(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.
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