A "Crimmigration" conference, Walmart on the dole in Mississippi, and Kellogg locks out Memphis workers

It’s time for another Labor South roundup, and this one tells of the upcoming “Crimmigration” conference sponsored by the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance (MIRA), a report by the Good Jobs First organization on how the nation’s poorest state has shelled out $27.1 million to the Walmart corporation in addition to more than $750 million in subsidies to Nissan and Toyota, and Kellogg’s lockout of hundreds of union workers in Memphis.

Crimmigration

The 7^th annual MIRA and Southern Christian Leadership Conference “Unity Conference” will feature speakers and panel discussions on “Crimmigration: The Tragic Consequences of US Drug Policies on Families and Youth”.

The conference will take place in Jackson, Miss., Nov. 15 and 16 and include a keynote address by Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, and also feature Javier Sicillia, poet and leader of the Mexican Movement for Peace and Justice.

MIRA has worked tirelessly for years on behalf of immigrants in Mississippi and along the Gulf Coast. By developing a close coalition with the Black Legislative Caucus and white moderates and liberals, the organization has been successful in keeping draconian anti-immigrant legislation from becoming law in Mississippi. This is despite the fact that Republicans dominate both houses of the state Legislature and Mississippi’s Republican governor, Phil Bryant, owes his political success in part to his demagoguery of the immigration issue.

The nation’s poorest state has plenty of cash for corporations on the dole

In its report “AccountableUSA”, the Good Jobs First organization, a self-proclaimed “resource for grassroots groups and public officials seeking to make economic development subsidies more accountable and effective,” says state and local governments in Mississippi have given $27.1 million in subsidies to 13 or more Walmart locations in the state. This is in addition to the three-quarters of a billion dollars Mississippi gave away in subsidy packages to land and nurture Nissan and Toyota automobile plants.

“Many Wal-Mart workers are ineligible for health coverage from their employer or choose not to purchase what is available, because it is too expensive or too limited in scope,” Good Jobs First reports. “These workers often turn to taxpayer-funded health programs such as Medicaid.”

Good Jobs First made news in Mississippi back in May when it reported that state and local governments have actually provided more than $1.3 billion in subsidies to the Nissan plant in Canton alone since 2000. This includes the $363 million subsidy package awarded by the state Legislature plus a wide range of other subsidies, amounting to the equivalent of $290,000 per job at the plant.

Kellogg locks out workers, idling hundreds in Memphis

 The cereal-making giant Kellogg, based in Battle Creek, Mich., has locked out 220 workers at its plant in Memphis after failing to win union approval of its plan to hire new “casual” workers at what will likely be reduced wages and to change production scheduling as well as staffing.

The Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union has filed a charge of unfair labor practices against the company. The lockout does not extend to Kellogg’s plant in Rossville, Tenn. The lockout affects Memphis because of the expiration of the previous agreement at that plant.

Kellogg’s Memphis plant produces Apple Jacks, Froot Loops and other cereals. It announced plans to lay off 70 workers at the plant back in April. Kellogg profits totaled $352 million for the quarter ending June 29, up $28 million from the same period last year.

Southern Right-Wingers wage war against labor, plus a feature column on "The Last of the Letter Writers"

 

(On the far right in the photograph is the late raging Southern liberal Sander P. Margolis with yours truly and my wife Suzanne at a restaurant in Oxford, Miss., several years ago. This is my only photograph of Sandy.)

The Southern Right-Wing's assault on labor remains under-the-radar of most mainstream media even as it becomes increasingly war-like:

- In North Carolina, conservatives in the legislature are calling for a constitutional amendment to ban collective bargaining for public employees. The Southern Workers Assembly says a "South-wide and national campaign for labor/workers rights" is needed against "this right-wing  push."

- The loathsome National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation has filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board to prevent workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., from getting a German-style works council at the plant. Both company leaders and the United Auto Workers as well as a majority of workers at the plant are supportive of the works council, but Tennessee leaders like U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Gov. Bill Haslam are aghast at the idea of a major union-friendly plant on their home turf. The anti-union foundation alleges the UAW fooled and pressured workers into supporting the works council.  The UAW told Reuters the charges were "frivolous and baseless."

- Cedric Gina, president of the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa, and a South African labor delegation visited UAW headquarters in Canton, Miss., last week and met with workers at the Nissan plant there to get a better idea of those workers' struggles to get a union election at the 5,200-worker plant.  "We think this is not supposed to be happening in a so-called First World country, a so-called bastion of democracy," said Gina about Nissan anti-union tactics such as one-on-one meetings between management and workers warning of plant closures and lost jobs. NUMSA represents 325,000 workers in South Africa, including 2,000 Nissan workers near Pretoria. "This is really a shame. People in authority must be ashamed that a Japanese company has come and is allowed to exploit people in their own state, in their own country."

- The recent federal government shutdown in Washington, D.C., can be largely blamed on Southern conservatives in Congress, more and more analysts are saying. According to Zack Beauchamp in ThinkProgress, the U.S. House count of Southern Republicans on last week's re-opening of government was 73 voting "No" and 18 voting "Yes". The Southern accent at Tea Party gatherings is strong, even dominant, and it validates something I said in my 2008 book, Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press: "The South's political, business, religious and journalistic elite" continue to wage a civil war, and it's against working people. The regular folks among the Tea Party ranks sadly don't realize they're fighting a war against themselves. They hate government, but just try to take away their Social Security and Medicare. The South has always had plenty of people who work against their own interests. After all, this is the same South that South Carolina's John C. Calhoun rallied together in the failed "nullification" campaign of the 1830s, when he wanted Southern states to be able to override federal laws. It took another Southerner, President Andrew Jackson, to nullify the "nullification" effort.

Lots going on in the South these days, and the more things change, the more they stay the same!

(On a different note: Below is a feature column of mine that was recently published in the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Miss. It's about a fellow Southerner and diehard liberal whom I call The Last of the Letter Writers.)    

OXFORD, Miss. – The letters from Edwards, Miss., began arriving around 11 years ago.

The penmanship was a big, wild scrawl not always easy to read. Jumping off those pages, however, was the passion of the writer.

“There will be unions in the South in time because it is right,” lawyer and former journalist Sander P. “Sandy” Margolis wrote in one of them, responding to a column of mine about unions and the raw deal working-class people get.

Then, in big, capital letters, he offered a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt. “`YOU GAIN STRENGTH, COURAGE, AND CONFIDENCE BY EVERY EXPERIENCE IN WHICH YOU REALLY STOP TO LOOK FEAR IN THE FACE. YOU MUST DO THE THING YOU THINK YOU CANNOT DO.’”

I miss getting those letters. Sandy Margolis, the last of the letter writers, died at age 74 two years ago last month. His had been a long illness, and the letters had stopped long before. Still, I knew, as long as Sandy Margolis was breathing, things like justice, truth and honor had a champion.

A Virginia native, he came from a Jewish immigrant family with roots in Lithuania. A grandfather lived in South Africa, and an uncle once wrote for the Yiddish newspaper, the Jewish Forward, in New York. His parents struggled during the Depression. His father lacked education and lost his job, but “FDR’s New Deal gave him hope for employment and a better life.” They lost family members to the Holocaust.

In the Margolis household, politics and social justice were part of the regular conversation.

“My father … saw through Nixon’s `Southern Strategy’ in 1968. He remembered when LBJ said after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that `we’ve lost the South.’ But my father never let racism dishonor his soul.”

Sandy studied at the University of Virginia and Notre Dame and got his law degree at Ole Miss.  He worked as a liberal reporter and columnist in political boss Harry Byrd’s Virginia during the time of  “massive resistance” to racial integration. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr., A. Philip Randolph, United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther and many thousands of others in the 1963 March on Washington.

He wrote columns for different newspapers, worked as a lawyer, and until he became ill fired off letters to the editor—perhaps the last place in the world where people still actually write letters.

Ah, those letters! Whether to me or to a newspaper they were full of fire. After Republican Haley Barbour’s election as governor in 2003—a campaign in which Barbour brandished his state flag lapel pin with its Confederate insignia and allowed his image on the ultra-right-wing Committee of Conservative Citizens’ Web site--Sandy said this in a letter to the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger:  “He orchestrated a racist campaign. He knew that playing the ‘race card’ works in Mississippi. … Will Haley Barbour now seek the way of honor and apologize to African Americans for his campaign methods?”

Those words produced an outcry. Another letter writer responded angrily by linking Sandy with columnist Bill Minor and yours truly as three “hysterical” liberals unable to cope with Barbour’s victory. Sandy said he was proud to be in such company.

The Margolis pen was just as sharp in a column as in a personal letter. “The promotion of extreme corporate wealth and favoritism is corrupting and corroding the bedrock institutions of our republic,” he wrote in a piece for the alternative publication Planet Weekly in 2004. “Even the press and media, the sentinels of our liberty, are being subverted by corporate ownership and used as public relations and propaganda tools.”

Like the great crusading Jewish journalists Abraham Cahan, George Seldes and I.F. Stone, Sandy was an unabashed intellectual. His writings are replete with quotes—Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, Edmund Burke, Lewis Carroll, William Faulkner.

Here’s one he sent me from FDR, again in letters as big as his laugh: “`THE TEST OF OUR PROGRESS IS NOT WHETHER WE ADD MORE TO THE ABUNDANCE OF THOSE WHO HAVE MUCH; IT IS WHETHER WE PROVIDE ENOUGH FOR THOSE WHO HAVE TOO LITTLE.’”

Although proud of his Jewish heritage, he admitted he was “not a formally religious person.” Yet, he said, “we must treat every human being as a child of God, with justice, mercy and love.”

His wife Alice and his daughters Kate and Amanda keep his memory alive. And now maybe I’m helping a little, too. A postcard from Sandy and Alice hangs on the wall next to my desk, and I’ll never forget what they wrote. “We believe you have a Jewish heart because you believe in justice and truth and honor.”

No letter has ever pleased me more than that card.

Nissan's Canton, Miss., plant violates the international labor standards the company promised to uphold, report says

 

(Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn at the India Economic Summit in 2009. Photograph by Matthew Jordaan)

Nissan, a company with headquarters in Yokohama, Japan, a Brazilian-born CEO who divides his time between Japan and France, and plants around the world, including Canton, Miss., is in direct violation of international labor standards that it promised to uphold, an international labor law expert told reporters at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., today.

“Nissan has committed itself to … international standards,” said Lance Compa, author of Choosing Rights, a 46-page report on Nissan practices at its Canton plant. “Unfortunately Nissan is not living up to these international standards at the Canton plant. Nissan has engaged in a longstanding, aggressive campaign of interference with workers’ freedom of association.”

The report, commissioned by the United Auto Workers, includes a long litany of complaints from Nissan-Canton workers about a “Big Brother”-like atmosphere at the plant, where television screens in break areas broadcast repeated anti-union messages claiming the complicity of the UAW in the downfall of the nation’s Big Three automakers. The same message is hammered home again in intimidating and threatening one-on-one sessions with management.

The intimidation has only increased since the growth of a grassroots campaign calling for a union election at the plant over the past year, Compa said. Others at the press conference agreed.

Nissan-Canton worker Wade Cox, a 10-year veteran and production technician, said supervisors and even a vice president have joined in a chorus of union-bashing that includes threats that the 5,000-plus-worker plant will shut down if workers vote union. “They place fear in people’s hearts because of job security,” Cox said. “We’re just asking that we have this opportunity to have a fair and free election, free from intimidation and free from threats. Right now we don’t have a fair process. We ask that Nissan do better.”

According to the International Labor Organization’s 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work and ILO Conventions 87 and 98, companies like Nissan that are members of the United Nations Global Compact are prohibited from “imposing pressure, instilling fear, and making threats” against workers seeking union representation, the report said.

These standards prohibit a company from “creating an atmosphere of intimidation and fear,” from “pressuring or threatening retaliatory measures against workers,” and from “denying reasonable access for workers to hear from union representatives inside the workplace.”

Nissan joined the UN Global Compact in 2004. Yet, in a Feb. 25 letter to Compa, Nissan officials said, “our understanding of the principles of freedom of association and the effective right to collective bargaining as defined at the international level is that it does not require companies like Nissan to abrogate or otherwise disregard rights available to it under national law.”

Furthermore, “international labor standards … do not apply to private enterprises like Nissan. Rather, they apply to governments, which then use them as guidance to structure national law.”

In other words, Nissan prefers the much more lax interpretation of rights available to workers under U.S. labor laws, laws that have been weakened after decades of conservative and corporate pressure.  Compa said at the press conference that U.S. labor law, for example, allows companies to “predict” plant closings or use other conditional language, language perfected by the anti-union attorneys and consultants hired by companies like Nissan as a tool to keep workers fearful of unions.

“This is psychological pressure that violates international standards,” Compa said. “It’s also unethical and unfair.”

In an interview last summer, Nissan spokesman Travis Parman said, “Our communications meetings with employees are not new. We continuously and routinely meet with our employees to openly discuss matters pertinent to our business.”

Compa said workers testified to hearing management claim repeatedly that Nissan is a non-union company even though its plants outside the United States are unionized. Furthermore, “captive audience meetings” such as those in Canton are prohibited at Nissan’s unionized Japanese plants. At Canton, the UAW has no opportunity to counter claims by Nissan management, another violation of international standards.

The situation at the Canton plant “is like a political race, and one candidate has a monopoly on television advertisement, and the other has to pass out flyers,” Compa said.

“Let us be fair with the only resource Mississippi has—people who are willing to work hard,” said Isiac Jackson Jr., a prominent Jackson, Miss.-area minister and chair of the Mississippi Alliance for Fairness at Nissan, at the press conference. “Mississippi people work hard, and they (Nissan) discovered they can work cheap.”

Jackson decried the growing use of “temporary” workers at the Nissan-Canton plant. These workers earn just half the wages of fulltime workers.

The report calls on Nissan to give full compliance with the international labor standards it agreed to uphold and to allow workers the right to a free and fair opportunity to consider whether they want to join a union.

Labor South featured on "The People's Station" in Cleveland, Ohio

It has been a busy week for yours truly. Ed “Flash” Ferenc of WERE-AM 1490 in Cleveland, Ohio, interviewed me Wednesday, Sept. 25, about the United Auto Workers campaign at the Nissan plant in Canton, Miss. WERE-AM is “The People’s Station”, a radio station devoted to talking about labor issues and telling the stories of working class people, and it’s living proof that corporate media haven’t quite yet shut down the discussion on those stories or on labor issues in general.

On Ferenc’s “America’s Work Force” show, we discussed the labor movement in the South, its obstacles, how the image of the union-hostile, low-wage, low-benefits, environmentally lax South lamentably has become a model for the rest of the nation. The UAW’s success at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., also came up. The union says it has enough signed cards from workers for a German-style works council to be set up at the plant. Check out the show at: http://awfradio.com/todays-show-9-25-13/

The UAW’s turn to the South is also the subject of a lengthy piece I just completed for upcoming edition of the New Labor Forum in New York. The NLF is arguably the finest journal devoted to labor issues in the country today, and I was proud to write for them.

The South indeed is again a battleground, and the outcome will affect the entire nation. Workers need a united voice. That’s the only way to counter the Republican-backed corporate juggernaut. I shouldn’t let Democrats off the hook here. A lot of them spend too much time acting like Republicans. Working people have to look past party lines to see who their real friends are.

Teachers are protesting in North Carolina. They ought to protest. They’re the lowest-paid teachers in the nation, according to one recent report. Fast food workers have had it with sub-minimum wages and disrespect at the workplace. Auto workers get better pay than most folks in the South wearing a blue collar these days, but they know it isn’t only about the pay. It’s about respect. The United Auto Workers and other unions realize that, and it’s why their message is getting heard in Dixie. Let it ring loud and clear!

A Palestinian makes a go of a Middle Eastern restaurant that serves falafel but no alcohol in a Southern college town

  (To the right is restaurant owner Maher Alqasas)

(The following feature column by yours truly appeared in a recent edition of the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Miss. For this reason, please cite the Jackson Free Press when publishing this elsewhere.)

 OXFORD, Miss. – The great journalist, raconteur, and connoisseur of good food A.J. Liebling loved to venture off the beaten tracks of New York and Paris to find little restaurants and bistros overlooked by the culinary critics and trend-setters but where a man with a taste for good dining could enjoy himself.

Liebling knew such places—“lost Atlantises” he called them--often have a precarious existence. “The small restaurant is evanescent,” he writes in his 1959 classic Between Meals. “Sometimes it has the life span of a man, sometimes of a fruit fly.”

A more recent writer, the former chef and current TV food and travel personality Anthony Bourdain, had this to say about the perils of the restaurant business in his own book Kitchen Confidential: “To want to open a restaurant can be a strange and terrible affliction. What causes such a destructive urge in so many otherwise sensible people? Why would anyone want to pump their hard-earned cash down a hole that statistically, at least, will almost surely prove dry?”

Maher Alqasas, 50, a native of the Mount of Olives in Palestine and longtime resident and veteran restaurant owner here in Oxford, acknowledges the risks. “This is a tough business. Imagine working 12 hours a day and having a smile on your face for 12 hours, and to like what you do. The kitchen is a fireball, booming, loud, and I have to be a part of that. What makes it worth it at the end of the day in seeing the smile on their faces.”

He’s talking about the smile on the faces of customers at his Middle Eastern-Mediterranean restaurant Petra Cafe, open since February, a long, narrow stretch of a place in the corner of the town’s famous Square that once housed Wiley’s shoe shop and later Parrish’s bar. “Food is the moment of celebration,” says Alqasas, who grew up in Qatar, “because when you are hungry you are willing to eat anything, but if you know you are eating something good, it is a joy. You are nourishing your body.”

The food at Petra--falafel, kibbeh, hummus, labneh, dolmas, chicken shawerma, shish kabob, gyros with tiziki sauce—isn’t exactly what you’d find on the tables of most Southern homes. But it’s just as homemade and just as likely from old family recipes, says Petra chef and Alqasas’ wife, Angela, also a native of Palestine. “My customers come to my kitchen and tell me it’s the best falafel they’ve ever had, customers from Chicago, Michigan,” she says with pride. “I love it. I remember when I was a kid, my mom asked me to do the falafel. We used to help my mom. I learned from my mother and my mother-in-law.”

The Alqasas—their three children work at Petra, too--like the idea of a homey atmosphere, even though home for them would be exotic to most Oxonians. The walls feature paintings of street scenes and merchants from Old Egypt. The music is Turkish, the carpet at the front door is Persian. “I’m trying to keep the Oxford look, too, the old and new,” Maher Alqasas says. “This is an old building (a century old, he estimates) but with fresh legs … new ceiling, new floor, new electrical, new everything.”

Still, running a successful restaurant on Oxford’s Square can require more than good food and good atmosphere. Most of the two dozen or more restaurants and bars on or near the Square also serve alcohol. They’re why the town’s thriving night life rivals that of much larger cities. Petra allows brown-bagging but serves no alcohol.

Does it hurt business? “It does,” Alqasas admits, “but eventually it is going to be known. Customers can bring their own. It is worth the wait. It is all about the food.”

Alqasas is Muslim. His religious faith is one reason he wants to avoid serving alcohol. Another is the bar he once had in an earlier version of Petra a few blocks away. “It made my life miserable as far as inventory, keeping kids working, no stealing. … I don’t want to be a part of it.”

At least some of his customers don’t mind. “It didn’t stop us,” said Ole Miss student Shelby Herring, a 21-year-old hospitality management major from Houston, Texas, during a recent meal there with her friend and fellow Ole Miss student Molly Thrush. “I like Mediterranean food. I’m a vegetarian, so I like the falafel (fried ground vegetables), the salads, the hummus. Back home, I’d go once a week to a Middle Eastern or Mediterranean restaurant.”

Restaurants typically take a couple years to turn a decent profit. Petra just suffered through the summer doldrums that tend to hurt the bottom lines of most college town businesses. Many tables remained empty during the summer evenings.

“I am a patient person,” Alqasas says. However, he admits, he was more than ready for the fall invasion of Ole Miss students.

Labor South roundup: Calls for a new "Operation Dixie", GOP-appointed "Czars" in Democratic strongholds, and striking fast-food workers in Dixie

 In this latest roundup. Labor South looks at calls for a new “Operation Dixie”, GOP-appointed “Czars” in Democratic strongholds, and striking fast-food workers.

Calls for a modern-day “Operation Dixie”

Delegates at the 2013 convention of the AFL-CIO in Los Angeles this week adopted a a resolution proposed by the Savannah (Ga.) Regional Central Council “to develop a Southern organizing strategy” as “one of its top priorities” and one that will “include a long-term commitment to organize the South.”

Resolution 26 decries the fact that the U.S. labor movement “has never successfully developed a concerted and coordinated effort to organize workers in the 11 Southern states” of the Southern Region, thus “allowing the most conservative political forces in the South to operate without effectively being challenged by organized workers.”

The South today is “a major player in the new global economy,” the resolution says, “and has become a haven for US manufacturing, foreign investments and finance capital, and because of this reemergence is now playing an integral role in shaping US labor and social policies.”

Yet “corporations in the South have not only exploited Southern workers but have also been responsible for the negative environmental impact on many working class families, especially the African American, Latino, Native American, Asian and poor white communities.”

Conservative Southern politicians have okayed “billions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives” to corporations “at the expense of these struggling communities.”

Even as convention delegates adopted this resolution, however, much work is already underway to, indeed, organize the South, an effort tracked closely by Labor South.

The United Auto Workers, in a do-or-die effort to rebuild, is actively working with the IG Metall union in Germany and even some company officials to establish German-style works councils at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., and the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Ala. Despite opposition from political leaders in both states, VW officials are talking with union leaders about the move, and Mercedes-Benz officials say they’re neutral to the idea.

In fact, in a major breakthrough, Gary Casteel, UAW regional director for the South, said this week that a majority of workers at the VW plant in Chattanooga have now signed cards supporting a works council. Casteel told Associated Press that the cards are the legal equivalent of an actual election. He declined to say when the union would seek formal recognition.

Besides its work at the German plants, the UAW has helped build a wide-ranging grassroots campaign over the past eight years to organize the 5,200 workers at the Nissan plant in Canton, Miss. That campaign has taken activists around the country and as far away as Brazil and South Africa to make the case for a union vote in Canton. Hundreds now attend union-related events, even as Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant and other state leaders lock arms in opposition. Bryant attacked a recent study showing Nissan will receive up to $1.33 billion in government incentives over a 30-year period despite never living up to all the promises that came with its arrival in Mississippi. To counteract the UAW, Nissan has waged a high-stakes campaign to endear itself to the area black community—an estimated 80 percent of the workforce at the plant is black—offering hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to local schools and civil rights organizations.

Even back in 1946, when the original “Operation Dixie” was launched, labor leaders recognized the crucial importance of the South to labor’s future, the potential for Southern-bred anti-unionism to spread to the rest of the country. The campaign ended in failure in the early 1950s, but the predictions that prompted it have proven true. The South has to be organized, or the U.S. labor movement will eventually shrink into nonexistence.

Who needs democracy? Let’s appoint a “Czar”!

Detroit’s fiscal woes are widely known, and the Republican version of what caused them is the familiar tirade against a government-run-amuck with fat pensions and greedy unions at the heart of the problem. Michigan’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder, and the financial manager, Kevyn Orr, he chose to rule over the bankrupt city have targeted pension plans in their plan to restore fiscal integrity.

The plan fails to take into account the myriad reasons why Detroit got into such trouble, including NAFTA and other trade deals that put U.S. workers at a disadvantage (Michigan lost more jobs to NAFTA than any other state). Like Republican pols in the South, Michigan’s “fiscal conservative” pols aren’t above spending taxpayer money for causes they do support, such as $283 million for a pro-hockey stadium.

Oh, and by the way, Orr refused requests by the AFSCME to meet despite promises that union leaders would be part of the discussion about Detroit’s future.

When Tennessee State Comptroller Justin Wilson issued a warning to the city of Memphis this spring regarding its finances, local media and other observers wondered, “Is Memphis the next Detroit?”

Wilson told Memphis that its future depended on city leaders getting their fiscal act together in fixing the city’s ailing $622 million operating budget. Memphis has long been a Democratic stronghold in a very Republican state. Local economists insist Memphis is a long way from a Detroit-style state takeover, but how much will pension holders and other regular folks in Memphis have to suffer to keep that from happening?

Eerily similar to these developments is a recent decision by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) in California to take away San Francisco City College’s accreditation by the summer of 2014 if it fails to implement a multi-part plan that critics say essentially moves the school toward privatization.

San Francisco City College has been a democratic haven—known for shared governance, strong unions, and local activism—for years, and thus a burr in the saddle of conservative Republicans and even some Democrats.

Fast-food workers tired of working for less than living wages

The nationwide strikes and worker actions against low wages in the fast-food industry had spread to the South by the end of August, according to the North Carolina-based Institute for Southern Studies’ Facing South online magazine.

Fast-food workers in at least 11 Southern cities joined the nationwide strike, including workers in the Triangle region of North Carolina. North Carolina is perennially the nation’s least-unionized state.

Workers struck in Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Greensboro, Atlanta, Houston, Austin, Dallas, Memphis, New Orleans and Gretna, La.

The workers are seeking an hourly pay of $15. Their current average pay nationwide is $8.94 an hour.

This is a $200 billion industry. McDonald’s last year posted profits of $5.47 billion.

Labor South looking at Republican "czars" overseeing Democratic strongholds, and the rise of fast-food worker protests

Labor South is still on the watch although other writing duties have kept yours truly from posting recently.

Coming soon will be a look at a potential trend among conservative state political leaders to take over local entities that don't fit their preferred political profile.

We've seen this already with the state takeover of the city of Detroit, a city that granted has a lot of problems but which as a Democratic stronghold also makes a mighty juicy target for Republican pols. A recent warning from state officials in Tennessee that city leaders in Memphis better get their fiscal house in order raised concerns that Memphis could be another Detroit--another inviting target, that is.

More recently, students at City College of San Francisco have protested the possible loss of accreditation and shutdown of the school, popular for its low tuition and strong network of campus and community activists.  CCSF has an active teachers' union and a tradition of shared and democratic leadership. It has also been under attack by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges. The state community colleges chancellor has designated a "czar" to oversee campus operations. These political entities question the college's budget decision-making, among other things.

Of course, another growing issue is the spreading protest by fast-food workers about their wages, a protest that has included several Southern cities.

Labor South will be taking a look. Keep posted.