UAW vs. Nissan in Mississippi: Operation Dixie Revised? An in-depth look

 (To the left is actor Danny Glover, who came to Canton recently to support workers' efforts for a union vote at the Nissan plant)

This ran as the cover story for the July 18-24 edition of the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Miss. Related stories also included sidebars on Danny Glover's visit and Mississippi's financial investment in the Nissan plant. The Sidney Hillman Foundation in New York designated this as one of the nation's top stories of the week.



CANTON, Miss. – Michael Carter hardly evokes the Hollywood image of a podium-pounding, fire-breathing labor agitator. With his dark blue “New York” cap, light blue knit shirt, slight build and soft-spoken voice, he looks like what he is: a 38-year-old working man, husband and father of two.

He’s talking with me in the United Auto Workers’ newly opened office just off Nissan Parkway and within view of the 3.5 million square-foot Nissan plant. On the wall behind him is a framed, black-and-white photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. Prominent among the crowd of men close to King is Walter Reuther, the legendary labor leader who helped found the modern-day UAW, a man Barry Goldwater once denounced as a “dangerous menace” and arch-conservative Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger columnist Tom Ethridge blasted in 1964 as “top labor-fuehrer”.

Carter has never been a member of a union, never thought he’d ever want or need to join one, but he also never forgot what a union card meant to his father. “I learned more about it when my dad got injured on the job. He worked with the railroad. When he hurt his back, they tried to say he was drinking, and he wasn’t. The union fought for him, and he got his full benefits and retirement.

(To the right is Nissan worker Michael Carter)

“I kind of began to understand at that point.”

Nine years ago, when Carter landed a much-sought-after job with the $1.4 billion Nissan plant in Canton, joining a union was the farthest thing from his mind. “You had good benefits, good pay, … an illusion of community.”

Today, the Tupelo, Miss., native earns $23 an hour as a production technician at Nissan. It’s a good wage in a state with the lowest per capita income in the nation, some $15,000 more a year than the average Mississippian.

However, Carter is not only thinking and talking union these days, he’s one of growing number at the 3,300-worker plant who’ve taken a lead in calling for an election to determine whether he and his colleagues should join the United Auto Workers.

He tries to piece together for me the path that led him to want to be a union man, just like his dad.

Maybe it started with the company’s changes in his health care benefits. “They said too many people were going to the emergency room.” He soon found his premiums going up and his deductible jump from zero to $2,500. “I had a spot on my leg, and the doctor wanted surgery in case it was cancer. I filed for insurance, and they didn’t pay any of the bill. They said, `You haven’t made your deductible.’ It was $800. I thought they’d pay some of it.”

As for his wages, they’re good, but he hasn’t had a raise in years-- he feels he’s “topped out” at $23 an hour--and there’s little or no chance for promotion. Meanwhile, the line speed has increased on the shop floor, production requirements going up even at times when the workweek is cut back. “We asked why did it go up if we cut back to four days. They didn’t really give us an answer.”

And that’s at the heart of the problem.

“You don’t have a conversation. No feedback. No answer. When they told us about the new (health) plan, the deductible, they couldn’t explain it. There’s no relationship.”           

What he and other workers do get from management, he says, is a lot of talk about how horrible unions are. Whether it’s focus meetings or one-on-one sessions, the message is always the same: “Ain’t nothing good about a union.”

Carter has a hard time digesting that message. “I say that can’t be true. There’s good in anything.”

(To the right is Nissan worker Jeffrey Moore)

Fellow technician Jeffrey Moore, 34, a 10-year veteran who earns the same hourly wage as Carter, says his interest in the UAW “is not about money, it’s all just about being fair,” even though he wonders why he hasn’t had a pay raise since 2006 and why workers at Nissan’s Smyrna, Tenn., plant typically make $2 or more an hour than Canton workers. “I have a daughter and a wife. That’s another reason I want a union. I want to retire at Nissan and make sure they’re okay.”

Lee Ruffin, 45, a nine-year veteran technician, is another Nissan employee talking union. “Everything was fine, everything good, until 2005 and 2006 things started going downhill. Losing benefits, insurance, increasing line speed, which is a safety hazard, people getting hurt on the job, lots of strains and sprangs.

“Governor Bryant needs to come down and work and see for himself.”

Of course, Carter, Moore and Ruffin aren’t holding their breath for that to happen. Bryant didn’t respond to several requests for interviews for this story, but he warned recently in a speech in Oxford, Miss., that unions would have a negative effect on the auto industry in the South and he would encourage groups to actively oppose unionization.

The governor is part of a powerful phalanx of business, political and media leaders that stands in total opposition to any hint of a union in Mississippi’s automobile industry. “We don’t believe a union is needed up there,” says Jay Moon, president and CEO of the Mississippi Manufacturers Association. “We don’t believe the union would provide any benefits that the workers don’t have already.”

Many Mississippians agree. “I just have a problem with unions in general,” says Nelwyn Madison, 66, of Madison, Miss., a former part owner of a software business in the Jackson area. She admits her direct contacts with unions have been limited. “I just absolutely do not think employees have a right to tell employers how to run a company. If you don’t like where you are working, then you need to go somewhere else.”

Nissan officials certainly agree. “We feel the best way to interact with employees is through direct, two-way communication as opposed to involving a third party,” Nissan spokesman Travis Parman says. “This approach to employee relations has been very successful, resulting in a healthy and positive work environment, and encourages the free exchange of ideas.”

Carter begs to differ. “They says there’s an open door, but you may not get an answer to your question.”

A legendary union and a powerful corporation square off

These testimonies from the two sides of the union question at the Nissan plant in Canton are early volleys in what promises to be a landmark battle, a high-stakes squaring off that could become global in scope. For the UAW, Canton is key to a $60 million plan to establish its footprint in the South and beyond. At the center of the union’s strategy is to have Nissan agree to a set of “Fair Election Principles” that allow both sides equal time in presenting their case to workers. Union leaders stress they respect Nissan and want the company to be financially successful.

However, if Nissan refuses to engage in a “fair election”—and CEO Carlos Ghosn’s long record of intense antagonism to U.S. unions indicates it most certainly will—the UAW takes its case to a world stage. UAW officials have talked of a consumer boycott on a scale not seen since the grape boycott that established Cesar Chavez’s United Farmer Workers in the late 1960s. Expect workers and community activists carrying banners and passing out leaflets at Nissan dealerships across the land. The Canton story will even be heard at global auto shows.

Just this week a Nissan-Canton worker accompanied UAW President Bob King to Brazil to speak to Brazilian trade unionists there. UAW representatives are meeting regularly with trade unionists in Brazil, Japan, Germany, France and other countries.

(To the left is student activist Tyson Jackson)

The UAW Global Organizing Institute is already drawing interns from around the nation and world to Canton to help coordinate a social media networking and organizing effort. “There is a silent storm brewing in people, and the rain is going to start coming down,” says Tyson Jackson, 31, one of those interns, a Tougaloo College student from Champaign, Ill.

“Here I can feel the fear of the workers,” says Luara Scalasarra, another intern and a labor law student from the Estate University of Londrina in Brazil. “In Brazil, they don’t even need to vote. They can just form a union. But it is really good this campaign here. I really believe in this campaign.”

The UAW is preparing the same kind of “corporate campaign” that recently forced the Reynolds American tobacco giant finally to agree to meet with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in North Carolina. A similar campaign by workers at the Smithfield pork processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C., in 2009 led to their victory in joining the United Food and Commercial Workers.

On the other side, however, is a potential formidable foe, the world’s fourth-largest automaker, whose CEO and president once warned Nissan workers in Smyrna in a required meeting on the day before a union election that “bringing a union into Smyrna could result in making Smyrna not competitive, which is not in your best interest or Nissan’s.” Workers voted down the union.

Carlos Ghosn, a Brazilian of Lebanese descent who also is a French citizen and British knight, enjoys comic-book hero status in Japan for his role as the “turnaround” artist who saved once-struggling Nissan. To many in France, he’s the villainous “cost killer” who shut down plants and slashed jobs on his rise to the top, and who more recently oversaw the implementation of harsh workplace demands at Nissan’s French partner Renault that are believed to have contributed to several suicides and suicide attempts between 2005 and 2008.

Onto this battlefield have marched Mississippi workers like Carter, Moore, and Ruffin, proclaiming they’re never going to be heard unless they speak as one voice. In the heart of the conservative, “right-to-work” South—a term labor activists ridicule as really meaning “right to work for less”--they want to do what the Wagner Act of 1935 gave them full and protected legal rights to do: join a union.

They aren’t the first Nissan workers to talk this way. Back in 2007, James Fisher, Yvette Taylor and Stanley Martin challenged at public meetings the Camelot image of one of Mississippi’s premier manufacturers. They told of terminations for job-related injuries, intimidation, and anti-union propaganda. Workers at Nissan’s Smyrna plant also came to testify to humiliations and a caustic disregard for work-related injuries and illnesses.

“Nissan’s got this big halo, this rainbow over them,” Fisher said at the time. “It’s all on the outside. We have to fight tooth and nail on the inside. They can do what they want to on the inside. It’s always somebody trying to cut somebody’s throat.”

On hand was a wide range of religious and former civil rights leaders and community and political activists who became the seed of a grassroots movement that has now ripened to the point that the UAW can say, “Now is the time.” Canton, Mississippi, is the place where it will stake its future, and perhaps even the future of the nation’s labor movement.

UAW fighting for its life and its future

UAW officials insist they’re here because Nissan workers want them here, that this is a worker-and-community-fueled effort. Certainly workers have reached out. What can’t be denied, however, is the UAW is in a fight for its survival. It must not only staunch the bleeding that has reduced its membership by 75 percent in the last 30 years—from 1.5 million in 1979 to less than 400,000 today, but also once again thrive and grow in a new economy is making the South what Detroit once was in the automobile industry.

Speculation about where the UAW would focus its do-or-die campaign has been heated in the labor and automobile press since January 2011, when UAW President King revealed the union was coming to Dixie come hell or high water. Early reports pointed to the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., the Hyundai plant in Alabama, or the Toyota plant in Kentucky as Ground Zero. “If we lose, we’ll die quicker. If we win, we rebuild the UAW,” King told Labor Notes.

King said something prescient even earlier in his October 2010 statement to mark the One Nation March in Washington, D.C.: “We cannot sit back and wait for change to happen. We are the ones who must make change on behalf of all people. Every great achievement for social justice has been the result of the mobilization of people to achieve a just purpose.”

With such oratory, King, who took over the UAW presidency in June 2010, evokes the memory of another eloquent speaker, Walter Reuther, who braved brutal attacks by anti-union goons at his home and in the famous “Battle of the Overpass” at the Ford Company’s River Rouge plant in Michigan in 1937 to put the UAW at the forefront of the nation’s labor movement. In contrast to many other labor leaders, Reuther later embraced the civil rights movement and stood with Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington in 1963.

In many ways, today’s South is a far cry from the South Walter Reuther knew. It emerged from its bloody and futile resistance to civil rights in the 1960s to become the heart of the “Sunbelt”, encouraging industry and investment, and eventually “Detroit South”, which along with the Midwest is home to more than a dozen foreign-owned automobile assembly plants plus many other parts factories. What hasn’t changed in the South, however, is the hostility of its political and business leaders to unions.

Despite union contracts at plants at their home countries, none of the German and Asian-owned plants in the region is unionized, a glaring reality to a UAW that has had to make concession after concession to the Big Three in this struggling economy and witness the subsequent downward pull on worker wages and benefits everywhere.

The UAW is no stranger to the South. In fact, a sit-down strike at General Motors’ Lakewood plant in Atlanta in November 1936 became the first shot fired in the historic all-out “Battle of the Running Bulls” that would take place in Flint, Mich., in early 1937, an event that rivals the “Battle of the Overpass” in importance in UAW history. More recently, in 2003 and 2004, the union won major organizing campaigns with Freightliner workers in North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia. In fact, the UAW scored victories at smaller companies in Alabama and Kentucky within the past month.

The UAW actually has been in Canton since 2005. In March of that year, then-UAW President Ron Gettelfinger and then-Vice President and National Organizing Director Bob King came to Mississippi to meet with workers and community leaders.

It wasn’t until recently, however, that the union firmly decided Canton would be “the perfect place” to take its stand, as UAW Region 8 Director Gary Casteel, an Alabama native whose region includes the South, describes it.

Casteel lobbied hard to make Canton the UAW’s choice even though he knew “there’s no guarantee to win.” He and others emphasize that race isn’t a central issue, but the fact that an estimated 80 percent of the workforce at the Canton plant is black was a factor. Studies show blacks are comparatively more open to joining unions. 

Mississippi’s rich civil rights history was another factor. Organized labor as a whole needs to recapture its identity as a social movement, something it had in the 1930s but had lost by the 1950s.

“I had to advocate hard for this,” Casteel told me in a recent telephone interview. “We have tremendous worker support there. Nissan hired a heavily African-American workforce. I think that is a plus because of the history and the battles fought in Mississippi against all odds. Being from Alabama, knowing how this works in the South, it is just one of those things, the heritage of Mississippi. They have had to fight for the things they have achieved.”

Unionizing the South: A long struggle

A fight is what it will take in the South, a region where coal miners and textile workers in the 1920s and 1930s saw their efforts to join unions brutally suppressed. In 1946, when Congress of Industrial Organizations president Philip Murray launched “Operation Dixie” to organize Southern workers, he spoke of a “civil rights crusade” that would be “the most important drive of its kind ever undertaken by any labor organization in the history of the country.” Labor organizers fanned across the South, targeting textile, oil, lumber and other industries. Even in 1946 they knew the South was key to labor’s future.

Operation Dixie ended largely in failure, however, as the region’s power elite locked arms and exploited the racial divide and post-World War II fear of communism to keep workers from joining unions. Today the South remains the nation’s least unionized--and least paid--region, a uniformly “right to work” land where organizing is doubly difficult because workers can enjoy the hard-earned gains in wages and benefits of a unionized workplace without having to join the union.           

(To the left is veteran labor organizer Bruce Raynor during a recent visit to Canton)

Still, the South’s anti-union reputation never had a thing to do with the workers themselves, says Bruce Raynor, perhaps the most successful labor organizer in Southern history. The hostility to unions comes primarily from the South’s political, business, and media establishment, he told me in a recent telephone interview.

“I have always found Southern workers very receptive. It takes persistence. They are up against the powers that be. Southern workers don’t like being pushed around, being taken advantage of.”

A native New Yorker and president emeritus of Workers United, Raynor worked with the Textile Workers Union of America in the 1970s in the history-making struggle with the powerful anti-union textile firm of J.P. Stevens. That struggle, vividly depicted in the film Norma Rae, led to victory after a corporate campaign that included a national boycott, court challenges, and a high-level public relations effort to embarrass the company into recognizing workers’ rights.

“With J.P. Stevens, people thought it was hopeless,” Raynor recalled. “They ran the state, the local community.”

However, the secret to victory is community, he said. “As long as the union lets it be driven by the community, and also involving the religious community. Southerners tend to be religious people. It was the same way in the civil rights movement.”

Recognition of that need motivated the June 3 press conference in Canton where U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., Mississippi NAACP President Derrick Johnson, General Missionary Baptist State Convention President Isiac Johnson and others stood alongside a group of Nissan workers to pledge their support for a fair election at the plant. Thompson made it clear that he will monitor Nissan’s behavior closely in the months ahead.

As in the past, the biggest obstacle organizers face is fear.

“They have these anti-union meetings—they call them focus meetings,” Michael Carter says. “They say, `we’re going to give you the facts. If you have a union, we’ll close the plant.’”

Workers also fear their jobs may be eliminated or re-classified. The company depends heavily on so-called “temps”, workers hired on a less-than-fulltime basis with more limited pay and benefits. UAW officials say the 1,000 new jobs Nissan recently announced it was adding to the Canton plant will all be “temps”. “There’s a fear they’ll make our jobs temps,” says Jeffrey Moore.

Nissan spokesman Travis Parman discounts such fears. “Our communications meetings with employees are not new. We continuously and routinely meet with our employees to openly discuss matters pertinent to our business.”

As for the “temps” issue, Parman says, “Our direct and contract positions are long-term jobs that offer competitive pay and benefits. … Nissan has never laid off a single employee in the nearly 30 years it’s had manufacturing operations in the U.S.”

Like all Americans, Southerners have had a realistic fear of plant shutdowns and relocations to Mexico and China ever since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. They’ve seen it happen again and again. The textile and apparel industries alone suffered the erosion of more than 700,000 jobs between 1994 and 2003.

Sujit CanagaRetna, senior fiscal analyst with the Southern office of the Council of State Governments in Atlanta and an expert in the Southern auto industry, believes the UAW will have an uphill fight to convince Southern workers a union will better their lot. However, he says, auto workers should not fear the kind of shutdowns that devastated the Southern textile industry. “That is always the boogeyman, but it is not that easy,” CanagaRetna says. “That is an unlikely scenario. I think there would be negotiated settlements. I don’t think we run the risk of Nissan closing shop and leaving.”

The foreign transplants’ advantages in the South are too numerous, he says. Their proximity to major markets, ports and other transportation, and an established network of suppliers would override concerns about a union. Furthermore, he says, unions have changed. For example, UAW leader King has distanced himself from many of the old work rules and other factors that management scorned as impediments to productivity and profitability. “The whole environment has changed in terms of union versus nonunion environment,” CanagaRetna says. “It has become much more of a collaborative process.”

Mark Klinedinst, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Southern Mississippi, believes unions actually benefit a company as well as workers. “Typically unions have been in the forefront in getting better wages, benefits, working conditions. That is a very honorable tradition. It helps make for a stronger middle class. I think it is important as corporations get larger, that employees have a chance to have a voice as well. Modern management says that in all parts of an institution important stakeholders should have a voice. Unions could offer that channel.”

The prosperity the nation enjoyed from the 1940s through the 1960s came at a time when union representation was at its highest, Klinedinst says. “We’d be helped by having a stronger middle class.”

Certainly the folks at the UAW would agree, and so would workers like Michael Carter, Jeffrey Moore and Lee Ruffin. Nissan officials believe their workers already have the tools to make a strong middle class.

One of the most famous labor ballads of the 1930s asked the age-old question: “Which Side Are You On?” It’s a question waiting for an answer in Canton, Mississippi.           

Watching the UAW in Miss., poultry workers in Maryland, Appalachian musicians & coal miners, and Let's Call Them Working Class, Not Middle Class! Please!

Watching the UAW and Nissan in Canton, Miss.

Just finished an in-depth package of stories on the United Auto Workers and the Nissan plant in Canton, Miss., which runs in today's edition of the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Miss. The package includes a sidebar on actor Danny Glover's involvement in the UAW's push for an election at the 3,300-worker plant. This is a huge story of national--make that global--implications. Veteran labor organizers like Bruce Raynor and Richard Bensinger are also part of the action.

A version for this blog will be coming in the days ahead.

In the meantime, a quick look across the South shows there are all kinds of labor stirrings.

Workers on Maryland's Eastern Shore
 
I heard recently from Baltimore-based writer Bruce Vail, who publishes with the Working In These Times web magazine and other outlets. He said he's writing about Maryland's Eastern Shore and the poultry industry there. Apparently owners are trying the now-familiar game of pitting black workers against Latino workers, something we saw in the huge drive by workers at the Smithfield pork processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C. Those workers finally overcame such divisive tactics to win their union.

Locked-out musicians in Kentucky win the day

Ira Grupper of Labor Paeans writes that members of the Louisville Orchestra in Louisville, Ky., overcame an effort by management to "break (the) back" of Local 11-637 of The American Federation of Musicians and ended a worker lockout with a newly signed agreement.

Management at the struggling orchestra--many orchestras are struggling nowadays--had hired scabs to replace musicians after they refused what they considered to be an unacceptable contract. The musicians hung in there, however, found some political support as well as help from Kentucky AFL-CIO President Bill Londrigan, and eventually won the day.

Black lung cases in Appalachia on the rise

Black lung cases in the coal mining country of Appalachia are on the rise, according to a recent investigation by National Public Radio and the Center for Public Integrity. The disease rate among miners has doubled in the past decade.  Howard Berkes of NPR All Things Considered reports that worst stage cases have actually quadrupled since the 1980s in parts of Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia.

Why? Blame the mining industry and federal regulators who apparently look the other way rather than enforce protections. If he were alive today, United Mine Workers leader John L. Lewis would ask (no, he would demand!) to know why are we turning back the clock to the horrible conditions that existed a century ago.

We are the working class, thank you very much!

I've been harping at this issue for a long time. We need to start using the term "working class" instead of the mollifying "middle class" term that President Obama and even national labor leaders want to continue to embrace even though it's clearly an example of the kind of language that seeks to eviscerate worker solidarity.

In an essay in the Spring 2012 edition of New Labor Forum, noted labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein comes out strongly for the "working class" in an article titled "Class Unconsciousness: Stop Using `Middle Class' to Depict the Labor Movement".

Maybe labor leaders at least will hear Lichtenstein even if they refuse to hear Atkins.

"Unionists and those who advocate on their behalf need to use the kind of language whose emotive power and historic resonance match the political audacity of those who occupied both the Wisconsin statehouse and the Wall Street parks," Lichtenstein writes.

Three years ago, in a May 29, 2009, letter to Cindy Estrada of the United Auto Workers in Detroit, yours truly, Joe Atkins, wrote the following: "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'. 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."

So there! I said it again!

Injured workers in the Magnolia state beware! Mississippi weakens its already weak workers' compensation law

J. K. Morrison turned over in his grave on July 1.

A little-known part-time investigator, slight in build, who looked older than his 68 years, Morrison was a private citizen who believed Mississippi desperately needed a law to protect people who get injured on the job.

He was the chief warrior for the last 10 years of a 26-year struggle, and he shed tears when Mississippi became the last state in the nation to adopt a workers’ compensation law in April 1948. “Now when I go to bed at night,” he told Mississippi columnist Bill Minor after the bill’s passage, “I have the comforting feeling that I have done a good duty to somebody who will lose a leg or an arm on the job.”

The clock turned back on July 1, however, when the state’s newly revised workers’ compensation law went into effect, putting the burden on workers to prove injuries are job-related and that they weren’t drinking or taking drugs, to provide medical evidence within a strict deadline and show they had no pre-existing condition.

The new law tells corporations Mississippi “is the most job-friendly environment in America,” crowed Gov. Phil Bryant during a May press conference.

Mississippi Manufacturers Association President Jay Moon proclaimed the new law actually promotes “the safety of the individual,” pondering no doubt the Cheshire cat grins on the faces of his MMA membership.

J.K. Morrison would not agree. Neither would the “four horsemen”, the World War II veterans in the House who, as Minor wrote in an April 11, 1948, column, fought hardest for injured workers. Two became the stuff of legend in Mississippi politics: future Gov. William Winter and famed “Whiskey Speech” author N.S. “Soggy” Sweat.

(To the right is Mississippi labor attorney Roger Doolittle)

In a word, the new law “is terrible,” says Jackson labor attorney Roger K. Doolittle, who commissioned a study two years ago that showed a distinct bias on the part of the state’s Republican-dominated Workers’ Compensation Commission in favor of employers in worker injury claims. “This law is going to create an atmosphere that will be the most litigious in the history of the workers’ compensation act. … The intent is to deprive workers of access to the courts … a deprivation of due process.”

Doolittle says he and other attorneys may seek an injunction that would prevent the law’s enforcement until its constitutionality is determined.

(To the left is Mississippi AFL-CIO President Robert Shaffer)

Mississippi AFL-CIO President Robert Shaffer agrees that “the thing is horrible” but fears an injunction may be premature given Mississippi’s pro-corporate judiciary. He prefers to wait until after this year’s elections to see if a more worker-friendly state Supreme Court emerges.

 Waiting for a worker-friendly court in Mississippi, however, may be like Waiting for Godot. The fellow just may never show up, particularly if the deep-pocketed U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Legislative Exchange Council, and billionaire right-wingers Charles and David Koch do show up, as they’ve done before.

The irony is that the new law emerged out of a debate over the pro-employer bias of the current Workers’ Compensation Commission, led by former Gov. Haley Barbour’s hand-picked man, Liles Williams, for the past seven years. Doolittle’s study prompted the bipartisan Joint Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review (PEER) itself to conduct a months-long review of the commission. Its January 2012 findings described a commission that rejected administrative law judge rulings without stating “clear, principled legal grounds” and that acted in a manner that delayed the resolution of cases by an average of nearly two months.

With the Republican takeover of the state House in the November elections and continued Republican control in the Senate and Governor’s mansion, the issue turned from the commission’s performance to the law itself. Under intense lobbying from the MMA and Mississippi Association of Self-Insurers, conservative legislators saw an opportunity and took it.

Not without a battle, however. The state AFL-CIO set up phone banks, pleaded unsuccessfully with House Insurance Chairman Gary Chism, R-Columbus, an insurance agent, for public hearings. After the House flipped on its earlier rejection of changes to the law, a fight actually broke out between Rep. Bob Evans, D-Monticello, and Rep. Bennett Malone, D-Carthage. Malone was one of three Democrats who switched their votes.

Despite claims the changes establish a needed balance, the original purpose of workers’ compensation law was to give workers the benefit of the doubt in injury cases in exchange for them forgoing further legal action.

July is historically the month with the most worker injuries. Statistics are hard to find in Mississippi but at least 13,000 job-related injuries take place every year and many more may go unreported. Eighty Mississippians died as a result of such injuries in 2008.

J.K. Morrison fought for 10 hard years on behalf of those workers. Is his own work now to be in vain?

Hardworking Hollywood Cowpokes: TV Western heroes gather to tell tales

(To the left is Hugh "Wyatt Earp" O'Brian at the recent TV Westerns film festival near Memphis)

Okay, this is not as momentous as the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling today on President Obama's health care law, nor is it as serious as most of my other postings on this blog, but it does have to do with hard-working folks looking back at their careers with a lot of pride and nostalgia. They happen to be TV Western stars from Hollywood's yesteryear.  They and many of their fans gathered near Memphis in early June, and I was there to tell the story of that event. They worked hard at their craft--character actor L.Q. Jones said he and others in television's 90-minute-long "The Virginian" series "did the equivalent of a full motion picture every eight days." Hugh O'Brian said the cast of "Wyatt Earp" worked 12-hour days five and six days a week. Their duties at this conference kept them pretty darn busy, too, as you'll see. This feature ran in the Jackson Free Press in mid-June.

OLIVE BRANCH, Miss. – I’m staring into the face of Marshal Wyatt Earp. It’s not exactly as I remember him back when I was a 10-year-old would-be cowboy and Wyatt was on television every Tuesday night. He’s in a motorized wheelchair now, his once-jet black hair is gray, and he’s sporting a beard.

But it’s him, the same black tie, starched white shirt, long black coat, purple vest.  All around him are photographs of the Wyatt I remember. “The first adult Western,” he says proudly of The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, which first aired in September 1955. “Look at the wardrobe. The first thing you wanted was to be authentic.” No fancy sequins, no scarves with polka dots. “Wyatt was marshal, and he wore what business owners wore.”

He’s not really Wyatt Earp, of course. He’s Hugh O’Brian, the 87-year-old actor who played him on television for seven years and still speaks of him like he’s a close friend. They’re on a first-name basis.

O’Brian is one of a couple dozen TV Western stars of yesteryear working the banquet rooms of the Whispering Woods Hotel and Conference Center. Clint “Cheyenne” Walker is signing autographs. James “The Virginian” Drury is telling jokes. Great character actors, their faces better known than their names, people like L.Q. Jones, Ed Faulkner, Henry Darrow and Roberta Shore, are regaling fans with Hollywood tales, of working with Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, Barbara Stanwyck, directors Sam Peckinpah and Samuel Fuller.

(To the right is L.Q. Jones)

It’s the fourth annual “A Gathering of Guns” TV Western film festival, and some 900 fans from as far away as Australia have come. Many are dressed in cowboy and cowgirl garb themselves, looking like an army of aging walk-ons on the set of a major Warner Brothers production.

Ellen Diiorio could have just stepped out of a Conestoga wagon. In her bonnet and calico dress, she’s anything but new millennium. “I represent the fortitude of the prairie women who helped forge this country,” she tells me. “I know we had a lot of heroes in the Old West like Wyatt Earp, but there were women, too, who had the strength and fortitude to carry the day.”

Of course, she’s not a prairie woman. She’s a 60-year-old 4-H Club secretary and elementary education teacher from Westfield, N.J. She’s also such a big fan of the late actor Dan Blocker, who played “Hoss” on Bonanza, that her email address even carries his name.

Charles Gunn’s black Stetson, string tie and brown vest tell me he’s a fan of a different sort. “I like the singing cowboys, like Johnny Western and Rex Allen Jr.” In fact, he adds, “I’m a singer, too.”

And indeed he is. The 63-year-old Warrenton, Ga., resident hands me his card: “Charles W. Gunn – Southeast’s Singing Cowboy – Clean Family Entertainment”.

Western and Allen are themselves somewhere in the hotel, but Gunn is now enjoying L.Q. Jones’ tales from his 114 movies and 500 TV credits. “Barbara Stanwyck was one of the toughest ladies God ever made,” Jones says. “Didn’t weigh 90 pounds, but this woman could make a sailor blush. You could do nothing to make her mad but screw up.”

Fan Lynne Mercer, 47, came all the way from Canberra, Australia. Too young to have seen many of the original shows, she’s mainly seen reruns. Still, “when I saw The Virginian it blew my mind. The Western style of life, a simple life, not complicated, outdoors. Of course, it wasn’t an easy life.”

This is a Hollywood version of an oldtimers’ baseball game, only much more demanding. The festival works its all-star cast hard. They tell stories, perform in short plays and comedy stints, shake innumerable hands, sign endless photographs.

“I’m so busy I only had a chance to eat two bites of my birthday cake,” says Clint Walker, who just turned 85. He’s not as big as he was when he starred in Cheyenne, a time when he stood 6’6” with a 54-inch chest and 38-inch waist. He’s still big, though, and a big man gets hungry.

(To the right is actor Clint Walker signing autographs)

He glances down the growing line of autograph seekers. It’s four in the afternoon. “I haven’t had lunch yet,” he says. But then the gentle giant dutifully signs every photograph, and he takes his time doing it, too.

The average age of the stars here is 75, and many of them are well into their 80s, says Ray Nielsen, co-director of the event. Several of those invited—Robert Horton, James Stacy, Will Hutchins, Ty Hardin—were unable to come because of illness. Most of the fans are in middle to late middle age.

The Western “doesn’t resonate with the younger generation,” Neilsen says. “It’s too tame for them, not enough pyrotechnics.”

Look at 2011’s Cowboys & Aliens, he says. Hollywood figured it had to mix in science fiction to make a Western successful today. “We’re a dying breed but that’s okay.”

The Western’s faded appeal to modern audiences is a reason why some stars are reluctant to come to festivals. “It is hard for them to believe that people still remember and care,” Nielsen says. An example is famed character actor Clu Gulager, whose refusal to come to this year’s festival prompted fans to chant “We Want Clu!” at one panel session.

“When they come for the first time, they are overwhelmed,” Nielsen says. “They find out that not only do the fans know them, they know more about them than (the actors) themselves. They are bowled over by it.”

As for the fans, he says, the festival brings back what it was like so long ago to sit in front of the screen and watch your heroes under the Western sky. “When you spend three or four days in the `reel’ world versus the `real’ world, you tend to block everything else out, the problems, the concerns, the economy. It’s all out the window. You are living in the moment. When the festival ends, and you go back to the `real’ world, it is a real downer.”

You know what? I’m feeling that way myself.

UAW targets Nissan plant in Canton, Miss., for its Southern campaign

 (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.)

After months of speculation about where the United Auto Workers was going to focus its do-or-die Southern campaign to organize workers, the giant 3,000-worker Nissan plant in Canton, Miss., has emerged as Battleground No. 1.

The $1.4 billion, nine-year-old plant has been eyed by UAW leaders for several years as a potential prize in its efforts to regain ground it has lost over the past several decades. UAW membership has dropped 75 percent in the last 30 years, and that decline has been aggravated by the proliferation of non-unionized foreign-owned auto plants in the South.

Early speculation had the union targeting the Volkswagen plant near Chattanooga, Tenn., and the Daimler-owned Mercedes plant near Tuscaloosa, Ala., but it’s Nissan’s Canton plant that’s in the crosshairs.

On May 1, the UAW moved its headquarters from nearby Gluckstadt, Miss., to the Nissan Parkway directly across from the sprawling plant. “We can look at them everyday and they can see us,” said Sanchioni L. Butler, a national organizer now working full-time in Mississippi.

A recent press conference in Canton organized by community leaders had U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., standing alongside state NAACP President Derrick Johnson and others pledging their support for the unionization effort at Canton.

Butler said community leaders were at the forefront in organizing the press conference, not the UAW. Hundreds of workers at the plant have already indicated their support for a union, she said.

The UAW wants to avoid a repetition of its failed 2001 campaign to organize the Nissan plant in Smyrna, Tenn. On the day before the election, Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn appeared in a video that was required viewing for workers. “Bringing a union into Smyrna could result in making Smyna not competitive, which is not in your best interest or Nissan’s,” he warned them. They got the message.

Nissan and Ghosn have already started to use similar anti-union tactics in Canton, UAW officials said. “All we want is a fair election,” Butler said.

The union also won’t find any support among Mississippi’s conservative Republican leadership. Gov. Phil Bryant, in a speech to business leaders this week at the University of Mississippi’s Center for Manufacturing Excellence in Oxford, expressed concern that the UAW was going to try to organize the new Toyota plant near Tupelo, Miss. “The automobile industry is very fragile,” said Bryant, as quoted in a Memphis Commercial Appeal article. “That’s what worries me. If the union involvement becomes active in the Southeastern automobile corridor, what does it do to industry? And I just don’t see a positive outcome to that.”

Mississippi is a “right-to-work” state, which makes organizing doubly difficult. In fact, the state embedded “right-to-work” in its constution during the administration of Gov. Ross Barnett in the early 1960s. The state invested $363 million in the Nissan plant.

Working in UAW’s favor this go-around is the workforce at the Nissan plant, which is estimated to be 80 percent African-American, Butler said. That’s the exact reverse of the Smyrna plant. African-Americans have traditionally been more inclined to vote unions than Southern whites.

Another favorable factor may be Mississippi's history. It was here that some of the bloodiest battles of the civil rights movement were fought. It is here where the idea of a social movement based on social justice at the workplace can find fertile ground, UAW leaders believe.

Butler said the issue for workers at Nissan is and will be fairness and respect at the workplace, not money. Although Nissan workers in Canton have historically earned less than their counterparts at other auto plants, they still make more than most Mississippi workers.

Over the past several years, the UAW has laid the groundwork for a future campaign in Mississippi, developing relationships with community, political, and religious leaders. The test of that work lies ahead.

Labor South round-up: Labor victories in Alabama and N.C., migrant workers suffering behind bars and at workplace, the return of the graveyard shift, & Art Pope gets more exposure

Organized Labor wins in Alabama and North Carolina

Organized labor scored two major victories in the South in recent days as 1,200 workers at the Pilgrim’s Pride poultry plant in Russellville, Ala., joined the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) and the Reynolds American tobacco company in North Carolina finally agreed to meet with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) to discuss the needs and concerns of migrant workers.

“Unions may be under attack across the country but working people still desperately need the security and dignity that comes with a union voice,” RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum said this week. “This resounding vote will be heard by poultry workers throughout the South as a message of hope.”

Workers at the JBS-owned plant voted 706 to 292 to join the union, which is affiliated with the United Food and Commercial Workers. As the American division of the Brazilian beef and poultry firm JBS, Pilgrim’s Pride is the largest chicken producer in the United States and a leader in one of Alabama’s largest industries.

The victory capped one of the largest organizing drives in Alabama over the past 10 years.

Workers at the plant said respect, not money, was the key issue for them in joining the union. “We had no respect from management, and absolutely no voice in anything that affected us,” sanitation department worker Cheryl Kowalski said in a RWDSU press release. “The bottom line was `do what you are told or you don’t have a job.’ But the union provided us with a glimmer of hope.”

The company fought tooth and nail against the union, forcing workers to attend anti-union meetings, distributing “Vote No” T-shirts and anti-union literature, and pressuring local businesses to ostracize union activists.

In North Carolina, tobacco giant Reynolds American’s agreement to meet with FLOC marks a major step forward in a nearly five-year campaign to get industry to recognize and deal with health and other issues of tobacco workers, 90 percent of whom in North Carolina are undocumented migrants, according to Oxfam.

(To the left is FLOC President and founder Baldemar Velasquez)

FLOC says nearly one out of every four of the 30,000 workers in North Carolina suffer from nicotine poisoning. Exposure to harmful pesticides and long hours under the summer sun have also contributed to strokes and even death. Workers often live in crowded, unsanitary camps or in remote, substandard trailers.  They suffer these conditions for minimum or sub-minimum pay.

FLOC has been dogged in its efforts to get Reynolds American to recognize its responsibilities, which the company has rejected in the past by saying the workers are not its employees but rather of the tobacco farms that hire them. Those tobacco farms, however, helped Reynolds earn nearly $1 billion in profits during what has been called the Great Recession and the many billions more it reports in annual international sales.

The path that now leads to a meeting between Reynolds and FLOC has been one filled with struggle. In recent years, FLOC has waged a JPMorgan Chase divestment campaign to force the Wall Street powerhouse to put pressure on the North Carolina company. JPMorgan Chase is a leader in the consortium of lenders that funnels close to $500 million in credit to Reynolds American. FLOC leaders also showed up repeatedly at shareholders’ meetings to press the issue.

The meeting will take the form of an “Industrial Council” with FLOC and Reynolds representatives present and also representatives from the North Carolina Growers Association and Phillips Morris’ parent company, the Altria Group.

Obama’s new promise to young migrants, and the reality of migrant workers’ lives—both at the workplace and behind bars

President Obama’s promise this week to cease deporting DREAM Act-eligible immigrant youths came as welcome news to a beleaguered minority in this nation. Let’s hope it’s more than just a campaign trail gesture and leads to real solutions.

Certainly those migrants suffering behind bars because they came to the United States looking for work need some help.

Inmates at the privately run Adams County Correctional Facility near Natchez, Miss., say last month’s riot at the 2,500-inmate facility—which claimed the life of one prison guard and caused several injuries—was the result of a history of neglect and abuse. They told members of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance (MIRA) that poor medical care has led to as many as 11 deaths over the past year. Only one doctor works at the prison, they said.

Most of the inmates at the facility, which is run by the Correctional Corporation of America (CCA), are immigrants who were convicted of re-entering the country without documentation.

(To the right is MIRA Executive Director Bill Chandler)

Roughneck guards, a minority but still palpable presence, “beat inmates, discriminate against them, and humiliate them constantly,” MIRA reported in a recent newsletter. The correctional officer who died was allegedly beaten during the riot after dumping chemicals from a rooftop onto inmates below, MIRA reported.

Privately run prisons are a growing issue in Mississippi. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has charged the East Mississippi Correctional Facility near Lost Gap with inadequate staffing and malfunctioning door locks, exposing employees to assaults from inmates. The facility is owned by the GEO Group of Boca Raton, Fla., which announced in April it was discontinuing contracts for East Mississippi and two other facilities in Mississippi. The company faces more than $100,000 in OSHA fines.

One of those other prisons, the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility, was at the center of a recent federal class action lawsuit that resulted in the removal of children there to protect them from sexual and physical abuse.

Migrant workers on the outside often don’t fare much better than those serving time in prison. Stolen wages, unpaid overtime, round-the-clock working shifts, and squalid living conditions led workers at C.J.’s Seafood in New Orleans recently to go on strike despite a hostile anti-immigrant and anti-organized labor climate that gets them little sympathy from local and state officials.

The workers have filed a complaint with the Department of Labor about their working conditions. C.J.’s Seafood, which reports $20 million in annual earnings, lists Walmart as its top customer and is currently in a dispute with DOL over new regulations that insist workers be paid and be paid fairly.

Back to the graveyard shift at auto plants in the South and across the country

As a sign of the rebounding automobile industry, General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Nissan and Kia have re-instituted the third shift at plants across the country. Workers will go on the “graveyard” shift at Hyundai’s Alabama plant in September.

According to Automotive News, 22 of the 83 assembly plants in North America will have three shifts by the beginning of 2013, a sharp contrast to the early 2000s when only 7 percent of plants maintained a third shift.

Adding the third shift came at the urging of the Obama Administration, which sees it as a means to add profits to an industry that, at least among its some of its domestic leaders, required federal bailout money to survive just a few years ago.

A final note: Good work by Facing South opens door to further scrutiny of North Carolina kingpin Art Pope

The May-June edition of Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors, features an article by University of North Carolina French professor Hassan Melehy on North Carolina right-wing kingpin Art Pope, who “offers money to fund academic programs in Western civilization and free-market economics at state universities while his think tanks attack `radical’ faculty and argue for decreased state funding of higher education.”

Pope, North Carolina’s version of billionaire right-wingers Charles and David Koch, is coming under increased public scrutiny for his efforts to inculcate higher education with his own Ayn Randian views. The reason: Facing South, the crusading online publication of the North Carolina-based Institute for Southern Studies, which first exposed Pope’s backroom dealings and manipulations. Good work, Facing South!

Walker & Koch Inc. pull it off but the fight continues

(King Kong in the 1933 film)

Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker's victory in Tuesday's recall election is being called a crushing blow to organized labor in this nation, and it certainly isn't happy news. Walker is at the forefront of the corporate-financed, GOP-led assault on unions, particularly public unions. His victory will inspire further assaults.

However,  let's be clear. He bought this victory, he and his billionaire friends Charles and David Koch, who together are the King Kong of modern-day, post-Citizens United campaign financing. He and his friends spent as much as $50 million so that he could finish out his term in office. The labor ground forces who pushed for and got this recall election, God bless 'em, forced Walker & Koch Inc. to spend $50 million! Think about that!

"Last night was not what we had hoped for, but we're beginning to build the long-term infrastructure that allows us to talk to--and organize--both union and non-union households," wrote Michael Podhorzer, executive director of Workers' Voice, in a letter released to supporters today.

Podhorzer notes that the anti-Walker grassroots campaign had already succeeded in returning Democratic control back to the state Senate in Wisconsin, a huge victory against the Republican tide in that state. For the recall election, groups like Working America had some 11,000 members "on the doors talking to non-union members."

A post-election poll showed 75 percent of union members in Wisconsin voted for Democratic candidate Tom Barrett. Why 25 percent of union members would vote for Walker raises the key question Thomas Frank asked in his book What's The Matter With Kansas? Why do people vote against their own interests?

Meanwhile, the grassroots are still stirring across the land, including in the South.

Here in Mississippi, United Auto Workers officials recently joined hands with U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and the state NAACP in a press conference to pledge to work together to organize the giant Nissan plant in Canton, near the state capital of Jackson.

In Memphis, AFSCME Local 1733 released a study showing that the city and Shelby County, Tenn., where Memphis is located, handed major corporations like Fed-Ex, International Paper, and Cargill some $41.6 million in property tax breaks in fiscal 2011. That came at the same time the city cut pay for most municipal workers by 4.6 percent to meet a $47 million budget deficit.

It's the kind of politics we have all across America today, whether it's in cities like Memphis or in our federal government in Washington, D.C.

There's plenty of money in this country. Not everybody is suffering in this "Great Recession". Just ask Scott Walker's bank rollers. To them, the recession is not only over, it never really happened.

For many out there, however, it's a depression, not a recession, and it's far from over. Here's how writer Dale Maharidge puts it in his and photojournalist Michael S. Williamson's wonderful book Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression:  "My great recession is your Great Depression if you lose your job and your home. The oxymoronic term `jobless recovery' is an insult to those who have been laid off."

Walker & Koch Inc. are immune from such realities. They can drown the political process with a flood of cash and muddy up reality for only so long. Even King Kong eventually met his end, and, you know, he wasn't even that bad a guy. In fact, I think I've insulted the big ape by comparing him to Walker's friends.