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?

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

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

(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

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

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

(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

(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.