Upcoming post on veteran Memphis-based labor organizer Rose Turner

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.