford, Miss.

The February 26 protest will be part of an international protest against tax-avoiding corporations and the politicians who curry favor with them while slashing much-needed programs that serve the public as well as slashing or trimming back public jobs, as we're now seeing in Wisconsin and other states.

President Obama has called for trimming or eliminating as many as 200 federal programs in his latest budget, and Republicans would like to push those and more cuts to draconian levels.

Meanwhile nearly two-thirds of U.S. corporations don't even pay income taxes, taking advantage of tax myriad loopholes and offshore tax havens, according to US Uncut.

According to the U.S. Government Accounting Office, those havens are enjoyed by 83 of the top 100 publicly traded corporations operating in the United States.

Check out the US Uncut Web site for more information.

The Wisconsin Protest: Workers Take A Stand

2011-02-22T13:51:00.000-08:00

These are exciting times, not only in the Middle East but also Wisconsin. People are rising up and telling truth to power. The truth is they've had enough. Like Mississippi civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer said back in the day: They're "sick and tired of being sick and tired."

The U.S. labor movement is on the line in Wisconsin, where a union-busting governor would like to strip workers of their legal right to organize and speak as one. In the same state where the bottomless coffers of the GOP money machine recently brought down one of the U.S. Senate's most progressive members, Russ Feingold, the true aim of that political/corporate machine and its ward heelers and precinct captains has become clear: DESTROY UNIONS.

Wisconsin is a long way from the U.S. South, but the union-busters got their inspiration from down here. They're working hard to gut public sector unions across the country and enact so-called right-to-work laws beyond the South and Midwest. They're even looking to woebegotten Mississippi--the nation's poorest state in most categories regarding workers--as a shining citadel. Why do I say that? Well, this is the state that not only enacted a right-to-work law, it put it into its state constitution. That is what other states are now hoping to do.

I'll soon be reporting more on this and the Southern connections in an upcoming posting.

Take a look at this video by Matt Wisniewski to get some inspiration as you read the headlines and watch the evening news about the goings-on in Wisconsin. Enjoy the great music from the band Arcade Fire, too. The song is Rebellion. This is a people's movement. Power to the people!

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour: A master of the smoke-filled backrooms considers a presidential bid

2011-02-18T06:03:00.000-08:00

(The accompanying photograph of Haley Barbour is by Gage Skidmore.)

Twice in my life I have heard political experts say these words: “Haley Barbour has no chance.”

The first time was back in 1982 when the then-35-year-old Mississippian and former Nixon campaigner ran for the U.S. Senate against incumbent John C. Stennis, who first took office the year Barbour was born.

Barbour spent a million dollars in the state’s most expensive race up to then, gave the 81-year-old legend a one-two punch on his age—Mississippi needs “a senator for the ‘80s,” not a senator in his 80s, the message went. Stennis was tough, however. After convincing then-President Reagan not to campaign on Barbour’s behalf, the legend KO’d his ambitious opponent in a 64-36 percent vote and in 80 of Mississippi’s 82 counties.

Twenty-one years later, after a hugely successful career as a Republican operative, lobbyist and one of the Beltway’s premier insiders, Barbour ran for governor. Again political experts thumbed their noses. Let me paraphrase: ‘No way are the people of Mississippi going to elect the quintessential fat-cat lobbyist.”

When the bell rang this time, however, Barbour’s opponent was on the mat, victim of a $10.6 million campaign and a very smart politician who sported a pin on his lapel with the Mississippi flag and its Confederate insignia.

After nearly two terms as governor, Barbour is now considering a bid for the presidency, an eyebrow-raiser unless you remember this guy had the chutzpah at 35 to take on a Mississippi giant. “People will identify him with some of the Old South,” Tougaloo College political scientist Stephen Rozman naysayed to the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger. “How can he transcend that and have a national appeal where he can connect?”

Unquestioned is Barbour’s mastery of the smoke-filled backrooms. As Republican National Committee chair, he helped engineer the GOP takeover in Congress in 1994. As founder of the Barbour, Griffith & Rogers lobbying firm, he became one of the most connected men in Washington. His firm’s clients included the Swiss government (defending its old World War II-era Nazi accounts), Big Tobacco, Big Pharmaceuticals, former Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi, even the Kurdistan Regional Government.

Add Big Oil and Big Chemicals to the list, too, if you include Barbour’s other lobbying outfit, the National Environmental Strategies Company.

As head of the Republican Governors’ Association, Barbour helped raise tens of millions of dollars for GOP gubernatorial candidates.

Let’s just say Barbour has collected enough IOUs to fill several large suitcases.

But behind-the-scenes mastery was never enough for this politician. Thus that Senate race in 1982, that governor’s race in 2003, and now, maybe, possibly, the BIG ONE.

He’s probably the most powerful governor Mississippi has ever had. He turned the state Senate into his private duchy. Only Speaker Billy McCoy and the Democratically controlled House stood in the way of a complete takeover of Mississippi politics.

Still, as a presidential candidate, Barbour would be in a new ballgame altogether.

Every backroom deal would be subject to a new level of scrutiny, even in today’s Fox-dominated media, the kind that he got in 1997 when he had to testify before the U.S. Senate Governmental Affairs Committee about his Hong Kong moneyman pal Ambrous Young and Young’s financial support of the GOP in the 1994 election.

He has a conservative political record that should appeal to Tea Partyers—think of all those calls to cut Medicaid, education, mental health centers in the nation’s poorest state. However, that super-connected résumé, oozing as it does with the money-soaked, favor-currying culture that Tea Partyers as well as progressives despise, could pose a problem.

Then there’s that nagging Barbour penchant for gaffes, going all the way back to 1982 when the New York Times quoted him as telling an aide who used the word “coons” in referring to blacks that he was going to be “reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks.” Barbour insisted he was misquoted, but the foot-in-the-mouth syndrome was still there as recently as December when The Weekly Standard quoted him singing the praises of the segregationist Citizens Council in Yazoo City.

There’s the rub. Nobody quotes you in those smoke-filled backrooms.

The Atkins Plan for UAW Success in the South

2011-02-09T16:10:00.000-08:00

Back in May 2009, I wrote Cindy Estrada (now vice president) of the United Auto Workers a letter in response to her request for input about what might help the union to attain a stronger foothold in the South. The UAW's recent unveiling of a plan to devote $60 million toward organizing the South and Midwest prompted me to pull my letter back out of the files and see how much of it might still apply. A lot, I believe.

UAW President Bob King, speaking to Labor Notes, recently compared the new campaign to poker, saying it is the same as an "all-in-hand. If we lose, we'll die quicker. If we win, we rebuild the UAW."

Like the labor movement as a whole, the UAW is in a fight for survival. Just 350,000 workers carry a UAW card today, compared to 1.5 million in 1979. Across the movement, union membership is just 11.9 percent of the nation's workforce, a drop from 12.3 percent in 2009.

The big, potentially fatal thorn in the UAW's side is the foreign-owned, non-unionized transplant in the South--Nissan, Toyota, Hyundai, Mercedes. The UAW's agreement with the Big Three a couple years ago to allow new hires to start as low as $14 an hour helped cut the differential between unionized and non-unionized plants. Even if those foreign-owned companies may not pay union scale, they pay a lot more than most other Southern-based companies. So why should a Southerner join a union?

King and the UAW want at least to try to convince companies to allow intimidation-free elections to give workers a true choice, but if that doesn't work they're ready to wage global-sized corporate campaigns to shame the companies into allowing democracy to work in their workforce.

Still, it's an uphill fight with the withering attacks of proto-fascist Glenn Beck and the Fox News channel providing a constant anti-union drumbeat. There are lots of conservative blue-collar viewers in the South who've never had any contact with unions, much less benefited from a union tradition.

So let's look at the Atkins plan for UAW success in the South. I've done some editing of my letter to Estrada, eliminating segments that are now dated or irrelevant, but the bulk of it is unchanged. Let me know what you think.

Letter to the UAW

Hope you’re doing well. I’ve done a lot of thinking about our earlier discussions, and I have some ideas together I’d like to share with you.

I believe a strong labor movement—and a strong UAW—are not only important and needed for the South but for the nation as a whole. I think you’re right on target when you talk about a new message that focuses on “we together” rather than “what I can do for you (or you for me)”, more inclusiveness and greater density (or solidarity).

I actually think these goals can be achieved. I’m often the last optimist in the room, but in this case I feel history shows us it can be done. I remember the pre-civil rights-era South, a time when a truly “new” South was considered impossible. I also lived for a time in West Germany when the idea of a re-united Germany was considered a pipe dream. This is a challenging time we face, but it is also an exciting time, one of great opportunity for a rebirth.

Here in the South it may seem nearly impossible that a worker with Nissan or Toyota would “risk” his or her job security by joining a union, particularly when they’re making twice what their neighbors are making. Yet I’m going to outline some ideas below that offer ways to realize the “impossible dream” without making us all a bunch of foolish Don Quixotes! Some of them aren’t really so original, and some may indeed be foolish, but nothing’s lost by putting them out there.

A Social Movement

I agree with labor scholar Nelson Lichtenstein that the future of the labor movement—and thus its vanguard, the UAW—is to recapture its old identity as a social movement. The civil rights movement took its inspiration from the UAW’s 1937 sit-down strike in Flint, Mich., and other similar events, even converting old union songs into civil rights songs. That spirit needs to be revived. I think it would appeal to young people, their idealism and energy, give them a movement with which they can make their mark in history, align them with working people. That was a failure of the late ‘60s radicalism (and of unions): there was practically no solidarity between student radicals and workers (I know because I was there and in the middle of it!).

In my book Covering for the Bosses, I wrote about existing alliances in the South that show promise of a welding together of civil rights and worker rights, such as the Southern Faith, Labor, and Community Alliance. This group not only brings blacks and whites together but also Latinos. The UAW has been a strong supporter and needs to continue to nurture and be identified with such community action groups.

Worker Solidarity

My friend Marty Fishgold, a labor writer and activist in NYC (who died in 2010), (once) told me about how the IBM example might help the UAW here and elsewhere. IBM workers earned nice, enviable wages while workers at IBM suppliers had to scratch out a living on minimum wages. There was no worker solidarity. The same situation exists in the auto industry, certainly here down South. Worker solidarity is key to long-term success for the UAW, and to achieve it will likely require the Five-Year Plan you discussed. My suggestion is to mount a “Worker Pride” campaign that really identifies all of us as workers---“If you have a boss, you’re a worker”—and not to shy away from “working class identity” (here I think I differ from Nelson Lichtenstein). This identity today can be shared by assembly line workers and high-tech workers and educators (and journalists). Even Silicon Valley workers could be made to identify with it these days! Believe me, you’re never going to get “middle-class solidarity”, and I’m not sure if the middle class even exists any more.

This worker pride can be specifically applied to workers in the auto industry. They are part of the last bastion of people in the USA who actually MAKE things. Their industry accounts for 25 percent of U.S. manufacturing. Take pride in that role, and don’t just hand it over to the corporate boardrooms and let them rework it to their own interests. I’ll return later to some auto industry specifics as far as appealing to workers at Toyota, Nissan, etc.

By the way, as a note here: Never underestimate the desire of most of the management and ownership class in the South (and that includes their politicians) to destroy unions. They are relentless and will stop at nothing. So eventually a working class militancy will be needed to confront them.

A Proposed Five-Year Plan

The UAW has to reach beyond just card-holding members. It would include tapping into old-fashioned Southern populism (the left-leaning kind of an Earl Long or Big Jim Folsom, not the right-wing populism of a Pat Robertson or Newt Gingrich). Ideas: Sponsor BBQ picnics, fish fries, open to the public (with ample security, however!), tap into media online and radio, spend some cash for TV and newspaper ads, begin a recruiting plan to get some country music, rap, or rock singers on board (study who might be sympathetic—country music singers all sing about working class life, while many rap enthusiasts want the music to rediscover social consciousness) and maybe even some big name stars like a Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson or a Bruce Springsteen (appeal to their social consciousness so they won’t charge so much for helping!). What about an ad or sponsorship at a NASCAR race (My note: The UAW already does this, of course)? At the local level, a lot of these things don’t have to be expensive. The UAW needs to become part of the culture, the community, and it can’t wait until Toyota is organized.

Reaching out to Jobless Workers and to Intellectuals & Artists

The UAW does indeed have to reach beyond members and the plant workers it wants to become members. There has to be a solidarity between all workers as well as intellectuals and artists. Locate laid-off people who may be angry or downright militant enough to volunteer to help—whether by speaking to worker groups and participating in labor or worker schools (another suggestion) that could be set up. For that matter, I would open up membership or affiliation to non-plant workers, people sympathetic to the cause who might like to have that card in their pocket and be willing to contribute dues and other help.

Reaching Young People

Young people have idealism and energy, and not a lot of outlets out there for them to express those things. They need a movement. They have the tech savvy and the connections (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to spread the word. They can be recruited through UAW or labor-friendly speakers, lectures, workshops, film or documentary showings, etc. At present, they have little or no exposure to the labor movement.

Tapping into Local Issues

Here in Mississippi, education has been a perennial issue since the early 1980s (actually before). The UAW needs to join that dialogue, become active in promoting good education—whether it helps immediate organizing needs or not. This is a good way to tap into education leaders and activists who might not necessarily think of the labor movement as one of their causes. Believe it or not, Mississippi does have its progressives—in education, civil rights, environment, etc.—it’s just they need to be educated about how workers’ rights fit into that picture. This applies to other Southern states, too.

Dealing with the Transplants: It's more than wages. It's respect & dignity

I think the UAW needs to move way beyond wage questions in appealing to workers. Respect and dignity are bigger issues with transplant workers. Of course, we can never forget fear as a part of their daily working lives. Life in a Toyota plant is all about intense competition with fellow workers (despite management’s talk about “team” effort), fear of injury (and thus down-shifting of duties or loss of job), surveillance, modern-day speedups (the “kaizen” concept), temps, and a creeping cynicism. That’s what the UAW needs to tap into, but it needs first to create the culture and climate that will make those workers turn to the UAW. This is what I’ve meant by the things I’ve suggested above.

As Tolstoy said, “Show, Don’t Tell.” Maybe there’s been too much telling in organizing and not enough showing. Getting workers into a discussion that allows them to reach their own conclusions about things will be much more effective, I think. Ultimately, make them also feel part of something larger than themselves, part of a movement. This is some of the most compelling testimony in The Uprising of ‘34, the great documentary about the textile strikes in the South in the 1930s. For the first time, those mill workers felt like they were part of something important, and that made them important. It gave them back their humanity. That film brought tears to my eyes.

So there you go. Take care and best wishes.

Young journalists in North Carolina provide a close-up view of trouble on Tobacco Road

2011-02-03T14:01:00.000-08:00

Here's a little something different for this blog but certainly right on target in its concern for working folks in the South.

Check out the compelling and award-winning series titled Hardship & Hope on the impact of the Great Recession along Tobacco Road in central North Carolina. Photojournalism students at the University of North Carolina compiled the reports in 2009 although I just this week found out about them. That's thanks to Alex McDaniel, a graduate student in my Narrative Journalism class this semester at the University of Mississippi.

One of the series, Holding On by John Adkisson, tells of 45-year-old Allen Hutson of Oxford, N.C., who has lost his job but still has to make ends meet to support his family. It's the kind of story that could just as easily be told in 2011.

Another in the series, Stop the Presses by Stacey Axelrod, deals with journalists who’ve been laid off in the recession, some of whom I used to work with many years ago back at the old, now-defunct afternoon newspaper, The Raleigh Times.

The package provided yet more proof (I see this, too, in my classrooms) that young journalists are still out there, compelled and inspired by a sense of social justice, and getting real stories about real people in real situations. That's what good journalists have always done.

Chinese firms hoping that workers of the world don't unite? Another labor round-up from the South and Global South

2011-01-28T11:16:00.000-08:00

(The accompanying photo was taken by the author in Singapore last May. It shows an interesting mix of capitalism and communist ideology with posters of Mao decorating a storefront in Singapore's Chinatown.)

This latest round-up of labor activity in or related to the South clearly shows the growing connections between Dixie and the Global South as fast-growing China deepens its investment in the U.S. with new plants planned in labor-hostile South Carolina and Texas, and as Arkansas-based Wal-Mart extends its reach into the African continent.

Even the recent killing of coal mine safety legislation in the U.S. Congress has global implications when you consider the sufferings of coal miners not only in West Virginia but around the world in the past year.

China and the South

The world's largest communist country, China, may have been founded on the pro-proletariat theories and preachings of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but it today increasingly stands shoulder to shoulder with the world's premier capitalist economy, the United States, in its attitude toward workers and unions.

As reported recently by Phil Mattera of Dirt Diggers Digest and Facing South, Chinese investment in the U.S. has soared in the past two years. Those investments include plans by the appliance-maker Haier Group to build a factory in South Carolina as well as Tianjin Pipe's plans for a $1 billion plant in Texas. Chinese companies have had an eye on the U.S. appliance industry for some time and tried unsuccessfully several years ago to purchase the Maytag company.

China has also been eyeing the U.S. auto market for some time, of course. GM sold Nexteer Automotive to a Chinese firm, and a Chinese automaker has looked at a site in Mississippi for a possible future plant. If that ever materializes, the United Auto Workers should be ready for them. UAW President Bob King said earlier this month that his organization is going to be increasingly focused on the South in its future organizing efforts. That is, after all, where the industry is going.

What would Mao say to all this? What's particularly interesting is that these companies are looking to the South, where they hope to capitalize on low-union rates and low wages as well as from relaxed regulatory and environmental regulations.

What is the message here? "Workers of the World Don't Unite"?

Wal-Mart in South Africa

The South's own global mega-corporation, Wal-Mart, recently got the nod from the shareholders of the South African retail chain Massmart to allow the Arkansas-based firm to purchase 51 percent of the company's shares. This sets the stage for Wal-Mart's entry into the continent of Africa, and from a base in its most prosperous country. Wal-Mart stores are already in South America and Asia.

The Congress of South African Trade Unions opposed the purchase. Sidumo Diamini, president of the congress, told the Associated Press the purchase offers "nothing for the workers. ... Wal-Mart ... has never done anything for the workers."

Massmart stores stretch across 14 countries on the African continent.

Holding a magnifying glass to Wal-Mart operations, however, are U.S. unions through the Web sites Wake Up Walmart and Walmart Watch, which just announced that they are joining forces and creating "one unified voice to hold Walmart accountable for its impact on communities, the American workforce, the retail sector, the environment and the nation's economy."

In fact, the combined operations have launched a petition-signing campaign to get Wal-Mart to engage community groups in "ensuring quality job creation."

Although Wal-Mart remains non-union in the U.S., Wake Up Walmart and Walmart Watch have put public pressure on the firm that led to change in some of its practices, such as the forcing of employees to work off the clock.

Coal Mine Safety At Risk Here and Abroad

Finally, in the U.S. Congress, the lameduck session that many heralded as a huge success for President Obama failed to produce legislation that might prevent future disasters such as the Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion in West Virginia that killed 29 miners last April. House Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., pushed hard for a bill that would have made it easier to shut down unsafe mines, set up new protections for whistleblowers, and increase penalties against derelict mine owners.

However, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers sent their army of lobbyists into the fray and got 99.9 percent of House Republicans and a couple dozen Democrats to oppose and thus kill the bill.

The year 2010 was the deadliest for U.S. coal miners in 18 years. Forty-eight miners died. However, mine safety is not just an issue here. It's truly a global issue, as we saw with last year's dramatic rescue of 33 trapped Chilean miners.

To get an idea of how bad things are for miners, we have to turn our attention back to China, which ranks first in the world in miner deaths. In the year 2009, 2,631 miners in China lost their lives. Just last October, 37 miners died in Yuzhou City in the Hunan province after a gas explosion.

The Chinese government has adopted new regulations aimed at making coal mining safer. Critics, however, say such efforts thus far have been insufficient and too disjointed to meet the problem.

The Pro-Employer, Anti-Employee Rulings of the Mississippi Workers' Compensation Commission Under Review

2011-01-20T08:18:00.000-08:00

(Following is another scoop by this blog on the anti-employee rulings of the Mississippi Workers' Compensation Commission. It describes a pending review of that arch-conservative commission. This is in Mississippi, typically the South extreme, but the assault on workers and workers' rights that it points to is taking place across the region and beyond. Previous blog postings and columns published at this site this past summer and early fall helped re-ignite the debate on this issue.)

The Mississippi Workers’ Compensation Commission and its rulings will be the subject of a months-long review by the Joint Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review, PEER Director Max Arinder said last week.

“We have had some complaints filed with the committee about actions of the commission, about some of the decisions,” Arinder said.

PEER, whose 14 members include seven state senators and seven state House members, initially approved plans to conduct a review of the commission last October pending the availability of resources. It reaffirmed this decision in December.

As detailed in this column last August, a study ordered by Jackson plaintiffs’ attorney Roger K. Doolittle showed that the three-member commission is decidedly on the side of employers in most disputes between employers and employees regarding workplace injuries. According to the study, the commission’s three members voted to reject administrative law judge decisions favoring workers between 75 and 91 percent of the time.

“I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and I’ve never seen a commission this conservative,” said Jackson attorney John Jones, who handles workers’ compensation cases.

Commission Chairman Liles Williams disputed claims of bias but conceded that his own numbers show him voting for the employer 59 percent of the time. Williams’ six-year term in office was scheduled to end in December, but sources say he has gotten the nod from the governor for a second term.

Arinder said he wasn’t at liberty to discuss details of the complaints received about the commission or the upcoming PEER review. However, he said he expected the review to begin in a matter of weeks and that he hoped it wouldn’t take longer than three months to complete. PEER reviews assess and evaluate the accountability of state programs and agencies. Like many state programs, PEER has suffered significant budgetary cutbacks in recent years, reducing its staff from 27 to 21 positions.

The state Court of Appeals handed the Workers’ Compensation Commission a setback in October when it reversed the commission decision in the case of Shirley Cole versus Ellisville State School. The commission had earlier overturned an administrative judge ruling in favor of Cole, a school employee who injured her knee at work. “The Commission erred by reducing Cole’s award of permanent-partial disability benefits,” ruled the Court of Appeals with all of its nine judges in concurrence. “We reverse the Commission’s decision … and reinstate the (administrative judge’s) decision.”

The pending review won’t mark the first time the commission has come under PEER’s scrutiny. At the beginning of Gov. Barbour’s first term, PEER issued a report that said the commission needed more management oversight, and it pointed to poor record-keeping of employee time sheets and accrued leave files.

The state House Insurance Committee held a hearing on Doolittle’s findings more than a year ago and discussed the possibility of an investigation of the commission. However, the investigation remained “in limbo” a year later because of the sharp differences between those on opposing sides of the issue, said committee chairman Walter Robinson of Bolton.

Although statistics on work-related injuries and deaths in Mississippi can be difficult to pin down, attorney Jones estimates at least as many as 13,000 workers are injured on the job every year. Some 80 Mississippi workers died from work-related injuries in 2008.

Mississippi has long ranked at or near the bottom in the nation in workers’ compensation benefits. It was the last state in the nation to adopt a workers’ compensation law. Even today it remains one of the few states that award less than 100 percent of weekly wages to workers injured on the job. Even if the commission rules in their favor, injured Mississippi workers only receive two-thirds of their weekly wages.

A 2005 study by the Workers Compensation Research Institute showed that cases in Mississippi also take much longer to resolve than cases in other states. “The average interval from petition filing to a judge’s order was almost 20 months,” the study said.

Edwin Edwards, last of the true populists and bane of Southern Republicans, gets a taste of freedom after eight years

2011-01-16T13:40:00.001-08:00

Edward Washington Edwards was one of the most colorful politicians in the post-war U.S. South, a dyed-in-the-wool populist of the Left (the only true populist) and never-ending source of frustration to moralizing Republicans and other conservatives who kept indicting him until they finally succeeded in putting him behind bars.

After eight years in prison on a 2002 bribery and extortion conviction, the four-time Louisiana governor and former congressman entered a halfway house in Baton Rouge last week en route to his long-sought freedom.

The 83-year-old Cajun has always insisted on his innocence and said he was a victim of his political enemies. He was convicted for his role in the rigging of the casino licensing process in his state.

A final link in the long chain of colorful Louisiana governors that included fellow populist Democrats Huey "Kingfish" Long and "Uncle" Earl Long, Edwards enjoyed a lifelong reputation as a devoted gambler and ladies' man, another Louisiana lineage that goes back to swashbuckling early 19th century pirate Jean Lafitte.

I covered Edwards in the 1980s as a political correspondent whose beat included Mississippi, Louisiana and the South in general. I particularly recall a speech he gave in Biloxi, Miss., October 1984. He'd come to rally support for Mississippi Democrat William Winter's U.S. Senate bid and to lambast his favorite targets: Republicans.

"You can afford to vote Republican when there is no need," Edwards said in his Cajun accent, "but, man, when things are tough, you need a man who is concerned about problems."

"Find one person without a job and that's one too many, one uneducated child and that's one too many, one elderly person who goes to bed unsure about his future and that's one too many."

Edwards told the applauding crowd that he knew personally what need is. He said he grew up in poverty with no electricity, plumbing or running water in his home. He said his mother was a midwife who delivered 1,800 babies, and he was delivered by his grandmother with a kerosene lamp providing the only light.

And, he added, "By golly, I was the first Cajun Catholic elected governor of the state of Louisiana."

Ah, populism! The real kind. Don't you miss it?

On the Tuscon Shootings: Corporate Media Putting on Blinders

2011-01-10T07:21:00.000-08:00

The decline in journalism in this nation can be seen in the mainstream media coverage of the tragedy that took place in Tuscon, Arizona, this past Saturday.

The shooting of Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others, including the killing of a federal judge, a nine-year-old girl, and four more of the victims, has prompted a national discussion about the vitriol of modern-day politics and the increasing vocabulary of violence that characterizes it.

Pima County, Ariz., Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, a Texas native, stepped into the middle of that discussion when he pointed an accusing finger at the "Mecca for prejudice and bigotry" that Arizona has become, a situation created in large part by politicians and their proselytizing pundits on television and in the blogosphere.

The words were hardly out of Dupnik's mouth, however, before media personalities like NBC Today Show's Matt Lauer and veteran political commentator Tom Brokaw jumped to defuse them. In their assessments on Monday morning (Jan. 10, 2010), Lauer bemoaned extremes on both the Left and the Right while Brokaw recalled the violence of the leftist radicals of the 1960s.

Neither seemed to want to see what's obvious to much of the rest of the nation. It's the violent rhetoric of the Right today that's at the heart of this problem. Where is there a liberal blogger spewing the vitriol of hate and violence to a large audience, as Lauer implies? Does Brokaw have to go back 40 or 50 years to find a liberal seed to what happened in Tuscon? That's like the right-wing so-called "scholars" out there nowadays who've been trying to put a leftist, socialist tag on Hitler and Mussolini, and in the process take the sting out of right-wing extremism.

Media ombudsman Howard Kurtz is another corporate media type who wants to let right-wingers off the hook, choosing instead in recent commentary to blame journalists and their war-like political terminology (example: use of terms like "bombshell" and "air war").

Let's cut to the chase. Dupnik knows. Lauer, Brokaw and Kurtz are too comfortably removed in their New York or Washington corporate offices to see what the sheriff sees on the ground level of America.

Giffords' opponent in her hard-fought 2010 bid for a third term in Congress was Tea Party Republican Jesse Kelly, who once campaigned from a shooting range and brandished slogans like "Get on Target for Victory in November". As is well known now, Sarah Palin included Giffords on her "target map" of Democrats needing to be removed from office in the 2010 elections. These Democrats were placed in gun-like crosshairs on Palin's map. Giffords' offense was her support of health care reform and, of course, the "D" after her name.

Remember the gun-wielding, screaming, and bullying that characterized the health care debate, as well as the screaming, bullying blusterings of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck?

When journalists are unable to see what's before their eyes, they stop being journalists.

2011: A watershed year for pols and the two-party system?

2011-01-07T10:08:00.000-08:00

The year 2011 may prove a watershed year for politicians--from President Obama on down to your local legislator--and for the nation's two-party system. This may be the year we really see who truly serves Wall Street or Main Street.

Alabama's George Wallace used to say there wasn't a "dime's worth of difference" between the two parties, and he was absolutely right in many ways. In the U.S. Congress, both Democrats and Republicans are so beholden to K Street lobbyists, Wall Street, and their own self-preservation that it's no wonder Americans are looking to Tea Partyers and similar groups for solutions.

President Obama's most recent picks for his top advisers are further signs that he's becoming just another Bill Clinton Democrat, one of those Democratic Leadership Council types that are about as removed from FDR's Democratic Party as you can get.

It actually may be more politically interesting to see what's going to happen on the other side of the political aisle as quintessential corporate boardroom Republicans like new House Speaker John Boehner deal with the anti-government Tea Partyers in the party's ranks. Remember: Boehner's party isn't really anti-government. It just wants government to suit the purposes of its powerful financial backers. There's no real ideology there other than a bipartisan view of government as essentially a spoils system for those in power.

Here in the South, we have an old-line, blue-blooded Republican like Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour considering a bid for the presidency. On the surface, Barbour might seem to have the perfect combination of the insider connections only a former Republican National Committee chair and top Washington lobbyist could have with a record as governor that seems to have some actual Tea Party-like credentials, given his philosophy of minimal government and opposition to tax increases.

If there are any mainstream reporters still out there digging for truth, however, it shouldn't be hard to show that Barbour is no Tea Party protester. Like Boehner, he is a symbol of the very system Tea Partyers claim to protest. Barbour never saw a corporation he didn't like, and that's why he just pushed through a $500 million incentives package for a new solar panel-making plant in Hattiesburg at a time when the state is planning to close mental health facilities due to lack of funding.

At the state level, Barbour still has to contend with Democrats like House Speaker Billy McCoy who still believe government should be at the service of people, not corporations and fat-cats.

Too bad there aren't more Democrats like McCoy in the U.S. Congress--or in the White House, for that matter.

Tale of an immigrant family from long ago

2010-12-20T10:58:00.000-08:00

(The picture to the left is of The Flight Into Egypt by Giotto di Bondone, depicting the Holy Family's escape from Herod's tyranny. It was painted between 1304 and 1306, and it is located in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy)

They were descendants of immigrants who themselves became immigrants.

Soon after the baby arrived, a dream came to the father that the little family would have to leave their homeland if they were to survive. Even the life of an innocent child was in danger in their homeland.

So the three of them—father, mother and child—left their tiny village and embarked on a treacherous journey through the desert wilderness. They were very poor and had little more than the clothes on their backs.

They traveled by day and by night, ever fearful they might be captured or attacked, until they finally crossed the border. They brought no documentation with them, only their humility and the father’s willingness to work hard to support his family.

He was a trained craftsman, good with his hands, and his work was valued even if he was paid so little he could never hope to rise out of his poverty. With his teenage wife tending to their baby, he went out among the people to earn bread and shelter for them.

He heard the whisperings among those in this new land. They called him and his family foreigners, outsiders, and even illegal aliens, as if they had come from the moon and their very existence was something less than human, a violation of not only the law of the land but also God’s law.

“They’re just here to take our jobs, to feed, house, and clothe themselves at our expense,” he heard one of them say.

“They don’t even take the time to learn our language,” said another.

“Why are they even here? Is their own country not good enough for them? Perhaps they’re spies,” said yet another.

“The way people like these spawn they’ll soon be everywhere, expecting their new offspring to be treated equally just because they were born here, like so many little anchors for their illegal parents. Anchor babies, that’s what they’ll be.”

Some of these whisperings came from the very people who benefited from his labors. They would say these things as soon as they walked away from the worksite and rejoined their neighbors and friends. Local leaders heard the comments, too, and saw an advantage in such fears, prejudice, and suspicions. So they began to talk among the crowds and, being leaders, talked loudest of all, loud enough for everyone to hear.

Even the priests joined the chorus, invoking God’s judgment from their pulpits, condemning the strangers for breaking the law and taking advantage of people’s hospitality.

The father and mother, already homesick, longed for their faraway families and friends. They knew many did not welcome them in this strange land, but they also feared for their child’s life if they returned home. Did their little child have any idea of all the troubles that surrounded them?

The father remembered how his ancestors had been immigrants to this very land many generations before and had prospered here, but then a new leader had turned them into slaves and they had left. Now he and his wife and child had returned because their own land had become hostile. When would it all end? Where was there a refuge?

Eventually the father, whose namesake had been a dreamer and an interpreter of dreams, had yet another dream, and this one told him the time had come to return home. So he and his wife packed their belongings, wrapped up their child to keep it warm, and journeyed back to their homeland. They had to be careful. Dangers still lurked, but at least they were home.

And back in the strange land where they had sought refuge, some indeed missed them. “He did good work,” one said. “You know, they never really bothered anyone,” another said.

But these voices were quickly drowned out by the leaders and their priests who cried “Good riddance!” and then looked for others to condemn.

Strike by Georgia inmates Invokes the Old and the New About the South

2010-12-14T15:52:00.000-08:00

(To the right you see a late-career campaign poster from James K. Vardaman from the early 1920s, one of my prized possessions of Southern political memorabilia)

A nonviolent strike by inmates at seven Georgia prisons has evoked one of the South's long-held and darkest traditions while incorporating the latest technology at the same time.

The inmates at Smith State Prison in Downing and elsewhere across the state told the New York Times that they were able to coordinate their protest through use of "contraband cellphones" that allowed text-messaging as a means of communication. Inmates were able to purchase the cellphones from guards and other sources, often at exorbitant prices.

The key issues behind the strike are inmate demands that they be paid for work they do in the prison system and that deteriorating living conditions be improved. They also want more focus on rehabilitation, such as educational programs. The Georgia Department of Corrections' response thus far is a lockdown at four of the prisons.

The familiar story of miserable conditions within Southern prisons has become the stuff of Hollywood, with movies such as I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang and Cool Hand Luke depicting a South with plenty of uniformed sadists always ready to use their power and fulfill their darkest needs to chain, beat, and whip those helpless to oppose them.

Beyond their use of cellphones and complaints about prison conditions, the inmates and their insistence that they be paid for their work reminded this writer of an age-old issue in the South: private profiteering from prison labor.

It evokes a South that's perhaps not as "new" as we'd like to think. Using prison labor for private profit was a key issue in turn-of-the-(20th) century Mississippi, where--irony of ironies--one of the South's most notoriously racist politicians, Gov. James K. Vardaman, pushed through major reform legislation that ended convict leasing and improved conditions at the state's notorious Parchman prison.

"I am more interested in the salvation of men than I am in hoarding gold," Vardaman said, protesting "money coined out of the blood and tears of the unfortunate convicts."

Conditions were indeed bad. Investigators found inmates doing farm labor for the privately owned land of prison officials, sick inmates confined to a ward where broken windows exposed them to freezing temperatures in the winter, and, in one case, an inmate forced by a guard to kill another inmate.

As retold in Albert D. Kirwan's book, Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics, 1876-1925, Vardaman told Mississippians that even a "low-bred, vulgar creature, congenitally corrupt, inured to physical and moral filth" deserved "kindly treatment, a decent bed to sleep on, and sanitary surrounding."

He decried prison conditions "rivaling in brutality and fiendishness, the atrocities of ... Torquemada."

Vardaman, a striking figure on the campaign trail with his long black hair, white suit, and black hat, provides a classic example of Southern contradiction in politics. Known as the "Great White Chief", he was a horrible racist when campaigning, even supporting the lynching of blacks. As an office-holder, however, he was remarkably progressive for his time and even acted to prevent the lynching he supported as a candidate. He supported restrictions on child labor, fought the all-powerful railroad companies and other big corporations, created a state textbook commission and thereby ended the American Book Company's monopoly. Vardaman even increased educational funding for blacks.

However, Vardaman's racist diatribes on the campaign trail--imitated and perhaps even exceeded by his understudy, Theodore G. Bilbo--will forever mark and darken whatever positive achievements he attained.

Nevertheless, some of his reform spirit as regards prisons might be worth re-visiting these days as governments continue to look to private prison-operating companies to do the work that they themselves should do, and, as I've written before, another "dark piece of the Old South that's still there" threatens to resurrect itself--even if it never really went away.

The Immigrants in Maxo Vanka's Murals Speak to a New Generation of Immigrants Today

2010-12-07T16:10:00.000-08:00

(The accompanying picture is one of Maxo Vanka's compelling murals, and it depicts the cost of war for immigrants who suffer discrimination and prejudice in their new homeland yet are willing to fight and even lose their lives for that homeland. It is a fitting picture for this post, filed on December 7, Pearl Harbor Day, and the day after the celebration of St. Nicholas, the namesake for the church where Vanka's murals are preserved.)

Veteran readers of this blog know of my admiration for Croatian artist Maxo Vanka, whose breathtaking Depression-era murals are preserved at the St. Nicholas Croation Catholic Church on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, Pa.

The Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka (SPMMMV) recently announced that it has secured a $50,000 matching grant to fund the first phase of a project to preserve and restore the murals, which vividly depict the lives of peasant immigrants to the region who did backbreaking labor in the steel mills, factories, and coal mines to realize the American dream.

SPMMV is also preparing for the May 2011 presentation of A Gift to America, a play by David Demarest that deals with Vanka's work and the haunting murals that cover practically every inch of wall space in the church.

Thus far, more than $235,000 has been raised toward the project, which seeks to preserve an important piece of immigrant history in this country. A second phase of restoration has a fund-raising goal of $350,000.

Although this blog focuses on the U.S. South--and by extension the Global South--the stories told in Vanka's murals reflect the lives of millions of newly arrived Southerners from south of the border--the loneliness, the hard work, the exploitation, the prejudice, the struggle to preserve traditions and yet adapt to a new home.

To get an idea of how close to home Vanka's murals hit let's consider the recent plight of 350 Filipino teachers who came to Louisiana to teach in the public schools but found themselves virtual slaves of the labor contractors who brought them there. The contractors buried the teachers in such bogus debt for fees, travel, and other "expenses" that they had to live in substandard housing with little hope of ever emerging out of their indentured servitude.

With the prompting of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, American Federation of Teachers, Migrant Heritage Commission and Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, the Louisiana Attorney General's Office intervened and succeeded in rescuing the teachers and is in the process of getting them proper visas for their stay here.

The Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers also secured a victory recently for migrant workers when it got a major tomato industry leader, Pacific Tomato Growers, to agree to observe the organization's code of conduct. That code insists that workers have access to a health and safety program and grievance resolution procedures.

The CIW is building a long track record of success in its ongoing fight for immigrant worker rights.

Maxo Vanka would be proud.

Wal-Mart vs female employees, and Wal-Mart vs. retail workers in South Africa

2010-12-01T16:41:00.000-08:00

Wal-Mart greeter Betty Dukes' nine-year-old discrimination case against her employer has finally reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and a decision is expected any day now as to whether she and thousands of other female employees actually have a basis for a class-action claim against the company.

Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer and strongly backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, claims lower court rulings accepting the class-action suit are wrong and that allegations of a systemic practice of discrimination against women is ridiculous. Dukes and others say many female workers at Wal-Mart not only get the short end of the stick in pay raises and promotions but are subjected to discriminatory and insulting treatment by management at the workplace because of their gender.

Remember: this is the same Supreme Court that in January opened the floodgates to the corporate financing of American politics, so Betty Dukes and her colleagues are up against a Goliath indeed.

Meanwhile in South Africa, leaders of the 150,000-member South African Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union (SACCAWU) have threatened to go on strike if Wal-Mart is successful in its efforts to take over Massmart, which has discount retail stores spread across the continent with plans to open dozens more.

Wal-Mart is positioned to take majority control of Massmart shares if shareholders agree to it, setting the stage for a major invasion by the virulently anti-union, Arkansas-based retailer to spread the gospel of Sam (Walton, the company's founder) to Africans: cheap goods provided by a cheap multi-billion-dollar company whose low-paid U.S. employees often have to depend on Medicaid and Food Stamps to survive.

It'll be interesting to see how a stand-off between corporate Wal-Mart and a union with strong connections to government in Africa might turn out.

A Tale of Two Cities: Memphis and Nashville

2010-11-22T12:07:00.000-08:00

I'm driving along Nashville's West End Avenue in my 10-year-old Buick LeSabre (a veteran of 155,000 miles and still counting). I'm on a story assignment with a young journalist from Chicago. Memphis comes up in the conversation, and she asks about something she's heard: "Nashville and the rest of Tennessee hate Memphis, right?"

It wasn't the first time I'd heard about the Bluff City's uneasy relationship with the rest of the state. I remember back in the 1970s when an Ivy League-educated, Knoxville-reared journalist colleague of mine in North Carolina described Memphis this way: "It's the largest city in northern Mississippi."

He didn't mean it as a compliment.

I'd asked him about Memphis because the city had held a fascination for me since the early 1960s when I was a teenager. That was when I discovered the blues and first really appreciated rockabilly. I've since spent a lot of time in Memphis (including maintaining an apartment there with my wife for the past four years), and I've developed some ideas about what makes the city different.

Let's start with politics. Today, with all the Tea Party shouting and Republican resurgence, Memphis is a blue speck in a sea of red. One reason, of course, is that the majority of the approximately 700,000 people who live there are black. The farther east you travel from Downtown and Midtown, the whiter and more Republican it gets.

The racial divide that killed Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 remains an old sore that's not completely healed. It's not uncommon to hear white people call Memphis Memphrica. Willie Herenton, the city's first black mayor, a brooding, thin-skinned man obsessed by race, didn't help much despite nearly two decades of rule. His successor, A.C. Wharton, also black, offers promise that some long-missing salve may now be applied.

"Boss" (E.H.) Crump, the city's political dictator for much of the first half of the 20th century, has been dead a long time, but his legacy still casts a shadow. Crump was every bit as powerful in his city as Richard Daley Sr. was in his. Maybe moreso. When Herenton ran unsuccessfully for Congress this past year, he was inevitably compared to Crump, who also served for a time in Congress.

In my mind's eye, Memphis is dark, Nashville is light.

I was in Nashville much of the past week, and the city seemed to be thriving despite the devastating flood of last May. The skyline that Bob Dylan once sang about gets more sleek and impressive every year. Broadway, the main thoroughfare, was jam-packed this past Saturday night as college football fans (Vanderbilt played the University of Tennessee) crowded Tootsie's and the dozens of other venues, elbowing for room with the thousands of other folk who still flock to Nashville to see or become country music stars.

Memphis from Beale to Union can hop at night, too, but a northerly stroll up Main or Front Street is a journey into noir land. In many ways, Memphis remains the haunting metropolis Jim Jarmusch depicted in his 1990 film Mystery Train even if it's thankfully less desolate. That desolation once got nailed by legendary basketball coach Phil Jackson, who said downtown looked like "Dresden after the war."

"Memphis Noir" is a major reason I love the city the way I do.

For all of Nashville's Hank-Roy-Lefty-Webb-Kitty-Patsy-driven mystique, it still pales in comparison to the city where Elvis would only come out in the wee hours, dragging his mafia with him, to ride the Zippin Pippin in Libertyland when no one else was there, or the city where Jerry Lee Lewis showed up at the gates of Graceland late at night drunk and wielding a .38 while the oblivious boy from Tupelo was asleep at the top of the hill. Jerry Lee always figured he was the true king of rock 'n' roll.

Crime-wise Memphis routinely ranks just behind Detroit, enough to inspire the cop television show The First 48 before Police Director Larry Godwin complained about the bad publicity and made the show look for another city to embarrass. The crime, by the way, includes more than its share of political corruption, with John Ford of the Ford political dynasty leading a long line of pols-on-the-take who've marched off to prison or into other halls of shame. I interviewed Ford in the early 1980s while doing a story about Memphis politics. When His Majesty deigned to look at me, it was usually with disdain or at best utter impatience.

Interstate 40, the "Music Highway", connects Nashville and Memphis, but the disconnect begins with Nashville's corporate music infrastructure. Corporate Nashville has always fought a kind of war with roots music. Sticking with roots is hard when all you really care about is the bottom line. That's why it put an orchestra behind George Jones at the height of his career, hoping he'd cross over like Jim Reeves did.

Whether at Sun Records, Stax, Alex Chilton's garage, or in the 1920s-era blues saloons along Beale, Memphis music has always had an edge, a rawness, a real-ness that scared the bejeebers out of the corporate suits on Music Row. No wonder Willie and Waylon had to go back to Luckenbach. No wonder Steve Earle had to leave "Guitar Town". For new, rootsy talents on the scene today like Jamey Johnson, it may be just a matter of time.

Memphis, you scary, dark city by the Big Muddy, city of neon and shadows, you may be as poor and sometimes as rejected as an orphan in a Dickens novel, but unloved you are not. Believe me. I'm a witness, and I just gave you my testimony.

Apologies: New posts coming!

2010-11-22T10:55:00.000-08:00

Apologies for not posting during the past week or so. I've been in Nashville, Tenn., going through a "multi-media boot camp" hosted by the John Seigenthaler Center, Freedom Forum Diversity Institute, to better equip myself in understanding and utilizing the technology so essential to the journalism profession today. These were 10-hour days with little time for anything else. Hopefully readers of this blog will soon see some of the results of this training.

The "Bottom" to "Top" Low-Down on Recent Worker Activity in Dixie and Beyond

2010-11-09T17:48:00.000-08:00

Ever hear the song by country music singer Jamey Johnson in which a country music star laments his loneliness on the road to an unknown, down-on-his-luck bar mate? The bar mate has this to say in response: “It might be lonely at the top, but it’s a bitch at the bottom.”

It’s a great song, one that hearkens back to some of Ol’ Hank’s best, and it speaks to an economic divide in this country and beyond that continues to grow every day.

Here are some news items from the U.S. South and beyond that speak to that divide—folks at the bottom fighting for their rights, and those at the top fighting just as hard against them. It's getting tougher and tougher for workers to take a stand, but they're doing it, and sometimes they even win.

Management at Atlanta-based Delta gets a narrow victory—and a wake-up call
Less than 350 out of nearly 19,000 votes was the margin of victory for Delta management recently as flight attendants said “No” to joining a union.

The vote was not a surprise but still a disappointment to the thousands of flight attendants, including 300 in Memphis, who've worked for Northwest—now merged with Delta—and have long supported union representation.

Votes from ramp workers and others at the merged airlines are still to come. Industry observers say management shouldn’t be popping the champagne just yet. The vote by the flight attendants was so close that unionization remains a “threat” to the company, which, by the way, waged an expensive, high profile anti-union campaign prior to the vote.

Fed-Ex’s Fred Smith enjoyed the Nov. 2 elections
With the Republican takeover of the U.S. House and defeat of pro-labor House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman James Oberstar, D-Minn., Federal Express CEO Smith can breathe easier about Oberstar’s push to apply the same rules to the Memphis-based company that now apply to its major U.S. competitor, UPS.

Contract drivers at Fed-Ex have been saying they’re essentially full-time employees but can’t unionize because of their job designation. The Teamsters union and others say Fed-Ex should operate under the same rules as its competitors instead of the rules of the Railway Labor Act that now apply.

Piedmont agents vote union
Salisbury, Md.-based Piedmont Airlines fought unionization tooth and nail, but its 3,000 fleet and passenger service agents recently cast their ballots overwhelmingly in favor of joining the Communications Workers of America.

It was a two-to-one landslide for the union, which means workers can indeed stand up to union-busting tactics, intimidation, and “captive-audience meetings” decrying unions, according to the AFL-CIO Now Blog.

European hypocrisy in Arkansas
Despite European firms’ claims of allegiance to International Labor Organization codes of conduct, many are quick to take advantage of lax labor laws in the United States. Take the Dutch-based Gamma Holding firm, for example.

When workers at its National Wire Fabric company in Star City, Arkansas, went on strike, management wasted no time hiring permanent replacements, a direct violation of those same codes.

A new study by the Human Rights Watch organization, A Strange Case: Violations of Workers’ Freedom of Association in the United States by European Multinational Corporations, details how officials with companies such as Gamma Holding talk out of both sides of their mouths, something U.S. Southerners are used to hearing from their politicians and own business leaders.

This latter entry reminds me of corporate consultant Richard A. Beaumont’s essay, Working in the South, of some years back. In that essay, Beaumont talks of European industrialists coming to the South and reacting in shock to the virulent anti-unionism of their Southern counterparts. “Five minutes later, (the European industrialist) is saying, `Now, when I go to the South, how do I operate on a nonunion basis?’”

Elephants make Dinosaurs of the Blue Dogs in the Cottonfields

2010-11-03T17:38:00.000-07:00

What's the future of the "Blue Dog" Democrat? It's a legitimate question to ask in the wake of Tuesday's election.

Here in Mississippi, two "Blue Dog" Democrats--1st District Congressman Travis Childers and 4th District Congressman Gene Taylor--lost their re-election bids to Republicans Tuesday. They lost despite major efforts to distance themselves from the president and from outgoing U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and by voting against such Democrat-led initiatives as health care reform.

Stalwart fiscal conservatives both of them, they lost because they're Democrats and they represent majority white districts in the South. Roughly half of the U.S. House's 54-member Blue Dog Coalition lost their seats in the Nov. 2 election.

A bit of history helps put Tuesday's results in perspective.

The white South has been trending Republican ever since former Democrat Strom Thurmond of South Carolina campaigned for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964. Thurmond had first broken from the Democratic Party way back in 1948 when he led the so-called Dixiecrat revolt out of the party and served as the States' Rights presidential candidate that year. Thurmond and other conservatives in the once Solid (Democratic) South just couldn't tolerate their party's tolerance of civil rights and labor any longer.

Thurmond was a pioneer to Southern Democrats-turned-Republicans--from North Carolina's Jesse Helms to Alabama's Richard Shelby.

Southern Democrats had been a key--if often unlikely--part of the coalition that put and kept Franklin Deleanor Roosevelt in the White House. They included raging liberals like Claude Pepper of Florida and ol' mossback (social) conservatives like Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi. Of course, some unreconstructed Confederates like Harry Byrd of Virginia and "Cotton" Ed Smith of South Carolina eventually became FDR enemies.

After Roosevelt died, the coalition fell apart, and many Southern Democrats joined with a new Republican majority in Congress in supporting the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, a repudiation of everything FDR stood for as regards labor and working people.

The Dixiecrat revolt did not lead to a viable third party for conservative Southern Democrats after 1948, but their disgruntlement grew as the civil rights movement gained steam in the 1950s and early 1960s. By 1964, Strom Thurmond was campaigning throughout the South for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

However, even as more and more elephants appeared in the cotton fields (to paraphrase writer Wayne Greenhaw's description), many Southern conservatives chose to stay within the party that their daddies, mamas, granddaddies and grandmamas had belonged to since Abe Lincoln held office. Especially at the local level, Democrats remained strong in the South. For one reason, they knew government and how to make it work for the voters they needed, something still alien to anti-government Republicans.

The immediate predecessor to the "Blue Dog" Democrat in Congress was the "Boll Weevil" Democrat of the 1970s and 1980s, best personified by U.S. Rep. G.V. "Sonny" Montgomery of Mississippi, a military veteran who once during the Vietnam War angrily charged an anti-war protester on the steps of the Capitol.

Montgomery had a long, successful career in politics before retiring, and before the Congress became so intensely partisan that Southern conservatives either had to become an elephant or a dinosaur.

That appears to be the choice that Childers, Taylor and a lot of other Blue Dogs faced. Partisanship, guilt by association, Tea Party madness, voter anger and frustration at an economy that still rewards the rich while punishing everybody else--it's enough to make a blue dog howl the blues.

"High Popalorum and Low Popahirum" on the 2010 Campaign Trail

2010-10-30T06:21:00.000-07:00

OXFORD, Miss. – The evening is cool, the sky is clear, and the air is thick with talk of politics and the smell of the best barbecue chicken I’ve eaten since my daddy passed away.

There’s also a generous hint of bourbon in the air, but the hundreds of people here at Johnny Morgan’s “Good Ole’ Boys and Gals” semi-annual cookout are high on politics, not booze. Here are sheriffs, chancery and city clerks, county supervisors, aldermen, state legislators, judges of every make, shape, stripe, and judiciary level.

In the crowd are dozens of past, present, and future candidates for every conceivable public office in North Mississippi and beyond, and a few old-time politicos and legends like Flick Ash of nearby Potts Camp. When I ask Ash how active he is in politics these days, he eyes me curiously and gives the cryptic answer you’d expect from a master. “I’ve got a few friends. I’d like to think I have a little influence.”

Located at Lafayette County Supervisor and former legislator Morgan’s metal barn off Highway 7, this is the best political party Mississippi offers north of Neshoba County. The people here are the movers and shakers at the local level, the men and women who work the precincts, know the numbers, and help get out the vote, so the two major candidates in Mississippi's hotly contested 1st congressional district race weren’t about to miss this.

I listen as both U.S. Rep. Travis Childers, D-Miss., and the Republican who wants to oust him, Alan Nunnelee, take their turns on the podium. Nunnelee wastes no time slapping the dreaded U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tag on Childers. The California Democrat is a bête noire in GOP circles. Childers responds by putting the horrid “tax hiker” tag on Nunnelee for supporting Gov. Haley Barbour’s 2009 hospital tax.

An old leftie like me can’t help but shake his head. I want to quote Shakespeare (and my hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt) and say, “A plague on both your houses.”

“Blue Dog” Democrats like Childers and 4th Cong. District Rep. Gene Taylor are in unusually tough fights this year because of the “D” behind their names. Both come from predominantly white districts, and, let’s face it, “white” in Mississippi increasingly means conservative—no, make that arch-conservative—and Republican.

This is the year of Republicans-Marching-in-Lockstep in Congress, and in the hustings the Tea Party Ascendance, the so-called “grassroots” movement that is actually fueled and financed in part by the likes of right-wing billionaires David and Charles Koch.

Alongside the mysterious Koch brothers and their Americans for Prosperity organization is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, taking full advantage of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling by pumping millions into what Nation magazine calls “the most expensive midterm election in history.” Just how much of that money comes from foreign countries like India and Bahrain we don’t know.

I listen to Childers and remember how he voted against health care reform. So did Taylor, who even signed a petition to repeal the legislation. Nunnelee would be no different. Maybe they think Americans are just hunky-dory with their doctor bills and insurance premiums and the fact that a pre-existing condition can mean no insurance.

I’m also remembering Louisiana’s long-ago political boss Huey Long and his famous “High Popalorum and Low Popahirum” speech. “The only difference that I’ve found between the Democratic leadership and the Republican leadership is that one of them was skinning from the ankle up, and the other from the ear down.”

Still, I know what’s at stake in Tuesday’s election. If the Republicans do as predicted and take over the House, any real government action to deal with this recession will likely come grinding to a halt. What we’ll get instead will be House investigation after investigation aimed at embarrassing and ultimately toppling a Democratic administration with the hope of a restoration of the good ol’ days.

Remember those days?

Privatizing pols, union-busting companies, and protesting workers

2010-10-27T09:36:00.000-07:00

As election day looms, here are a few of the stories percolating in the South that affect the region's working folks:

In West Virginia, Republican Senate candidate John Raese has called for the elimination of the federal minimum wage, which he calls an "archaic system" even though some 60,000 West Virginians got a pay raise when the federal minimum wage was last increased. As reported recently by Nation magazine, Raese is not the only right-wing Republican Senatorial candidate taking aim what remains of the nation's social safety net.

Rand Paul in Kentucky has caused a stir by criticizing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Ken Buck in Colorado wants to privatize Veterans Administration hospitals, and Joe Miller in Alaska wants to eliminate unemployment compensation, Nation reports.

What these politicians really want is a return to the late-19th century era when robber barons like John D. Rockefeller organized trusts to control entire industries and wielded more power than the president himself. It took "muckraking" journalists like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens to expose the depths of economic and political corruption in the country. Where are the muckrakers today? Hard to find in a world in which the media are corporate-owned and bound to a corporate view of the world that looks at government as an inconvenience when it's not serving corporate interests.

Close to home here in Oxford, Mississippi, a recent newspaper story headlined "Union vote could send jobs to Oxford" detailed how the Olin Corporation's Winchester operations in East Alton, Ill., may relocate to Oxford now that union workers rejected by a 2-1 margin concessions in a new proposed contract. Olin is now threatening to move the plant to Oxford.

If so, it would just be another example in the long parade of companies that have headed South to avoid unions. If only a workforce with a strong working-class consciousness were here waiting for them.

Approximately 900 workers are at the East Alton ammunition plant. Members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District 9 union felt the ammunition plant shouldn't be seeking concessions at a time when its net income totaled $21.1 million at last report, the second-best in the division's history.

Oxford is already the location of a Winchester ammunition and military packing plant.

And finally in the border city of Baltimore, Md., workers are protesting their recent firing by the ESPN Zone restaurant in the city's Inner Harbor area. They said they were only given a week's notice in violation of legal requirements that 60-days notice be given in cases of mass layoffs.

As reported by In These Times magazine, about 150 workers lost their job at the restaurant, which is owned by the Disney corporation. Some 50 workers and their supporters marched recently in protest. Supporters include the United Workers labor group.

Five workers have filed a class-action lawsuit against Disney.

The arrests of striking workers in India affect workers everywhere

2010-10-18T11:18:00.001-07:00

The neo-liberal business model that has global firms raking in profits without allegiance to workers or home countries is coming under increasing pressure from the very ones whose backbreaking labor make that model possible: workers.

Approximately 500 striking workers at electronics manufacturer Foxconn's operations in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu have been placed under arrest by the government, thus pitting Taiwan-based Foxconn and an Indian government against Indian workers.

Foxconn, which produces iPhones and Nintendo among other products, is where at least 10 workers committed suicide in plants in Shenzhen, China, north of Hong Kong, over the past year or so. Chinese media reported that Foxconn workers were being forced to work as much as 80 hours overtime, more than double the legal limit.

Following the story is the international, pro-labor Web publication, LabourStart, whose editor, Eric Lee, urged this week that "we need to flood the offices of state officials with the demand that the jailed workers be released."

The growing unrest among workers in China, India, and other countries is watched closely by neo-liberal leaders. Nearly 2,000 workers for Honda in China’s Guangdong province, went on strike in mid-May, shutting down production at the company’s four plants there. They were protesting low wages and poor working conditions. Workers at the Hyundai plant in Chennai, India, shut down operations there, too, in June.

The rash of suicides by workers at Foxconn’s plants in China prompted the company to raise wages twice within a single week—first by 30 percent, and then by 70 percent.

The Chinese government has given indications that it is hearing the workers' protests, and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has called for reforms to help the workers.

Although Labor South focuses on labor issues in the U.S. South, it also addresses "Global South" issues because this South is intimately connected to a greater South that stretches from Singapore to Cape Town to Buenos Aires to New Orleans.

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel said recently that her nation's efforts to build a multicultural society have failed and that future immigrants essentially need to become German-speaking Germans, she placed the onus nearly completely on the immigrants themselves, ignoring the economic factors (in a global economy dominated by the free-trade, cheap-labor neo-liberal model) that are forcing many millions of workers around the globe to leave their homes and families and seek a livelihood in an often-hostile society--as if they do that gleefully with dollar (Euro) signs in their eyes.

Let's bring it back to Dixie. One company that has benefited wonderfully from global trade is Arkansas-based, virulently anti-union Wal-Mart, which exports billions of dollars worth of goods from China and which has benefited from that nation's undervalued currency as a result.

Working people are all in this together. That's why Eric Lee is right. Support those workers in Tamil Nadu. They're our neighbors--in more ways than one.

Rose Turner: A labor organizer committed to her "family" of low-pay workers in the Deep South

2010-10-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

MEMPHIS - On the wall next to Rose Turner’s desk at United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1529 headquarters here is a framed copy of a 20-year-old newspaper cartoon depicting former Mississippi Delta Congressman Mike Espy as a huge catfish. The caption reads: “The one that almost got away.”

“I laugh every time I look at that cartoon, and it brings back all the memories of that 1990 strike (by catfish workers),” said the 52-year-old West Memphis, Ark., native and veteran labor warrior. “He didn’t really show much support for us, and when he did show up to apologize, we said, `We’re not voting for your ass again.’”

Turner, Local 1529’s organizing director, has spent the last three decades fighting for some of the lowest paid workers in the Deep South—workers at catfish plants in the Delta, nursing home workers in Arkansas and Tennessee—and she has seen first-hand what even they can do if they stand together and speak with one voice.

“The South has always been about people working for nothing, not having pensions, health care,” she said. “The only way the South is going to grow is through the labor movement.”

Even die-hard conservative Republicans now pay homage to the civil rights movement, tipping their hats to events safely tucked away in history, while at the same time many in the business community so closely aligned with them still do everything they can to keep workers—whether black, white, Latino or Asian—at the bottom. “This is the 21st century, and it’s still going on,” she said. “It is well alive.”

Turner and Local 1529 President Lonnie Sheppard led hundreds of workers at Delta Pride Catfish Inc. and partner firm Country Select in a threatened strike this summer that finally forced the companies back to the bargaining table with a new contract offer that restored the pay and benefits their previous offer had tried to gut.

It was almost a replay of the 1990 strike at Delta Pride, which garnered national attention, led to a boycott of company products, and resulted in one of the South’s great union victories in the last half of the 20th century.

“If I was going to be an employer, I would a business I was proud of,” Turner said. “I wouldn’t want a company that hinders the community.”

Yet, she recalled, company officials sat across from her at the bargaining table in 1990, saying things like, “`If they want to go the bathroom, they got to clock out,’” and “`We’re going to do what we want to do even if you have a union.’”

She was also part of the team that first organized workers at Delta Pride and all but two of the catfish plants now operating in the Delta, perennially one of the nation’s poorest regions. “When people have been oppressed and beat down, they like to see somebody on their side.”

Turner, a salty-tongued, quick-to-laugh woman with a thick drawl, sharp wit and compassionate eyes, got her start in the labor movement while working as a certified nursing assistant in a West Memphis nursing home. “People were being mistreated,” she said.

After she began enjoying success organizing at that nursing home and others, a company official tried to get her to stop by offering her a major pay raise. “I told her the union is bigger than you or me. This is just a job. I don’t want them to give me anything. Anything people give you, they can take away. You got to earn what you get.”

Turner said organizing is a constant, daily activity, and you can never sit back and think it’s going to happen without a lot of sweat. “This is an everyday thing. You’ve got to constantly move, (make sure) the things you get are tangible. You got to organize. If you don’t, you die on the vine.”

Organizers have to adjust to changing times but never take their eyes off the prize, she said. For example, the catfish industry was thriving in 1990. Today producers have to compete with China and Vietnam while surviving a recession at home. However, Turner said, organizers have to be on the alert that these factors don’t become excuses for mistreating workers.

She recalls one company official’s comment during the recent negotiations: “`We never said we were broke. We just want to be competitive like everybody else.’”

Management tends to see workers like those in the catfish-producing plants in the same way they look at field hands. “It’s like we’re all on the farm. Just because we work at a catfish plant, we’re not still on the farm. A lot of people at those plants have been to high school, been to college. They know there are no other jobs in the Delta, so they stay. `I don’t want to leave my mama, my family,’ they say, and the company knows that.”

Turner said she has occasionally thought about retirement, but she can’t stop fighting right now. “I can’t leave until I make sure that catfish contract is made whole. I don’t just want to see Rose Turner make progress. These people are just like my family.

“A lot of people think a contract is about money,” she said. It’s actually “about fairness and dignity on the job.”

Upcoming post on veteran Memphis-based labor organizer Rose Turner

2010-10-12T18:11:00.000-07:00

In the next couple of days I'll be posting a story on Rose Turner, veteran labor organizer with the United Food and Commercial Workers union.

A native of West Memphis, Ark., who has been organizing nursing home and catfish plant workers in the Deep South for the past three decades, Turner is in one sense a fiery throwback to the ol' days of organizing, when it was all about door-to-door campaigning, phone-to-phone proselytizing, round-table Q&A sessions into the wee hours, hard-as-nails negotiating at the bargaining table with management. Salty-tongued, always honest and straight-to-the-point, Rose Marie Turner is the kind of labor organizer who may be a throwback in one sense, but she also points the way to the future in prompting a true resurrection of a labor movement in the South and beyond.

I interviewed Rose Turner today at UFCW Local 1529 headquarters in Memphis, and I'm looking forward to putting her story down on paper--or rather the computer screen.

Delta Pride workers talk about their new contract

2010-10-05T14:51:00.000-07:00

(The photograph is of Delta Pride Catfish worker Clyde Stansberry at the recent union vote on a new contract)

INDIANOLA, Miss. - On September 29, I traveled to this little Mississippi Delta town to witness the vote of workers at Delta Pride Catfish Inc. on a new contract offer from the company. A hundred or so workers were on hand as United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1529 President Lonnie Sheppard told them that the contract is not "everything we want" but "is it everything they want? Oh, no. They wanted $1.7 million from you."

The workers I interviewed after the vote generally supported the contract, a far cry from the May 2010 contract offer that would have gutted all the gains from the workers' historic 1990 strike. In May, workers voted nearly unanimously to go on strike rather than accept that contract.

The new contract offers modest pay increases, daily overtime, and a modified health insurance plan but also new limits on vacation and other measures less than popular among veteran workers like Corinneiler Howard.

The 55-year-old, 26-year veteran at the company said her pay will go from $9.15 an hour to $9.50 an hour but she is losing a week's vacation as a result of the new contract.

"I been here 26 years. I worked hard to get where I am. We've got families to feed. I think it's so unfair to lose a week (of vacation) after 26 years."

She had accrued five weeks' vacation, but new rules limits the maximum amount of vacation to four weeks.

As for the pay, she said, "I'd a felt a lot better if they'd said $10."

Clyde Stansberry, 57, a 28-year veteran mechanic's helper at the plant, said the contract was "better than nothing. Jobs are hard to find. I figured they'd come back (with a new offer). Too much to lose for both sides."

Stansberry makes $12.75 an hour.

Maggie Leflore, 58, a 22-year veteran who operates a machine that skins the fish, said she's happy enough with the contract. "I'm glad it's over. We been having a tough time."

After 22 years at Delta Pride, Leflore earns $8.05 an hour.

New round-up: Union vote at Delta, Teamsters try to shake up Fed-Ex, and a rally cry for immigrants in Mississippi

2010-09-30T07:56:00.000-07:00

Here is the latest round-up of some of the key labor activity in the South

A Unionized Delta Airlines in Atlanta?

Delta Airlines CEO Richard Anderson believes the "culture" developed over 80 years at his Atlanta-based company precludes unions, and that's why he's urging some 20,000 attendants--including 7,000 who were union members at now-merged Northwest Airlines--to vote "No" in elections beginning this week, the first in a series between now and early November that will also include 14,000 baggage handlers and more than 16,000 other workers.

Two previous union votes at Delta were unsuccessful. However, the addition of the Northwest attendants changes the landscape and could pave the way for a major labor victory in the Deep South.

Union officials are encouraged by new rules put in place by the National Mediation Board, which oversees transportation, that state that a majority of votes constitutes victory. Under the old rules, a majority of all employees--whether voting or not--was required before victory could be declared.

Teamsters trying to stir up Fed-Ex in Memphis

Over in Memphis, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters tried unsuccessfully again to get Federal Express stockholders to approve changes allowing for an independent board chairman at the company as it prepares for the eventual retirement of CEO/founder Fred Smith. Stockholders voted down the proposal by a 2-1 margin at their annual meeting at the company's headquarters.

Fed-Ex and the Teamsters have been squaring off for some time now with the union supporting efforts to have the company operate under the same labor rules that apply to its major competitor, UPS. Legislation is pending before Congress to effect such a change, which would give the Teamsters a golden opportunity to organize Fed-Ex drivers. Fred Smith has fought this legislation with tooth and nail and threatened to nullify huge Boeing contracts with the company if it is passed.

Mississippi organizer calls immigrant rights human rights

Here, closer to home, Lily Axelrod, North Mississippi organizer with the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, this week encouraged students and faculty at the University of Mississippi to become engaged in the effort to secure human rights for immigrant workers.

"We need drastic reform of our immigration system that will emphasize human rights," said Axelrod, herself a descendant of Polish immigrants. "Unfortunately none of the bills being tossed about Congress right now do that. If the government would just enforce existing (labor and human rights) laws, things would be better.

"We're working from the ground up here in Mississippi, using the same kind of tactics that civil rights groups used."

MIRA is now combating proposed legislation before the Mississippi Legislature that would mimic the draconian, anti-immigrant law recently adopted in Arizona, a law that allows law enforcement to stop and question anyone suspected of lacking immigrant documentation. Critics say the law is a blank check to law enforcement for the harassment of any immigrant, whether legal or not.

Hearings on the proposed legislation in Mississippi were held this week.

Pending strike by catfish workers in Mississippi defused by new contract negotiations

2010-09-21T07:29:00.000-07:00

Months-long negotiations between Delta Pride Catfish Inc. and members of the United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 1529, have defused a potential strike by hundreds of workers at the company's plant in Indianola, Miss., and with plants operated by a partner firm in Isola and Belzona, Miss., all in the perennially poor Mississippi Delta.

"The strike vote woke them up," said Lonnie Sheppard, president of UFCW Local 1529, referring to nearly unanimous votes by plant workers in May to strike rather than accept a company-offered contract that would have created a seven-day work week, deleted daily overtime, doubled the probationary period for new hires to six months, reduced seniority benefits, given the company free reign in contracting out work, tripled worker contributions to company health insurance over a three-year period, and other measures considered intolerable by workers and their union representatives.

Union officials felt the provisions would have nullified the hard-fought gains made by workers as a result of their highly publicized strike at Delta Pride in 1990, the largest by black workers in Mississippi's history and one that prompted a national boycott of Delta Pride products.

"I was wanting to get this behind me," Sheppard said Thursday. "There's got to be common ground."

The newly negotiated contract, which workers will vote on next week, includes wage increases, daily overtime, and a "modified co-pay on insurance but not bad," Sheppard said. "All the 84 proposals they (previously) gave are off the table."

Had the dispute gone to a strike, he said, "it would have been a revitalization of 1990. It would have been exciting, but also disastrous for all sides."

Strikes, which Sheppard calls "a last resort", have been on the decline for years. However, the recession and frustration over employer intransigence and apparent desire to destroy unions have created a recent uptick of strike activity.

More than 300 workers at the Mott plant in upstate New York declared victory this month after a three-month strike at the applesauce plant. Members of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union/United Food and Commercial Workers Local 220 won a new contract that restored wage-and-benefit levels that an earlier contract had sought to cut or even eliminate.

As with Delta Pride, Mott, owned by the Texas-based Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, had tried to gut worker pay and benefits in its earlier contract offer, including calls for $3-an-hour wage cuts and the complete elimination of pensions for new workers. The Dr. Pepper Snapple Group's profits last year totaled $550 million, and its CEO, Larry Young, earned a nifty $6.5 million.

The union local said "No!" to the contract, and workers walked out, a first for workers at the Mott plant. Local stores offered the striking workers food and other assistance, and other unions, such as the Service Employees International Union, provided cash for the strike fund. As reported recently in Nation magazine, even Canadian politicians weighed in, pressuring CEO Young with concerns that scab workers weren't up to the job in insuring food-safety standards.

"Not a day went by without people stopping by to drop off a financial or food donation to the strike fund," RWDSU President Stuart Applebaum told the AFL-CIO Now blog. "The RWDSU members at Mott's have a message for working people everywhere: Stand up for what you believe in, and stay united."

Sheppard said a strike by workers at the catfish plants would have produced similar offers of help, just as it did in 1990.

FLOC launches JPMorgan Chase divestment campaign, the latest volley in a growing Southern movement

2010-09-14T08:34:00.000-07:00

(The photograph is of FLOC organizer Diego Reyes (Jr.), taken in his migrant worker father's trailer near Sanford, N.C., this summer)

The Farm Labor Organizing Committee, the Ohio-based migrant workers' rights organization that has been increasingly focused on the U.S. South in recent years, this month launched its JPMorgan Chase divestment campaign to force the Wall Street powerhouse to pressure the Reynolds American tobacco company to help farmworkers.

"We are asking people who care about farmworker justice to close their Chase accounts, cancel their Chase credit cards, and pledge not to bank with Chase until Reynolds agrees to work with FLOC to find a solution to these abuses," said FLOC community/union organizer Diego Reyes in a recent statement.

As Reyes told me during an interview in North Carolina this summer, "We need R.J. Reynolds to understand they have a lot of responsibility in the supply chain. Neither the workers nor the farmers are paid enough."

This is the latest volley in a three-year campaign to get Reynolds American to the bargaining table to establish a three-way working agreement with workers and growers. The divestment effort is similar to tactics that FLOC has used in the past in successful efforts to organize migrant workers and insist on social justice for them. FLOC won agreements with the Campbell, Vlasic, Heinz and Dean Foods companies in the 1980s and 1990s and a landmark victory with the North Carolina-based Mt. Olive Pickle Company in 2004, the largest labor agreement in the South.

JPMorgan Chase, a leader in the consortium of lenders that funnels close to $500 million in credit to the Reynolds American tobacco company.

With more than $8.5 billion in international sales as recently as 2006 and nearly $1 billion in profits during the recession, Reynolds American Inc. has not only survived but prospered since the multi-billion-dollar, multi-state tobacco settlements of the late 1990s, and it reigns today as the nation’s second largest tobacco company. By setting the terms with its contract growers, Reynolds American plays an important role in the lives of 30,000 tobacco pickers--most of whom are Latino migrants--and conditions in the fields, Reyes says.

Yet, Reynolds American officials have refused to meet with FLOC representatives. “The reason we have not agreed to meet with FLOC is simple: we can’t help them,” said a statement from the company’s Board of Directors and Leadership Team. “The workers FLOC wants to represent do not work for us. We cannot enter a bargaining agreement on the workers’ behalf—they are not our employees.”

Statistics from FLOC and the National Farm Worker Ministry estimate 24 percent of tobacco pickers suffer from nicotine poisoning each season. This along with exposure to harmful pesticides and long hours under the summer son have led to strokes and even deaths. Workers often live in crowded, unsanitary labor camps or in remote, substandard trailers.

FLOC was founded by its charismatic leader Baldemar Velasquez in 1967. Velasquez, an evangelical minister and winner of the 1990 MacArthur Fellows Award, told Southern Exposure magazine once that calls his and others’ efforts to improve the lot of migrant workers is part of a larger social movement that emphasizes community. “There is a new Latino labor force all over the South that will be the foundation of the next civil rights movement in the U.S.—a movement that is going to have a brown face.”

FLOC is one of several organizing groups that have experienced success in the U.S. South in recent years. Workers at the Smithfield hog plant in Tar Heel, N.C., scored a major victory against a formidable anti-union management in 2009 when they gained a contract with the United Food and Commercial Workers.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW)in Florida is currently waging a campaign similar to FLOC's Reynolds American campaign in its effort to get the state's largest grocery company, Publix, to pay growers a penny more for each pound of tomatoes Publix buys. The goal is to improve the lot of the industry's largely migrant workforce. The CIW has won similar agreements with Whole Foods, Burger King, McDonald's, Subway, and Yum Brands (which owns Taco Bell).

These groups are building on the foundation of earlier efforts, such as those by the leaders of the Southern Faith, Labor and Community Alliance in their successful effort to win a fairer contract for workers with K-Mart in North Carolina in the mid-1990s.

The tactics are often similar to those of the corporate campaigns that won agreements with the Georgia Power Company and Duke Power Company (owner of the union-busting Eastover mining company in Harlan County, Ky.) decades ago. The Institute for Southern Studies, now based in Durham, N.C., played a prominent role in those campaigns.

"It's really an exciting time," says Alexandria Jones, a Winston-Salem, N.C.-based community organizer with the National Farm Workers Ministry, which has worked closely with FLOC in the Reynolds American campaign. "You have to go to the top to effect real economic change.

"There are a lot of amazing things going on," she told me in an interview in Winston-Salem this summer. "In a lot of ways, the labor movement is strong. You have these small groups out there, groups of strong people. In areas of the greatest need, these poeple are working hard to make changes."

Workers' troubles are often disdained by the politicians who represent them

2010-09-05T07:01:00.000-07:00

(Here is my Labor Day Weekend column, a final installment on the workers' compensation system in Mississippi, the last state in the nation to adopt workers' compensation laws.)

What is it about working people that prompts such disdain, even contempt, from politicians whose job it is to represent them? It’s a good question to ask on a labor day weekend.

GOP guru and philosopher Newt Gingrich had this to say about workers’ compensation back when he was speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives: “If you’re not at work, why are we paying you? It’s not called a vacation fund.”

Let’s fast-forward to this year’s debate over a similar issue--extending unemployment benefits to the millions of U.S. workers facing the wolf at the door as a result of losing their jobs in the Wall Street-and-Bush-caused recession. Tennessee Congressman Zach Wamp, one of a solid flank of Republicans who successfully fought off the extension at least four times, had the following to say:

“We have continued to extend … unemployment compensation so long that there’s disincentives for people to actually re-enter the workforce or go out and look for a job. And this is creating a culture of dependence which we do not need. We want people out there scraping and clawing and looking for work and not just sitting back waiting.”

If you’ve been injured as a result of your job, do you feel now what you need most is a “vacation fund”? If you are one of the many who’ve lost their jobs and are having a hard time finding another, do you feel like you’re part of the “culture of dependence”?

When I recently wrote about a study showing a profound pro-employer tilt in Mississippi’s Workers’ Compensation Commission’s decisions on workplace injuries, I received letters from across the state decrying what one writer called a “pitiful” system that penalizes workers who get injured. My column was “only the tip of the iceberg,” another writer said.

The column described a study ordered by Jackson, Miss., attorney Roger Doolittle that showed the commission’s three members rejected administrative law judge decisions favoring workers between 75 and 91 percent of the time. Commission Chairman Liles Williams admitted to me his own numbers show he votes for the employer 59 percent of the time.

Letter writers, requesting anonymity in order not to put at risk ongoing cases, told of injuries that reduced annual wages of $30,000-plus to “zero in one day,” of employers who simply refused to carry workers’ compensation insurance and were allowed to get away with it, of major corporations that hire outside agencies to administer their policies and thus be able to dismiss claims routinely and with impunity.

“I do not believe the public has a clue what’s going on,” one writer told me.

Attorneys who represent injured workers joined together this month to demand that the state Legislature stop dragging its feet on a proposed investigation of the commission and its rulings. State House Insurance Committee Chairman Walter Robinson of Bolton, Miss., who held a hearing on the issue a year ago, told me last month that any investigation remains “in limbo” because the opposing sides are so far apart.

Statistics show six million U.S. workers suffer on-the-job injuries every year, and more than 6,000 of them die. Tens of thousands suffer life-debilitating diseases and even death as a result of being exposed to toxic workplace chemicals or other materials.

The state of Mississippi has never felt compelled to track such statistics particularly well, but I keep a folder of clippings that tell the story, and it’s an old one. There was Phillip Cason Hosch, 29, who died in an explosion at the Mueller Copper Tube plant in Fulton, Miss., in 2009. Then there was construction worker Eleazar Casiano, 20, who was killed when a 10-foot sewer trench collapsed on top of him in Harrison County, Miss., in 2006. And let’s not forget sawmill worker Andrew Lee Byrd, 46, who got trapped in a wood chipper at V&B’s International Inc. in Port Gibson, Miss., way back in 2004. “He was a good fella,’ Byrd’s sister said. “He loved fishing.”

These are a few of the people behind the statistics. I’ll bet they weren’t looking for a “vacation fund” or a handout. They were just doing their jobs, and they paid a mighty high price for it.

Singapore: a city-state fueled and founded by migrant workers

2010-09-02T19:22:00.000-07:00

(Here after a brief appearance earlier is my full-length article about Singapore and its migrant workers, relevant to us in the U.S. South, where the issue of migrant workers has raised speculation that yet another "New South" may be in the making. The photograph is of the Marina Bay Sands luxury hotel and casino, cited in the article and a symbol of Singapore's economic prowess. A shortened version of this article appeared in the September 2010 edition of the magazine In These Times. The longer version will soon appear in The Progressive Populist.)

SINGAPORE – W. Somerset Maugham, this city’s most famous expatriate writer, once said this about Southeast Asia’s workers: “These patient, industrious folk carry on the same yokes the same burdens as their ancestors carried so many generations back. The centuries have passed leaving no trace upon them.”

Yet, “in these countries of the East the most impressive, the most awe-inspiring monument of antiquity is neither temple, nor citadel, not great wall, but man. The peasant with his immemorial usages belongs to an age far more ancient than Angkor Wat, the Great Wall of China, or the Pyramids of Egypt.”

Whether Maugham wrote those words in his favorite room at Singapore’s famous Raffles Hotel is uncertain, but what is certain is that they’re just as true today as they were in 1930.

Here in this crossroads of Asian and Western cultures, an economic powerhouse that is a model to the rest of southeast Asia, migrant workers from Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and China do the backbreaking work that helped Singapore earn ranking recently as the world’s most competitive economy, topping the United States and perennial Asian competitor, Hong Kong.

More than one-third of the workforce in this city of five million is foreign-born. However, many live in crowded, rat-infested dormitories with little relief from the sweltering tropical heat, reliving the conditions that faced the 19th century immigrants from China who largely built Singapore.

“Singapore may be seen by some as a model in ways that are not so good for workers,” says John Gee, president of the Singapore-based Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2) organization. “It has made some reforms, shown a real commitment to countering the worst abuses of workers, but this still leaves a long way to go. We’d like to see a new relationship worked out, with a minimum wage, a weekly day off for domestic workers by law, overtime pay, limits on working hours.”

There’s no minimum wage in the 24th most expensive city in the world, and wages actually declined from a median monthly level of 1,389 Singapore dollars (approximately 1,000 U.S. dollars) in 1998 to 1,270 in 2008. Singaporeans have less purchasing power than the citizens of nearby Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, yet with an unemployment rate of 2.2 percent immigration has doubled over the past 10 years.
Singapore has emerged from its worst recession in history with 15.5 percent growth in the first quarter of this year. Manufacturing, 25 percent of the economy and led by the electronics and biomedical industries, was up 32.9 percent.

The city’s skyline rivals those of Chicago and Hong Kong, and it now includes the $7.8 billion, 55-story three towers of the Marina Bay Sands luxury hotel and casino with their connecting 2,500-acre sky terrace. Long one of the Pacific Rim’s economic “tigers,” the city pulses with energy from its financial district down to its busy ethnic enclaves with their Buddhist and Hindu temples, Moslem mosques, and vendor and shophouse-lined streets.

Yet this citadel of neo-liberalism reserves most of its rewards for those at the top end of the economy. The wealthy pay just half in taxes what their counterparts in the United States pay. Already-low corporate taxes were cut even lower during last year’s recession. Sales taxes, on the other hand, have risen from 4 percent in 2003 to the current 7 percent.

“The government keeps raising (sales) taxes, putting pressure on people, particularly small businessmen,” a convenience store owner in western Singapore complained to me. “You have to work very hard to make it. You have to get up early and go to bed late. People are scared to speak up. Even the rich are scared to say anything or they will lose what they have.”

Ang Peng Hwa, who heads the journalism program at Nanyang Technological University here, says the influx of immigrant workers has kept wages low while “the differential between the wealthy and the poor is growing.”

Workers have no real means to protest their conditions. Under the semi-authoritarian, half-century rule of the People’s Action Party and modern Singapore’s founder and current minister mentor, Lee Kuan Yew, any kind of protest is strictly limited. When the International Monetary Fund convened here in 2006, no outdoor protests were allowed.

Remember this is the city where American Michael Fay was famously caned for theft and vandalism in 1994. The Singapore Police are notoriously tough. No jaywalking, and no eating and drinking in the subways. Graffiti artists face up to three years in prison--plus the cane--if they get caught.

“Outdoor protests of the kind we see in the rest of the world are largely banned,” says Radha Basu, a senior correspondent with The Straights Times, Singapore’s major newspaper, and a frequent writer about migrant worker issues. “Impoverished migrant workers who are desperate to remain in Singapore to earn decent salaries don’t generally protest (although) there have been cases where groups have thronged (Ministry of Manpower) headquarters to complain about non-payment of salaries.”

Gee says workers should be able “to speak up for their own rights without fear of being sent home by their employers in order to shut them up and frighten others. That would make Singapore into a much better model to follow.”

Of course, many Singaporeans credit Lee Kuan Yew for raising the city from Third World to First World status. Lee, at 86, is officially retired, but he remains a formidable presence not only as minister mentor but also as the father of current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong

“Lots of foreigners come here to work,” 55-year-old taxi driver Abo Rhaman B Abo Samad says. “Everybody has a job if you’re not too choosy. I was a security guard making eight hundred to nine hundred (Singapore) dollars salary. I had to upgrade myself. Now I make four thousand a month.”

As for Lee Kuan Yew, Abo says, “He’s a smart man, a swell leader, a great leader. We have nothing, no natural resources. This man took us out of nothing.” Lee’s critics “are stupid. They haven’t been to Myanmar (Burma), or to Thailand where they are fighting.”

Indeed, over the two weeks I recently spent here, the streets of Bangkok turned red with blood as Red Shirt protesters raged against the government. North and South Korea rattled sabers over the sinking of a South Korean warship. Worker suicides and bizarre attacks on children and women revealed the dark underside to China’s economic boom. During my visit, Indonesian police raided a terrorist hideout in Jakarta and found plans indicating that one of the subway stops I used everyday was a bombing target.

The growing unrest among workers in China, India, and other countries is watched closely. Nearly 2,000 workers for Honda in China’s Guangdong province, went on strike in mid-May, shutting down production at the company’s four plants there. They were protesting low wages and poor working conditions. Workers at the Hyundai plant in Chennai, India, shut down operations there, too, in June. A rash of suicides by workers at Foxconn Technology’s plants in Shenzhen, China, prompted the company to raise wages twice within a single week—first by 30 percent, and then by 70 percent. Foxconn makes electronic components for Dell, Apple and other companies, including Apple’s iPhone and iPad.

Singapore’s National Wages Council has proposed that workers’ wages in the city-nation also be increased, and analysts predict they will rise as much as 5 percent this year. The city has also taken some action to improve workers’ living conditions, moving close to 20,000 last year to better facilities and increasing inspections. Fines against slumlords officially can be as high as $5,000 plus six months in jail, but in reality fines were as little as 200 Singapore dollars in 2009.

“Employers are responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of their foreign workers, including the provision of acceptable accommodation,” says Joann Tan, a spokeswoman with Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower (MOM). “To speed up punitive action against errant employers, MOM is considering raising the amount of composition fines imposed on employers for housing their workers in unacceptable conditions.”

Despite the city’s long history of immigration, a backlash against migrant workers is growing. Native Singaporeans resent blue-collar immigrants for keeping wages low, and they resent white-collar immigrants for taking away jobs. “Some quite venomous anti-migrant worker statements may be heard in casual conversation,” Gee says. “It is easy politics all over the world: blame the foreigner. None of the opposition parties speak up for them, as they see that as a vote loser.”

Journalist Radha Basu agrees. “Foreign workers in Singapore are increasingly being blamed for all kinds of ills—from low wages to crowded transport system to soaring property taxes and even petty crime.”

Yet, Gee says, “the construction sector would grind to a halt without migrant workers; likewise, the shipyard sector. Probably cleaning services would be badly hit, too. Migrant workers provide a substantial minority of the workforce who drive buses, work in shops and restaurants. One in six households have domestic workers. … Despite lots of complaints by sectors of the public about the presence of foreign workers, most people know that if they were excluded tomorrow, it would be catastrophic for the national economy.”

In other words, the peasant worker still has “his immemorial usages,” and he still builds the temples and citadels, but he rarely gets to enjoy them.

Let's hope BP victims don't suffer the fate of those in Bhopal or those of the big U.S. fruit companies in Latin America

2010-08-21T09:58:00.000-07:00

Big corporations in general don't have a particularly admirable record when it comes to social justice and human rights, and the U.S. government has been usually unwilling or reluctant at best to play any kind of role in improving that record.en

Many citizens who've suffered as a result of BP's giant oil spill in the Gulf Coast are still waiting on their claims. Complaints are already coming in, and BP's legion of lawyers are certain to look for any loopholes that their client can slip through. That's despite the federal government's demand that BP establish a $20 billion fund to repair the damages it has wrought.

A reminder of the long, sordid history of corporate malfeasance is ever present in faraway Bhopal, India, where a toxic leak from a Union Carbide pesticides plant killed nearly 4,000 on Dec. 3, 1984. Ultimately, more than 20,000 died from the disaster, and many more suffered life-debilitating injuries, including a second generation of birth defects and other health problems.

In fact, people across the entire nation of India are up in arms these days over the 26-year legal case that was only recently resolved with minimal sentences for seven defendants and minimal fines, too. Although victims are getting as little as $330 each for their suffering, both the U.S. and Indian governments appear ready to wash their hands of the matter and move on. Indian activist and writer N. Gunasekaran has written eloquently about the issue.

That quarter-century legal maze bring to mind the spirit-numbing Court of Chancery in Charles Dickens' Bleak House. Let's hope Gulf Coast victims don't suffer a similar fate.

Perhaps you recall the investigative project undertaken by the Gannett-owned Cincinnati Enquirer on Cincinnati-based Chiquita Brands International, Inc., (formerly the notorious United Fruit Company) in the 1990s. The newspaper and Gannett dropped the story after Chiquita threatened a lawsuit as a result of stolen voice-mail used in the investigation. Yes, dropped the story despite mountains of testimony regarding the practices of Chiquita in Central America. Bribes, behind-the-scenes deals to circumvent labor regulations, and environmental damage were all part of that dropped story.

Chiquita still faces legal disputes with victims as well as governments in the region, and with its own government due to its relationship with militia groups there. Guess who was one of Chiquita's top lawyers during these disputes. None other than U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

The Dole Food Company, formerly the Standard Fruit Company, isn't much better. It was the only major multinational company in the region to refuse to join an agreement in 1997 giving $41.5 million to some 26,000 workers. Five years later, a Nicaraguan tribunal ordered Dole and other companies to pay $489 million to workers suffering from exposure to Nemagon, a dangerous pesticide long banned in the United States. Nemagon is believed to have caused cancer, sterility, kidney and skin diseases, and birth deformities in workers and their families.

Ironically, the owner of the Dole Food Company, David Murdock, is the same corporate honcho who once owned the Cannon Mills textile company in Kannapolis, N.C., sold it, and left town with the hard-earned pension money of its employees. Eventually forced to pay back a paltry $1 million of the $39 million he took from the pension fund's excess assets, Murdock later returned and won over the town's skeptical, rightly bitter residents by promising a new research "biopolis" in Kannapolis that would "teach people about proper health, nutrition, and wellness" (Murdock's own words).

I was the first to publish the irony of Murdock's unhealthy Central American activities and his "proper health" activities in North Carolina. It appeared in my 2008 book, Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press.

Do you think research plans at Murdock's "biopolis" included studies of nemagon?