Ralph Nader wants Labor Day to mean more than bargains and sales. He wants a day that truly celebrates and champions the American worker. The AFL-CIO said "Yes" but then bowed to the Democratic Party's "No".

(Ralph Nader)
 

Legendary consumer activist Ralph Nader believes Labor Day should live up to its name. It should be a day that celebrates working people in the United States and their right to organize and speak in a united voice.

 

Instead of being a day extolling capitalism with shopping bargains and discount offers, this coming Labor Day on Monday, September 2, could feature a variety of community gatherings, including “assemblies, rallies, voter registration drives, marches, demonstrations and even agenda-driven parades,” Nader said.

 

“We can have all kinds of events at the local level,” Nader told me in a recent telephone interview. “A compact for American workers.”

 

The events would help promote important issues such as raising the minimum wage, repeal of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, greater protections for workers at the workplace, and more security for their pensions, all doubly important given the presidential election in November.

 

You’d think the AFL-CIO would love the idea. They did. Nader proposed it to AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and other labor leaders and got an enthusiastic response.  Several major labor leaders were ready to act as soon as they got the green light from the AFL-CIO. They included Baldemar Velasquez of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, Sara Nelson of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, and former Communications Workers of America President Larry Cohen.

 

“We thought, `This is great! We finally woke up that giant on 16^th Street (AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, D.C.) from their slumber,” Nader said.

 

Then the Democratic Party stepped in. “On anything remotely touching on elections, they pass it by the Democratic Party apparatus,” Nader said. “The Democratic Party shut it down. `We won’t be able to control it. Don’t rock the boat.’”

 

Attempts to contact Shuler national Democratic Party Chair Jaime Harrison were unsuccessful.

 

“She doesn’t even call us,” Nader said. “It completely goes dark. They’re so corrupt and so tied to the hip of the Democratic Party they can’t even put the works in on Labor Day.”

 

As for the Democratic Party, Nader said, “they’re controlled by corporate consultant media groups. They’d rather do puff pieces like what kind of coach was (Democratic vice presidential candidate) Tim Walz.”

 

Labor Day was even at its founding something of a contentious event. It ought to be on May 1, the day it is celebrated elsewhere in the world. May 1, 1886, was the day of the founding of the “Eight Hour Work Day” in Chicago and what is considered the world’s first May Day parade. However, the subsequent deadly police confrontation and bombing known as the “Haymarket Affair” and continued labor unrest in later years rattled President Grover Cleveland enough in 1894 to proclaim a “Labor Day” holiday but to make it the first Monday in September rather than May 1.  

 

A recent Gallup Poll showed that 70 percent of Americans view labor unions favorably, the second highest level in six decades. A poll in 2022 showed 71 percent viewed unions favorably.

 

The polls indicate Americans are ready for a more robust Labor Day, one that does more than ask them to reach into their pockets and spend, one that recognizes the contributions of the working class to American society and declares a commitment to make their lives better.

 

Harris supports Israel, NATO, and the war in Ukraine while Trump backs Israel and praises the firing of workers who are on strike. Why don't we have a major party peace candidate who supports workers?

(Kamala Harris)
 

(Below is a revised version of my initial post from a few days ago, sharpening the focus on Harris, the Democratic Party, and the issue of war) 

A Democratic Party loyalist here in Oxford told me recently he was at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago and the “joy” and “unity” among delegates was palpable. Even when Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, accepting her party’s nomination, talked war the smiles and applause were nearly universal.

 

Yes, Harris stood strong for the military-industrial complex, pledging support for NATO and its brutal war in Ukraine. “I helped mobilize a global response—over 50 countries—to defend against Putin’s aggression,” she boasted. As for Israel, Harris said, “I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.”

 

Furthermore, Harris said she is going to make sure “America—not China—wins the competition for the 21^st century. And that we strengthen—not abdicate—our global leadership.”

 

Is the Democratic Party the party of war? Despite Republican Richard Nixon’s role in continuing the Vietnam War after his election as president in 1968, let’s not forget it was Democrats John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson who got that war started. Today Joe Biden will go down in history as perhaps finally ending the 20-year war in Afghanistan but then turning around and funding the U.S.-pushed war in Ukraine, funding Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and threatening war with China simply because China poses a challenge to the United States’ economic dominance of the world.

 

In her speech to the Democratic National Convention, Kamala Harris firmly established she’ll be no less a warmonger than Joe Biden.

 

“As commander-in-chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” she told the fawning crowd in Chicago.

 

Actually her comments were among the few that even addressed war during the convention. This is despite the fact that the U.S.-and-NATO-funded war in Ukraine escalates daily with U.S.-armed Ukrainian soldiers now in Russia while Russian soldiers make steady gains in eastern Ukraine. Israel’s wholesale murdering of Gaza civilians has been made possible by the U.S. providing Israel with nearly 70 percent of all its arms imports—including an estimated $12.5 billion in weapons since October 2023.

 

In fact, Palestinian Americans were denied an opportunity to speak on the DNC stage in Chicago, and news coverage of pro-Palestinians protests outside the convention hall was minimal at best.

 

Even Republican Donald Trump and his running made J.D. Vance have indicated they’re sick and tired of the U.S funding the war in Ukraine, a needless war that the U.S. helped create by playing a key role in the overthrow of an elected, Russia-leaning government in Ukraine in 2014 and willful dismissal of rightful Russian desires not to have a hostile NATO partner on its borders.

 

However, Trump is as devoted to Israel’s warmongering as Biden-Harris, and if elected he’ll likely continue to feed the bloated military-industrial complex, with its funding now at an estimated $1.5 trillion.

 

Harris is enjoying a boost in polls since the convention, and the Trump team still hasn’t figured out quite how to deal with her. Trump is his own worse enemy. After rallying blue-collar workers and even many union members with his choice of Vance as a running mate and the party’s willingness to hear Teamsters President Sean O’Brien speak at the GOP Convention in July, the former president joined multi-billionaire Elon Musk on the X social media platform and praised the Tesla CEO for firing striking workers.

 

“I mean, look at what you do,” Trump said in absolute admiration, “You walk in, you just say, `You want to quit?’ They go on strike … and you say, `That’s okay, you’re all gone.’”

 

In 2022, Musk fired unionized workers at Tesla’s San Francisco headquarters and workers at its Buffalo, New York, factory who were organizing a union.

 

The United Auto Workers got so incensed about those comments that the union filed federal labor charges against Trump and Musk for making illegal threats against striking workers who are protected by federal law from such intimidation. O’Brien called Trump’s comments to Musk “economic terrorism.” 

 

Working class people, abandoned by the Democratic Party since Bill Clinton corporatized it in the 1990s and largely ignored by the Republican Party for a century or more, have nowhere really to turn. They’ll fight the wars that the politicians wage, and those same politicians could car less about the economic duress in their lives.

 

Worker class people—a term, by the way, that neither party likes very much--hope against hope each election. Unions dutifully endorse a Democratic Party that stopped listening decades ago. Third Party candidates like war opponent Jill Stein of the Green Party offer a breath of fresh air, but they can't get media attention and the major parties (particularly the Democratic Party) do everything possible to skuttle their campaigns.

 

Apologies for sounding pessimistic, but it seems the saber-rattling and warmongering are going to among the winners in the November election.

What divides America is not race but rich and poor, the old preacher J. Vernon McGee once said. He might have added war.

 

(J. Vernon McGee)
 

The late J. Vernon McGee, famous radio preacher and pastor of the Church of the Open Door in downtown Los Angeles, once had this to say about divisions in the United States. “It’s not race that ultimately will divide this country. It’s rich and poor.”

 

My very religious mother used to listen to McGee regularly, and I always enjoyed hearing what he had to say in that thick Southern accent of his. He told the truth when he talked about the rich and poor in America but he might have also added war. War is itself an issue of the rich and poor.

 

You’d think you would hear a lot about the plight of the working class in the current presidential election and the growing divide between them and the 1 percent who rule the corporatocracy that the United States has become.

 

On the Democratic side, Kamala Harris raised hopes in the working class with her choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate. A plainspoken champion of a handful of labor and other left-leaning issues as governor, Walz would seem to broaden the appeal for Harris, whose record features few challenges to corporate rule. Yet Walz as a congressman was quite centrist, and he is as staunch a supporter of Israel as much of the rest of the Democratic Party leadership, even as Israel continues its genocide in the Gaza Strip and suppression of Palestinians in the West Bank.

 

War is an issue for the working class. They fight the wars that the nation wages, and if not on the battlefield they are forced to support those wars with their tax dollars.

 

You’d think war is hardly an issue in this year’s election if you simply read or listened to mainstream media. Yet both Democrats and Republicans have wedded this nation to Israel’s rapacious behavior by sending the weapons it uses to kill Palestinians. They’ve done the same in Ukraine, continuing the bloody destruction of that nation in an effort to weaken Russia and bring about the regime change they so desperately want. The same motivations prompt all the talk against China, a nation that poses no military threat to the U.S. but one that poses for them an unacceptable economic challenge.

 

In other words, Harris thus far has helped feed Wall Street and a military-industrial complex that thrive while Main Street suffers. There’s little indication so far that Harris-Walz would be any different than Biden-Harris.

 

When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, he promised to clear “the swamp” that is the Deep State in Washington, D.C. Instead he brought bankers and warmongers into his cabinet and did little other than bluster about how great he was making America again. Would another Trump Administration be different?

 

Trump’s choice for VP, J.D. Vance, brought some promise of working class sympathies as a result of his own Appalachian background and his book, Hillbilly Elegy. However, let’s not forget he went on to Yale Law School and an early career as a corporate lawyer and venture capitalist. To his credit, he does oppose further U.S. funding for the war in Ukraine. However, both he and Trump remain strong supporters of Israel, and Vance has strongly condemned pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses.

 

For the time being, the Trump campaign is floundering. It misses easy target Joe Biden badly and hasn’t yet found the message to successfully counter Harris-Walz.

 

What the working class of America want are leaders who truly represent their interests, who aren’t utterly beholden to Wall Street and the war machine, who mean what they say and say what they mean. It has been so long since they had such a leader they have to wonder whether one exists.

 

Teamsters president preaches but not to the choir at the Republican national convention. Meanwhile Democrats pray for a miracle.

 Don’t preach to the choir, the old saying goes. You preach to the sinners in hopes to save their souls.

 

It’s the kind of message I used to hear in my youth from my Uncle Eb at the Macedonian Pentecostal Holiness Church in rural central North Carolina. Uncle Eb was a fiery presence behind his wooden pulpit, his blazing eyes, hooked nose, and gravelly voice. “You not too young to go to hell,” he once warned my brother John and me when we declined joining everyone else kneeling at the front aisle at the end of one of his sermons.

(Teamsters President Sean O'Brien)

 

Teamsters union president Sean O’Brien was definitely not preaching to the choir when he made his pro-union speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this past Monday night.

 

“I see American workers being taken for granted, workers being sold out to big banks, big tech corporations, the elite,” O’Brien said in his amazing stem-winder. America needs a “long-term investment in the American worker.”

 

O’Brien took a lot of heat for accepting Republican nominee Donald Trump’s invitation to speak at the Republican convention. His union even donated $45,000 to the Republican cause. United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain blasted Trump as a “scab” who’d “be a company man trying to squeeze the American worker” if he ever worked in a plant.

 

(Donald Trump)

 

Unlike most unions with their unwavering support for the national Democratic Party, the Teamsters have flirted before with the Republican Party. It’s a serious flirtation when you consider the Teamsters is the nation’s largest private-sector union with 1.4 million members.

 

O’Brien’s speech wasn’t the only stereotype-defying element in the Republican National Convention. Trump’s choice of U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance as his vice president running mate was another. Vance has built his career—if not always his vote--on support for the common man, the blue-collar worker, against the corporate elite in this country. He’s also taken a strong stand against U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine, much to the chagrin of the party’s most rabid warmongers, such as U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina.

(J.D. Vance)

 

What’s happening here? Is the Trump-led Republican Party trying to become the “Big Tent” party the Democrats have always claimed to be? Indeed, this week’s convention featured a row of black politicians and a major black influencer as well as a “common man” hero in wrestler Hulk Hogan.

 

 When the Democrats convene for their own convention in Chicago August 19, they’ll likely enter the arena a deeply divided party, uncertain who their leader will be now that incumbent President Joe Biden has bowed out. Will it be Vice President Kamala Harris, or some other choice who may somehow salvage the party’s sinking chances in November?

 

Of course, the Democrats will have loyalists on board such as the UAW’s Shawn Fain, an early endorser of Biden despite Biden’s dismal failure in late 2022 to support a railroad workers strike to secure better working conditions and decent sick leave policies.

 

 The recent--and now successful--push to get rid of Joe Biden in the wake of his disastrous debate performance against Trump has exposed the traditional “Big Tent” party to be essentially run by “Big Donors” from Hollywood and Wall Street. They may claim to be Diversity-Equity-Inclusion liberals but in essence they are just as disdainful of unions as a Walton or as many of those in that Milwaukee convention hall listening to O’Brien rail against billionaires.

 

(Franklin D. Roosevelt with Labor Secretary Frances Perkins)
 

Decades ago Bill and Hillary Clinton gutted the “Big Tent” soul of what was left of FDR’s old Democratic Party, deregulating the financial markets, repealing the Glass-Steagal Act that restricted monopolizing mergers. Bill's later successor, Barack Obama, would give a rousing pro-union speech at the 2005 AFL-CIO convention in Chicago—I was there and applauded it!—but he filled his cabinet with Wall Streeters once he got elected president.

 

Many workers—and likely a lot of Teamsters—are turning toward Trump and the Republicans because they feel abandoned by the modern-day Democratic Party with its obsessive focus on identity politics and general refusal to even use the term “working class”. They’re sadly bound to be disappointed, however, because Trump may sound populist and working class, but in his heart of hearts he’s a corporate billionaire who peopled his first administration with bankers and industrialists.

 

Working class people in America need a party of their own, a labor party, that is truly going to serve them, not just pay lip service during campaigns. They had such a party 120 years ago in the so-called People’s Party, better known as the Populists. The Democratic Party of that day, however, appropriated many of their issues, and the Populists gradually faded from the scene after becoming the largest third party movement in the country’s history.

 

Quo vadis, today’s America? I wish I had an answer.

 

A doddering old president and bulldog former president debate the nation's future while Democrats worry about their party's future

The whole world was watching—literally—as U.S. President Joe Biden stumbled and mumbled his way through a 90-minute debate with former president Donald Trump last night. For much of his presidency, Biden has been protected by a coterie of loyalists--and their media sycophants--who’ve insisted he is in full control of his faculties and his job as the most powerful man in the world.

 

Don’t believe your lying eyes, they told the world. Last night the world saw who was lying.

 

Democrats today (and Washington’s Deep State) are in either shell shock or panic mode as they look down through the remaining months before the election and wonder if their man can ever restore Americans’ confidence that he can lead them another four years. If he’s as doddering today as he appeared to be at the CNN debate last night, how will he be when he’s 86 years old and still in charge of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal?

 

Speculation is already circling among Democrats as to who would or could replace Biden as the head of the Democratic ticket. Vice President Kamala Harris? She’s even more unpopular than Biden. And if the party wants someone else, it cannot tell Kamala there’s a glass ceiling after all! Still, all the speculation is a waste of time. The presidency has been Joe Biden’s lifelong dream, and he’s not going to simply slip off into the night now that it is in his grip. Joe Biden’s ego may be the one remaining strength of his mental capacities.

 

For his part, Donald Trump probably bristled at the debate rules that prevented him from roughshodding Biden like he did Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and fellow Republicans during the 2016 presidential race. Yet, ironically, those rules actually helped him, keeping him on target, making him even look, dare I say, almost normal in his relative restraint. Of course, a plethora of lies poured from his mouth, but he at least held back from taking full mocking advantage of Biden’s disintegration.

 

Biden’s handlers over the past week obviously pumped him full of statistics. He seemed programmed as he recited them even if some of them were patently false. Biden told lies, too, lies that CNN commentators totally ignored. Russia, for example, has shown absolutely no inclination to take over all of Ukraine, much less Poland and other Eastern European countries, as Biden claimed again and again.

 

Biden was best when he pointed to Trump’s utter allegiance to the nation’s top 1 percent—the tax cuts to the wealthy, the suppression of organized labor and worker rights, the judges and justices he appointed to reward the rich and punish everyone else. However, viewers were watching Biden’s facial and body movements, listening to the raspy, uncertain voice, not really listening to the words.

 

The Democratic National Committee has become an extremely insular organization ever since Bill and Hillary Clinton excised the party’s soul and replaced it with unprincipled (and largely unsuccessful) formulas and algorithms to raise lots of money (Wall Street) and hopefully win elections. Just as the DNC worked to undermine Bernie Sanders’ candidacy eight years ago, it made sure this campaign that Biden was unchallenged in the primaries.

 

They got their man. Now what are they doing to do with him?

 

And how is the nation going to fare over the next four years? That’s the real concern that emerged from last night’s debate.

A pro-union worker school in North Carolina attracts 200, and 27,000 teachers and school workers get a union in Fairfax County, Virginia, while a judge, cops, and even some union leaders push against student anti-genocide protests

(Ella May Wiggins, a martyr of the Southern labor movement who was murdered during textile mill protests in North Carolina in 1929)
 

Some 200 pro-labor activists and workers attend a Southern Worker School in Charlotte, North Carolina, and a majority of voters of a 27,000-member teacher core in Fairfax County, Virginia, vote to join a union. Meanwhile, police and the courts crack down on protesters across the country, and Ford and Stellantis violate the spirit of recent union agreements by laying off hundreds of workers.

 

In this latest Labor South round-up, the lines are clearly being drawn between the American people and the political-financial forces that continue to try to dominate their lives.

 

A push to get workers into key industries across the South so they can organize and push pro-union ideas

 

An historic gathering of some 200 pro-union rank-and-filers took place in Charlotte, North Carolina, May 17 through 19, the largest worker school ever organized by the Southern Workers Assembly. A key topic of discussion was the SWA recently launched program to recruit pro-labor workers to enter key industries in the Southern economy.

 

The worker school “felt like a new beginning of the labor movement to me,” International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1414, Savannah, Georgia, Vice President Jamie Muhammad told the SWA, “a room filled with people organizing to achieve justice in the workplace, from all walks of life.”

 

Delegates came from across the South representing a wide array of unions, including locals with the United Campus Workers, United Auto Workers, Union of Southern Service Workers, National Nurses United, Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity & Empowerment, and the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

 

Inspired by the recent union victory by the UAW at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the Daimler Truck Company agreement in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia providing workers a 25 percent raise, and earlier UAW victories at General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, the worker school participants acknowledged the tough labor battleground the South has always been. Clear indication of this was the UAW’s recent failure in a union election at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama.

 

“The Southern auto industry will not be organized one election at a time, nor will the hospital industry or logistics or any industry,” SWA Coordinating Committee member Ed Bruno told participants. “The UAW founding in the 1930s was based on sit-down strikes that were multi-corporation, multi-location efforts to organize the entire auto industry. That’s the way the modern labor movement was formed. And that’s the way the South will be organized.”

 

Teachers and school workers overwhelmingly vote union in densely populated Fairfax County, Virginia, a historic vote largely ignored by mainstream media

 

A stunning union victory for the 27,000 teachers and school staff took place this week in Fairfax County, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. The vote by teachers was 97 percent to unionize, while the vote by support staff was 81 percent pro-union.

 

“I think people are realizing that they are not respected and want to be able to have the American dream,” Fairfax Education Association President Leslie Houston told the labor report Payday, one of the few news organizations to cover the election.

 

 Claiming the victory is Virginia Education Unions, a coalition of locals with the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association. Fairfax County is the fifth richest county in the nation, but also one where many public employees struggle to afford a living and are forced to have second jobs.

 

A shift toward the Democratic Party in Virginia in recent years allowed the 2020 passage of a law giving municipalities the right to allow collective bargaining agreements for public employees, something heretofore outlawed. This week’s union victory marked the culmination of a 47-year campaign for pro-union forces in Fairfax County’s schools.

 

Unions join student protesters opposing Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza’s Palestinian citizens, and the courts and the police and some union bosses don’t like it

 

At the above-mentioned Southern Workers Assembly Worker School in Charlotte, participants expressed solidarity with university students across the country who are protesting the United States’ complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza being waged by the Israeli military. They also condemned the anti-First Amendment crackdown on those protests by university leaders and local police.

 

A particular bone of contention has been at the University of California, where a strike by United Auto Workers academic workers recently broadened to include as many as 30,000 of the 48,000 UAW members in California’s institutes of higher learning.

 

The expansion of the strike led Orange County Superior Court Judge Randall J. Sherman to issue a strike-breaking order forcing workers to return to work at least until June 27 when final exams are taking place. The UAW leadership told workers to obey the judge’s order.

 

A violent attack by Zionist extremists on protesters prompted the strike on May 20.  Police did little to nothing to protect protesters from the extremists.

 

“The strikebreaking intervention by the courts … demonstrates that the defense of democratic rights will be not be protected by any government agency but only through a movement of the working class,” writes Dan Conway of the World Socialist Web Site. “The fight for this requires a struggle against the UAW bureaucracy.”

 

The WSWS contends the UAW bureaucracy has tried to contain the strike from the very beginning, something in line with UAW President Shawn Fain’s leadership and endorsement of President Joe Biden in his re-election campaign despite Biden’s pro-Zionist policies. Even victories Fain has claimed for the UAW, such as at Ford and Stellantis, are marred given the layoffs and mass firings, many or most of them supplemental or temporary employees, at those companies, the WSWS has argued.

 

Here's why the UAW lost the battle at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama: a lack of long-term commitment and grassroots, shoulder-to-shoulder organizing

(A textile strike in the U.S. South in 1934)
 

The United Auto Workers led a largely digital, minimal-staff campaign at the 5,000-plus worker Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama, and it failed. Despite predictions by the union that it had 70 percent-plus support, workers voted 56-44 percent against unionization this past week.

 

You’d think the UAW would have learned its lesson after multiple failed campaigns at Nissan in Tennessee and Mississippi and two failed elections at Volkswagen in Chattanooga, Tennessee, before its historic, landslide victory there in April.

 

As a veteran labor writer who has covered and studied the Southern labor movement for decades, I’ve seen what Crystal Lee “Norma Rae” Sutton learned in my native North Carolina during the 1970s. Winning in the South takes a long-term commitment and grassroots person-to-person organizing.

 

Sutton, who died in 2009, and her fellow workers in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, fought a decade-long war with the giant J.P. Stevens textile company before winning their union. It took the auto workers in Chattanooga three major votes and 10 years to gain their win in April. They went from losing their first vote 626-712 in 2014 and second vote 776-833 in 2019 to win this time by an unofficial count of 2628 to 985, a 73 percent margin.

 

Now their fight will turn to the bargaining table to get a union contract with Volkswagen, something that took Sutton and her fellow workers six years after their union victory to get with notoriously anti-union J.P. Stevens.

 

The UAW, which has pledged $40 million to unionize auto plants in the South, is also eyeing other non-union, foreign-owned auto plants in the South, such as Hyundai in Alabama, Toyota in Mississippi, and Nissan in Tennessee and Mississippi.

 

Some observers believe UAW will secure a contract with Volkswagen without too much resistance because of the overwhelming pro-union vote at the plant. However, anti-union forces beyond the company, such as former U.S. Senator and Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker, can never be underestimated. They will do anything they can to stall any more union progress.

 

Those forces were much in play at the Mercedes-Benz plant, where management held required attendance anti-union meetings with workers despite the fact that such meetings violate the German company’s own stated principles of non-interference during organizing efforts. Last week’s vote was the first union election at the plant.

 

(the bloody Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia in 1921 as coal miners fight for their union)
 

Prior to the vote in Chattanooga, the governors of six Southern states, including Alabama, issued an ominous warning against bringing unions to the South. Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee told workers they “risk their futures” if they vote union. A so-called “labor” online site called the LaborUnionNews.com pushed anti-UAW propaganda even as it presented itself as a valid source of labor information.

 

What helped the UAW in Chattanooga were energetic young and relatively new workers who didn’t inherit the old fears and prejudices that have hampered other campaigns in the South. They and other workers were also inspired by the success of the UAW’s Stand Up Strike campaign in 2023 with union victories at General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis. Soon after the vote in Chattanooga, the UAW scored another victory with the Daimler Truck company in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia, securing an agreement that included 25 percent raises for workers and an end to wage tiers.

 

Volkswagen, unionized everywhere else in the world except in the United States, generally complied with rules from its German base to keep hands-off in the union effort, including forbidding anti-union one-on-one sessions and required attendance at anti-union films. Still, workers turned toward the union in April after Volkswagen failed to keep many of the promises it made after the earlier elections.

 

Although Mercedes is also a German-based firm, it apparently had no such qualms about allowing anti-union measures to take place at its plant. Like Volkswagen, it also made many promises, and even hired a new plant manager, but now workers will have to see if those promises are kept.

 

Another factor in the election was former University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban’s turn-around in his support for unionization. After initially signaling a support for the union, he then told UAW’s ally, the More Perfect Union organization, to discontinue an ad featuring his endorsement. The Payday Report labor service says the University of Alabama convinced YouTube to take down the ad. Saban is a bona fide hero in Alabama.

 

However, for this writer, the key factor in UAW’s loss at Mercedes-Benz was a combination of its own arrogance after the victories in Chattanooga and in 2023 and a lack of a sense of history in the Southern labor movement.

 

(A call to strike by the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Arkansas in the 1930s)

 

Winning the South has been a dream of organized labor for more than a century. The historic labor battles in the coal mines of Kentucky and West Virginia and in the textile mills of the Carolinas in the 1920s and 1930s are the stuff of legend. However, those often bloody-and-deadly battles included many heartbreaking defeats, just as did the Congress of Industrial Union’s “Operation Dixie” campaign in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Even in victory, Crystal Lee “Norma Rae” Sutton and her fellow workers had to fight 17 years to get both a union and contract.

 

Today’s struggle is no less monumental. “Workers in Michigan are pitted against workers in Alabama, workers in the United States are pitted against workers in Mexico,” UAW President Shawn Fain wrote recently in In These Times magazine. “A united working class is the only effective wall against the billionaire class’ race to the bottom.”

 

It’s all true, Shawn Fain, but building “a united working class” in the South takes time, deep commitment, and roll-your-sleeves-up, ground-level, old school-as-well-as-new school organizing.

 

United Campus Workers pledge support for the pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Mississippi and decry the actions of the counter-demonstrators

(To the right, University of Mississippi pro-Palestinian protesters. From widely shared videos on social media) 

The recent anti-genocide protest and counter-protest at the University of Mississippi have received international attention. Some three dozen Ole Miss students showed their support for the Palestinians in Gaza who are under genocidal assault by the Israeli military—tens of thousands, many of them women and children are dead as a result of that assault. The students were met with some 200 counter protesters who threw objects at them and mocked and shouted at them. One of the counter protesters jumped about like an ape in front of a black pro-Palestine protester who happened to be a former graduate student of this writer.

(Counter demonstrators at the University of Mississippi taunting the pro-Palestinian protesters. Screenshot from video by Stacey J. Spiehler for the Mississippi Free Press.)

 

The counter protesters evoked painful memories of the racist and violent throng that tried to prevent James Meredith from enrolling as the first black student at the University of Mississippi in 1962.

 

(James Meredith, accompanied by U.S. marshals, on the Ole Miss campus in 1962)

 

Pro-Palestinian protests at universities across the United States are a clear indication of a galvanized youth movement unseen since the 1960s and may spell major trouble for President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. Biden’s military support for Israel has made this nation a party to the genocidal destruction of Gaza as well as the murderous actions of Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Pro-Palestine protesters aren’t defending Hamas’ attack on Israeli citizens on October 7. They’re standing against Israel’s murderous reaction to it.

 

Prompted in part by this writer, a charter member, the University Campus Workers of Mississippi-Communications Workers of America Local 3565 has issued a statement of support for the Ole Miss pro-Palestine demonstrators that I’ll copy below. Organized labor should stand shoulder to shoulder with these brave young people who’ve risked their college careers and possibly jail or injury to stand against this nation’s complicity in what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people.

 

Here is the statement:

 

United Campus Workers of Mississippi - CWA Local 3565

 

To UCWMS Members and the University of Mississippi Community:

On Thursday, May 2, a small and peaceful group of University of Mississippi students gathered to exercise their First Amendment right to protest on behalf of Palestinians facing a months-long genocidal assault by the Israeli Defense Force. This group of students were overwhelmed by a crowd of more than 200 counter-protestors, most of whom were also University of Mississippi students. Many of these student counter-protestors made explicitly racist remarks, shouting “hit the showers” and “your nose is huge” at the protestors; taunting a Black woman protestor by imitating a monkey; and equating the protestors with the terrorists in the 9/11 attacks. Others threw half-eaten food and water bottles at the students protesting against genocide. Several journalists, including student journalists, captured this abhorrent behavior on film, much of which is publicly available. Ultimately, police had to escort protestors off the premises for their own safety.

The unabashed racism displayed by the overwhelmingly White counter-protestors is unacceptable behavior for University of Mississippi students. It is out of step with our university’s creed, and violates the University’s own student code of conduct. Moreover, the counter-protestors’ throwing of food and drink at students engaged in a peaceful demonstration violated those students’ constitutional rights to free speech and to free assembly. 

 

We, the United Campus Workers of Mississippi, applaud the Chancellor's willingness to uphold the values of the university by condemning the racism at the protest and opening a student conduct investigation against one of the perpetrators. We call on the Chancellor and other university administration to continue their investigation to ensure that all students who behaved similarly are held accountable. The counter-protestors’ behavior, if left unchecked, sets a dangerous precedent for our students, as well as for any campus worker wishing to exercise their own First Amendment right to peacefully assemble and demonstrate on or off campus.

 

Norma Rae is smiling in heaven at the United Auto Workers' landmark victory at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee

(To the right, a poster from the 1979 film Norma Rae)
 

Somewhere in heaven Crystal Lee Sutton, the real-life “Norma Rae” of the epic labor war in the Carolina textile industry of the 1970s, has a big smile on her face.

 

More than anyone, Sutton—the inspiration for the 1979 film Norma Rae--would know the joy that the 4,300 workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, must feel after their huge victory Friday to join the United Auto Workers.

 

As with Sutton, who died in 2009, and her fellow workers in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, who fought a decade-long war with the giant J.P. Stevens textile company before winning their union, it took the auto workers in Chattanooga three major votes and 10 years to gain Saturday’s win. They went from losing their first vote 626-712 in 2014 and second vote 776-833 in 2019 to win this time by an unofficial count of 2628 to 985, more than a 70 percent margin.

 

“Being able to have a voice of your own is more important than just letting other people decide for you,” worker Manny Perez, 25, told crusading labor reporter Mike Elk of Payday Report just before the final results came in.

 

“This is a defining moment for the workers throughout the South and the rest of the country,”  the University of California at Berkeley Labor Center Co-Chair Brenda Muñoz said in a statement issued after the victory. “Foreign auto manufacturers can no longer count on the Southern states to provide cheap labor at the expense of working families.”

 

The victory came despite the fierce opposition of what this writer has long described as the phalanx of anti-union forces in the South. Powerful politicians such as Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee told workers they “risk their futures” if they vote union. A so-called “labor” online site called the LaborUnionNews.com pushed anti-UAW propaganda even as it presented itself as a valid source of labor information.

 

In the 2014 union vote, then-Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam and then-U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, both Republicans, essentially lied to the public by pretending to remain neutral while working feverishly to defeat the union behind closed doors. Haslam was part of a scheme to offer Volkswagen $300 million to expand its Chattanooga plant so long as the company worked with the state in preventing unionization there. Corker worked with LaborUnionNews.com owner Peter List back in 2014 to defeat the UAW.

 

(Ray Smithhart)
 

“You got the whole community against you, the supervisors, the merchants, the newspapers,” the late Mississippi labor warrior Ray Smithhart, then-dean of his state’s labor organizers, told me in 2004. “You can’t get the message across. What we needed was at least some kind of debate. This would let the employees hear both sides of the issues.”

 

Several factors contributed to the UAW victory in Chattanooga. A new cadre of young workers have joined the Volkswagen plant in recent years, bringing with energy and a greater willingness to consider the union cause that older workers have had. In a recent Southern Workers Assembly online discussion with workers and activists across the region, veteran organizer Ed Bruno of the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) said that young and energized organizers are key to union success today.

 

Another factor is the success of the UAW’s Stand Up Strike campaign in 2023 that led to union victories at General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, prompting the union to pledge $40 million toward a new effort to the organize the union-resistant U.S. South. A union vote is already scheduled for May 13-17 at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama. Organizers say they already have majority support for a union.

 

Volkswagen, unionized everywhere else in the world except in the United States, had to comply with rules from its German base to keep hands-off in the union effort, including forbidding anti-union one-on-one sessions and required attendance at anti-union films.

 

Workers have complained about safety conditions at the plant and lax efforts to address safety issues even when identified. Company promises of better days to come never materialized. All factors that provide fertile soil for unionization.

 

After Crystal Lee “Norma Rae” Sutton and her fellow workers won their fight for union recognition back in 1974, they had to wait another six years to get a contract with J.P. Stevens. That contract marked the end of a 17-year war that included illegal firings, delaying tactics, intimidation, what National Labor Relations Board administrative judge Bernard Reiss called “corporate designed lawlessness.”

 

Let’s hope Volkswagen is less intransigent and more willing now to sit down across the table from workers to develop a fair and equitable contract that can be a model to other foreign-owned and domestically owned companies across the South.

Organizing the South--Building success by learning from the victories of the 1930s and the failures of Operation Dixie in the late 1940s and early 1950s

(Sidney Hillman)
 

At the beginning of the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ “Operation Dixie” campaign to organize the U.S. South in 1946, Sidney Hillman, the leader of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, called the South “a venture into unplowed fields.”

 

Nearly 80 years later, organized labor has vowed finally to plow those fields and plant seeds that will ultimately help build a new labor movement across the nation.

 

“Take heart, learn the lessons and apply them to your situation, and thing big,” former UE (United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America) Director of Organizing Ed Bruno told participants from across the South in a Southern Workers Assembly online discussion Thursday, February 29.

 

Indeed, the United Auto Workers, fresh off its Stand Up Strike victories with General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis in 2023, has pledged $40 million to organize non-union auto plants, with a focus on the South. Results are already coming in. This month workers at both the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennesee, and the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama (that German company’s largest U.S. plant) announced majority support for unionizing.

 

They’re among some 10,000 non-union autoworkers signing union cards at 14 plants across the country.

 

After failed unionizing efforts at the Nissan plants in Mississippi and Tennessee and the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga in recent years, many wondered if the South would ever shake off its longheld distinction as the least-unionized region in the country, whether its “unplowed fields” will ever grow rich with a true harvest of its underpaid, overworked laborers.

 

After what has been dubbed “The Year of the Strike” in 2023 with UAW victories at the Big Three, nationwide organizing at Starbucks cafes (Starbucks has finally agreed to stop opposing unionization), in hospitals and on college campuses across the land, workers have a new confidence. The pandemic and record corporate profits also helped create a new worker consciousness, and polls show public support for unions at its highest level since the 1960s.

 

 “We’ve learned that we can’t trust Mercedes with our best interests,” Mercedes-Benz workers in Vance, Alabama, said in their announcement of majority union support this month. Citing the company’s “record profits”, widespread use and abuse of temporary workers, and imposition of a two-tier pay scale, the announcement continued, “There comes a time when enough is enough. Now is that time.”

 

At the Southern Workers Assembly Zoom session this week, Bruno and Jim Wrenn, a founding member of UE Local 150 at the Cummins Diesel Engine Plant in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, talked at length about the reasons behind the widely acknowledged failure of Operation Dixie between 1946 and 1953. The exploitation of divisions between black and white workers, the rank anti-communist demagoguery of the era, and inability of organizers to network campaigns at different plants in the region and work in solidarity rather than individually were all factors in the campaign never reaching its goals.

 

Bruno contrasted Operation Dixie with the massive pro-union surge in the mid-1930s that gave rise to the UAW and other unions, a high point in the history of organized labor in this country.

 

Five factors were key to the success of the 1930s labor movement, Bruno said:

 

1.     A committed cadre of organizers who were few in number but young and energized and who networked with other organizers. They were “not isolated.”

2.     A militant minority who “were fed up and ready to do something.”

3.     A high degree of class politics with pro-labor President Franklin D. Roosevelt leading the nation and powerful pro-labor forces in Congress and beyond.

4.     New rights as a result of the Wagner Act of 1935 and other legislation backing workers.

5.     The development of a “national voice” by strong labor leaders like John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers.

 

Workers today need to learn the lessons from successes and failures in the past, to work in solidarity with other workers who are struggling, to network, and build “corporate campaigns” that drive home their issues and demands to corporate headquarters, not just to local management, Bruno said.

(Philip Murray)

 

In 1946, CIO president Philip Murray called Operation Dixie “the most important drive of its kind ever undertaken by any labor organization in the history of the country.”

 

The new organizing campaign in the South in 2024 doesn’t have a name yet, but Murray’s words may very well still apply.

 

"War is a bad thing," young Hanh of Vietnam said in 1971, that is, unless today you're a neocon warmonger, struggling politician, or corporate member of the military-industrial complex

(U.S. soldiers and hooch maids near hooches in Plantation, Vietnam, around 1971)

 

The year was around 1971, and my Vietnamese girlfriend Hanh and I were talking in my hooch on the U.S. Army base at Plantation near Long Binh, Vietnam. A hooch maid, she was  beautiful, maybe 18, and I was 22. Our relationship was just getting started, but something real was there and we both felt it.

 

Then came this explosion somewhere in the distance. A bomb? We kept talking. No big deal. Then came another, this one closer, and finally a third explosion, this time closer still and loud and scary. Hanh looked at me, eyes full of experience way beyond 18 years.

 

“War is a bad thing,” she said in her broken English. I nodded as we got up and joined everyone else outside their hooches to see what was going on.

 

No more explosions came, thankfully, and no Army alerts were issued, so everyone went back to their lives, even if a little rattled.  In a few months, my tour was up and I’d leave Hanh with tears in her eyes and my heart heavy and no longer sure I was ready to go back to the “world” even though that’s what every soldier dreamed about day and night.

 

“We’ll see each other again,” I told her. “No,” she said, again much wiser than me, “we never see each other again.” She was right.

 

War has been on my mind a lot lately. It should be on everyone’s mind with wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, and all the saber-rattling from our own political and military leaders toward Russia, China, Iran, Yemen, North Korea, or any other nation that might want to join the newly reconstructed “axis of evil”.

 

War was the topic of my recent discussion with host Nima Rostami Alkhorshid on his international podcast Dialogue Works. It was my fourth appearance on his show, and war has dominated every discussion.

 

Even as we spoke, Israel continued its brutal bombing of the Gaza Strip, an ethnic cleansing launched after Hamas’ bloody October 7 terrorist attack in Israel. Israel’s war on Gaza has killed tens of thousands, including thousands of children, injured more than 60,000, and displaced nearly two million, with more than 60 percent of Gaza homes destroyed or damaged, and it has sowed the seeds of hatred and revenge for generations to come.

 

President Joe Biden, the number one beneficiary in Washington, D.C., of the largesse of the Israeli lobby over his long career—some $4.3 million in the past three decades, early on pledged total support to Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloody campaign.

 

In a presidential election year with polls showing a dramatic loss of support among Arab-Moslem voters and the crucial youth vote, the president has since urged Israel to ease up on civilian bombing—pretty please!—but his administration continues to send Israel weapons and has blocked UN efforts to demand a cease-fire. Now the military conflagration has spread to the Red Sea with the Houthi rebel group attacking cargo and other ships doing business with Israel, and the U.S. responding with bombing attacks on suspected Houthi bases in Yemen. Fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon has spilled across that border as Israeli settlers continue violent attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.

 

An attack this week on a U.S. base in Jordan killing three U.S. soldier and wounding dozens of others has ratcheted up the danger of a major regional war that brings in the U.S. and that perennial enemy of the neoconservative hawks in Biden’s administration, Iran. Recent Iranian attacks on suspected terrorist bases in Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan were a signal to the U.S., according to writer M.K. Bhadrakumar, that it will not tolerate the CIA’s efforts to help terrorist groups surround and attack Iran.

 

Of course, the war in Ukraine rages on despite the clear fact that Russia has won and Ukraine has lost. The recent discovery of a $40 billion corruption case dealing with military weapons in Ukraine is just another event souring public support for the Ukrainian cause.

 

Then there’s all this unrest in Europe with massive protests by farmers in Germany and France against the deteriorating economy that the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline heralded. Energy costs are up an estimated 18 percent in Europe, putting the pinch not only on farmers but other major industries as well. Green Party ideologues in Germany and their fellow travelers in France want farmers—and, well, everyone—to get off coal, gas, oil, and nuclear dependency, and get those wind turbines turning! Suffer today in order to save the world tomorrow!

 

My key points to Nima on Dialogue Works this past week were several:

 

-       Politicians, not the military, are really running these wars in Ukraine and in Gaza. Netanyahu’s approval ratings in Israel are even lower than Biden’s in the United States. Both fear not only loss of power but also the future possibility of jail. U.S. House impeachment proceedings against Biden are proceeding, and Netanyahu has long faced a day of reckoning over corruption allegations. Biden can’t allow a defeat in Ukraine before election day in November. So Ukrainians have to keep dying until then.

 

-       Unhinged capitalism is destroying the United States with the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about now determining nearly all of U.S. foreign policy. Biden has signed off on $886 billion in defense spending for 2024. That’s “b” as in billion, or, in other words, nearly a trillion!

 

-       The eastward expansion of NATO began under the Clinton Administration in the 1990s, continuing the long history of broken U.S. promises that date back at least as far as all those broken treaties with American Indians in the 1800s. Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary essentially destroyed the modern-day Democratic Party, making it as war-like and Wall Street-ruled as the Republican Party. No longer is it the party that helped champion the rise of the American Labor Movement in the 1930s and support the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

 

-       Why do we still listen to neocons and other warmongers after the utter failures they created in Vietnam, Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, wars that left ruin and devastation in their paths and served no purpose other than to further enrich corporate giants like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and BlackRock? How are wars with Russia, Iran, and/or China going to end any differently? I’ll answer that last one—those wars, if they happen, will end in the nuclear destruction of us all.

 

All these years later, I still think occasionally about Hanh and wonder how she fared after all the Americans left and the Communists took over. Did working on a U.S. Army base result in her going to one of those re-education camps, or worse? I want to think of her in Vietnam today living a good life with family and friends. Even so, I’ll bet she would still say as she did so many years ago, “War is a bad thing.”