"Crime pays" for the private prison industry and modern-day convict leasers

(The photograph to the left is of convict laborers at Mississippi's Parchman Farm prison in 1911)


It all started in Mississippi. Of course.

Deprived of his slaves by the Confederacy’s loss in the War Between the States, wealthy, politically connected cotton grower and railroad magnate Edmund Richardson needed cheap labor for the 25,000 acres of cotton spread across his 50 plantations in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta.

With the help of his political friends, he engineered a scheme in 1868 to lease former slaves who had become prison inmates after the war. He put them to work in his cotton fields and on his railroads and levees. He worked them hard and grew even richer. Federal and state authorities were so pleased with the agreement they even gave him money to cover transportations costs and other expenses.

The system quickly spread across the South, a region whose leaders have always loved cheap labor whether it be slave, indentured servant, sharecropper, tenant farmer, non-unionized cotton mill hand, or undocumented worker. And they love to work them hard, too. Conditions were so brutal by 1882 that nearly one-fifth of Mississippi’s leased convicts died from overwork or related causes.

In 1906, Mississippi Gov. James K. Vardaman became so disgusted that he led a successful campaign to reform a system “rivaling in brutality and fiendishness, the atrocities of … Torquemada” solely to benefit “some political dictator’s Delta plantation.”

Convict leasing across the land finally ended in 1928 when Alabama joined the rest of the nation and ceased the practice.

Enter Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, a 21st century Republican who would’ve enjoyed sipping mint juleps with Edmund Richardson on the back veranda. After the legislature waged an Arizona-like assault on undocumented workers, the governor was bombarded by angry Peach State farmers who complained they stood to lose $300 million from the loss of labor in their fields.

That’s when Deal came up with a “partial solution to our current status as we continue to move toward sustainable results with the legal options available.”

Translation: Let’s put a chunk of Georgia’s 100,000 convicted criminals who are on probation to work on the farm. He instructed his commissioners of labor and agriculture to proceed.

Of course, making money on convicted criminals and prison inmates has become big business in modern-day America. The Corrections Corporation of America, which operates three of Mississippi’s five private prisons, reported $1.6 billion in revenues in 2008. It’s no accident that the growth of private prisons since the early-to-mid 1980s has paralleled a phenomenal growth in incarceration—and correctional outlays.

The United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. Russia and China, both with long histories as police states, pale in comparison. Nowhere is incarceration more popular than in the Deep South. Mississippi ranks only behind Louisiana in the nation, and 67 percent of Mississippi’s inmates are black.

“The majority of people incarcerated in private prisons are in the eleven states of the old Confederacy,” write social activist Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich in The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy. “This keeps the South imprisoned in its own tragic history of building an economy on the backs of unfree people.”

In neighboring Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal has proposed privatizing three state prisons as a money-saving measure. However, statistics show correctional spending—here in Mississippi and across the nation--has skyrocketed since the first private prisons appeared. Although some officials blame “truth-in-sentencing” and other tough-on-crime measures, the private prison industry lobbied hard for those same measures. In other words, “crime pays” for this particular industry.

Ron Welch, Jackson attorney and longtime defender of prisoner rights in Mississippi, says the state today actually compares well with other states in oversight of its private prisons. However, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Civil Liberties Union and civil rights attorney Robert McDuff have filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of 13 inmates against the Walnut Grove facility to protest what they say are barbaric conditions. Walnut Grove is owned by the GEO Group of Florida.

Finding out what actually goes on inside private prisons is not always easy. In fact, Congress took up legislation in 2007 to place the industry under the purview of the Freedom of Information Act. Lobbying by industry leaders killed the bill.

“Roughly 25,000 federal criminal prisoners are jailed in private facilities at any given time,” U.S. Rep. Tim Holden, D-Pa., said at the time. “Yet private prisons are not required to publicly disclose information about their facilities’ daily operations.”

New legislation was introduced this year and remains pending. The industry, I’m sure, is prepared.

Union members carrying the banner in Virginia, Florida, and the Gulf Coast

Time for another Labor South round-up:

Verizon workers in Virginia join walkout

Virginia workers are among the 45,000 employees of Verizon Communication who have staged a walkout stretching from the mid-Atlantic states to Maine to protest a company that pays its chief executive officer 300 times what they earn, a company that reported $6.9 billion in net income during the first six months of 2011, yet it wants to cut wages and benefits amounting to $20,000 per employee.

Members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) decided their livelihood was on the line and that corporate crocodile tears about a decline in revenue were essentially a Verizon song-and-dance that's at odds with the facts.

The Wall Street Journal reported recently that Verizon "isn't under any financial stress."

FedEx wins a round with the Teamsters

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters this months withdrew a petition for an election at a FedEx facility in Brockton, Mass.

The union has been eyeing Memphis-based FedEx for some time and saw the Brockton ground facility as a place with potential for success. Earlier this month, however, union leaders decided they would wait and fight another day.

Professors unite in Florida

Faced with a governor every bit as anti-union as Wisconsin's Scott Walker, teachers in Florida's higher education system have wasted no time organizing.

According to Labor Notes, unionized faculty members at the University of Florida have seen their numbers rise from just 20 percent density last year to more than 40 percent today. At the state's unionized community colleges, union density has reached 70 percent and even higher. Florida State University professors are also organizing rapidly.

And among those fighting the good fight for laid-off faculty is the United Faculty of Florida organization.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott and other Republicans have pushed legislation to ease the decertification of public employee unions as well as make voting for the general population more difficult.

Unions remain strong on the Gulf Coast

On Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, Jim Couch, business manager of the 1,800-member International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 733, says organized labor remains strong despite layoffs, Northrop Grumman’s spinoff into a much leaner Huntington Ingalls Industries, and the U.S. Navy’s planned trimming of its fleet from 600 to just over 300 ships.

“We’re holding our own,” Couch says. “Even though we have a new company, we all know each other. We have a very cordial relationship. We do sit down and talk to each other, and we agree to disagree at times.”

The IBEW is just one of several unions that together represent more than 75 percent of the company’s 9,000-member workforce on the Gulf Coast. These include electricians, carpenters, boilermakers, and other skilled craft trades. In 2007, thousands of Northrop Grumman workers went on strike for better wages and benefits, and a contract was eventually approved.

CNN's August 14 Blair Mountain documentary: Where's the passion? Where's the justice?

(To the right is a photograph from the Battle for Blair between miners and coal operators' private militia in 1921)

H.L. Mencken, the “sage of Baltimore” and old-school curmudgeon of journalism, once had this to say about journalistic objectivity: “I’ve been a reporter for many years, and I can tell you that no reporter worth a hoot ever wrote a purely objective story.”

As a professor of journalism ethics, I talk a lot about objectivity, how it means different things to different people, and how some notions of it typically give the ultimate word to the powerful or at best short-change the side of justice because “objectivity” means both sides get equal billing in the story--whether they’re equal or not.

That’s what happened in the early days of the civil rights movement. Racist sheriffs in the Deep South complaining about “outside agitators” got equal say with local blacks who were “sick and tired of being sick and tired” of a system that kept them at the bottom.

Where’s this leading? To this past Sunday evening, August 14, and CNN anchor and special correspondent Soledad O’Brien’s Battle for Blair Mountain: Working in America, a documentary that attempts to tell the story of the battle between neighbor and neighbor in Sharples, W. Va., over whether the Arch Coal and (unnamed in the documentary) Massey Energy coal companies should destroy nearby Blair Mountain in search of coal and profits.

“It’s us against the world,” coal company supporter Linda Dials tells O’Brien. Her husband, James, a modern-day “coal miner” who essentially tries to rebuild the mountains his employer destroys, puts it this way: “I’ve got to work. That’s the bottom line.”

O’Brien, paying homage to CNN’s notion of journalistic objectivity, threads a treacherous path through “both sides” of a complex, emotion-laden story. The Dials represent one side, and they get the first word and the last word.

They want the government to allow the coal companies to remove the mountaintop to get to the coal that lies underneath. Mountaintop removal is, as O’Brien says, a very efficient way of coal mining. Blast away, and there’s the coal! It only takes 25 workers to do what 80 workers would do in underground mining, an option the companies now feel is too expensive.

Arch Coal declined an interview with O’Brien. Officials at notorious safety-standard violator Massey Energy (which began calling itself Alpha Natural Resources after 29 miners at its Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia were killed in an explosion in April 2010), it would seem, were never asked for an interview. Both companies applied for as many as six permits to blow the mountain up.

James Dial earns $65,000 a year (nearly twice what local school teachers earn) doing “reclamations” on destroyed mountains—that is, taking his bulldozer and crew and trying to rebuild a mountain with the refuse of rock and sand mountaintop removal leaves. He’s a trained carpenter, but that line of work doesn’t pay $65,000 a year in rural West Virginia. He and his wife lead the effort to let the companies have their way.

On the other side of the equation are folks like: Jimmy Weekley, whose house is close to Blair Mountain; Billy Smutko, who worries about “what do you get” 30 years from now after all the mountains are destroyed, and along with them streams and other water sources; and Chuck Keeney, whose great-grandfather was one of the 10,000 coal miners who went on strike on Blair Mountain in 1921 to fight coal company tyranny and be able to join the United Mine Workers. That bloody battle was one of the key events in labor history in this country, and Keeney and others would like to preserve Blair Mountain for that reason as well.

O’Brien does an admirable job bringing together scientists, government officials, and activists who tell how destructive mountaintop removal is in Appalachia. It creates an environmental disaster, they say. This is where she frames the story: environment versus jobs, tree huggers versus blue-collar workers.

Yet the truth is that mountaintop removal destroys more than the environment. It destroys communities as well as jobs. In fact, the best quote in O’Brien’s documentary comes from Billy Smutko: “When mountaintop removal started, that’s when the community started disappearing.”

The New York Times and other media outlets have written about the destruction that mountaintop removal leaves. This is how the Times put it in its headline to an article on the issue this April: “As mountaintops fall to mining, towns disappear and people scatter.”

The Dials don’t see it that way. James Dial wants to keep his $65,000-a-year job. Nothing wrong with that, until a journalist puts that perspective on an equal level with a mountain of evidence and the perspective of nearly everyone else who has any real insight into what mountaintop removal ultimately means.

As is often the case with so-called “objective” stories, the real issue lies beyond the two sides presented. Where is there real scrutiny of the coal companies and their practices? Their involvement in the communities? Their past records? They hand O’Brien a press release and take a powder. Where is there a real look into the history of this area, the epic, century-old struggle of miners for social justice?

What comes to mind is TV journalist/celebrity Diane Sawyer’s prize-winning A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains broadcast on ABC in February 2009, the culmination of a two-year project by Kentucky native Sawyer about Appalachian poverty that said practically nothing about the role of industry in that poverty but tons about corporate media’s lack of zeal for real muckraking journalism.

Where is the passion that drove George Stoney, Judith Helfand, and Susanne Rostock in their riveting documentary about the Depression-era cotton mill strikes, The Uprising of ’34? Where is the passion that makes Alexandra Lescaze’s 2003 documentary about textile workers in North Carolina, Where Do You Stand?, fill the viewing room with righteous indignation against greed and injustice?

The facts in O’Brien’s story do indicate where justice truly lies, and, to her credit, she did a lot of legwork to gather and present those facts. However, the context is deeper and broader than what is presented in Battle for Blair Mountain: Working in America.

Ol' H.L. Mencken was a conservative (in many ways) Germanophile who probably would argue with me into the wee hours on most issues in politics. However, I have a feeling he would say this to Soledad O’Brien: “You were there. What did you see? What did it tell you? Did it make you angry? You got the facts. Did they tell a story, a story the people need to hear, a story of passion and tragedy? A story that might make a difference? Tell that story, and tell it with passion, dammit!”

Delta's role in the FAA shutdown, IKEA's Virginia workers vote union, and the Southern heart of the Tea Party Movement

Here's the latest Labor South round-up, and once again much of it shows the South's profound influence on national politics today--whether it's Atlanta-based Delta Airlines conspiring with House Republicans in the shutdown of the FAA, or the Southern domination of the Tea Party movement.

FAA gets temporary retrieve but labor union issue remains

President Obama signed a bill Friday ending the partial shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration, but the central issue that made House Republicans willing to render 4,000 agency employees and thousands of airport construction project workers jobless--labor union rules--remains unresolved.

"The House Republicans freely admit that this is simply an effort to leverage one issue to hijack the legislative process and gain the upper hand on negotiating an anti-labor provision," U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., of the Senate Commerce Committee said on the Senate floor last week.

Indeed, the ongoing assault on both public and private labor unions waged by Republicans across the country continues, and it was at the heart of the two-week FAA shutdown, which cost the deficit-strapped federal government $350 million in revenues as a result of uncollected taxes on airline tickets. Congress went on vacation without authorizing the FAA.

Although some Republicans claimed the main issue was their opposition to the funding of rural air service that was included in the FAA budget, their desire to destroy unions was the primary mission.

At issue was a National Mediation Board ruling that non-votes will no longer count as "no" votes in union elections in the airline industry. As in practically every other kind of election, only those votes cast in a union election will now count as either "yes" or "no". The NMB oversees the airline industry.

Backing the Republicans in their anti-union mission is Delta Airlines, which actually benefited from the shutdown by pocketing the portion of ticket prices that would have gone to the federal government as taxes. Delta CEO Richard Anderson, whose salary is $9 million, has strongly criticized the NMB ruling.

Rockefeller specifically pointed to Delta as a culprit in the shutdown. "I wish I understood why the policy objections of one company--Delta Airlines--mattered more than the livelihood of thousands of people," the senator said.

The authorization signed by Obama Friday leaves the issue unresolved but one that Congress will have to face when its five-week vacation comes to an end.

Ikea workers vote union

In a 221-69 vote in late July, workers at Ikea's Danville, Va. plant chose the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers to represent them in future contract negotiations with the Swedish furniture maker.

The vote came after a tough campaign that included the company's hiring of the union-busting Jackson Lewis law firm. The workers' issues included "stretch-out"-like conditions at the work site, required overtime, eliminated raises, and low pay.

The campaign was marked by irony. Ikea had long enjoyed a stellar reputation as a good corporate friend to its workers in Europe, and it had cooperated with unions there. Its European workers also enjoyed wages that started at $19 an hour, compared to the $8 an hour its beginning Virginia workers earned.

The Southern heart of the Tea Party movement

Salon.com writer Michael Lind's August 2 and linked here story on the Tea Party movement exposes the Southern extremists who are its base.

"It should be called the Fort Sumter movement," Lind writes. "Today's Tea Party movement is merely the latest of a series of attacks on American democracy by the white Southern minority, which for more than two centuries has not hesitated to paralyze, sabotage or, in the case of the Civil War, destroy American democracy in order to get their way."

Despite the movement's Boston-evoking name and the media's association of it with the Midwest, the Tea Party is at its core the white Southern conservative elite, Lind writes, and he notes that the four states with the most Tea Party representatives in the U.S. House are: Texas, Florida, Louisiana, and Georgia.

"The fact that Tea Party conservatism speaks with a pronounced Southern drawl may have escaped the attention of the mainstream media, but it is obvious to members of Congress who have to try to work with these disproportionately-Southern fanatics," Lind writes.

So much for the much-ballyhooed New South. As the author of this blog has written before, today's South in some key ways isn't really so new after all, certainly when it comes to who rules and who serves.

Hope in Mississippi: Labor activists fighting the odds in a state that's the model for national GOP

(To the left is Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance Executive Director Bill Chandler in his Jackson, Miss., office. He was first sent to Mississippi by United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez in 1971)

JACKSON, Miss. - A hardened, intransigent rightwing has taken over the Republican Party and proved its willingness to take the nation to the economic brink to protect its well-heeled financial backers. Legislators have targeted government workers and immigrants as the source of their states’ economic ills. Meanwhile, all three branches of the federal government pay homage to the nation’s true power: Wall Street.

So why are worker activists in the nation’s most conservative state—veterans like Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance Executive Director Bill Chandler, United Food & Commercial Workers organizer Rose Turner, and Mississippi Association of Educators President Kevin Gilbert--optimistic about the future?

They live in a state where “right-to-work” is embedded in the state constitution, where teachers cannot legally strike or even engage in collective bargaining, where, in other words, the nation as a whole seems to be heading.

“There’s a sense of people coming together,” says Chandler, a veteran of labor wars going back to the 1960s. “It’s reminiscent of the ‘20s and ‘30s, when people were excited about the sense of unity, but this is more divergent and bigger.”

“You can take one of two philosophies and look at it as an obstacle,” Gilbert says. “We look at it as an opportunity. We could say, `Oh, woe is me,’ but we look at it and say, `What can we do?’”

Turner, a veteran of the historic and successful 1990 strike by catfish workers in the Mississippi Delta, puts it this way: “We are just clucking along like little chickens, hoping everything turns out all right.”

(To the right is labor activist Rose Turner)

It’s hard to see the reasons for any optimism from the national headlines.

The power of money in today’s politics cannot be overestimated. Billionaires Charles and David Koch, the corporate-backed, money-doling group known as ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), and their lobbyist friends such as former U.S. Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi have now become the fulcrum for what gets debated and what gets done—whether in Washington or in the state capitols.

Bolstered by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that opened the floodgate to corporate funding of political campaigns, these financiers are why the same white-collared Wall Street thugs who nearly destroyed the economy in 2008 are still holding the true reins of power. They’re also the brains behind the so-called Tea Party Movement, which despite the faux populist rhetoric about “big government” by its frontline soldiers is really only about one thing: the complete corporatization of American society.

The trick is many of those frontline soldiers don’t know this. Years of ingesting Fox News propaganda has made them really believe that it’s all about getting back to America’s roots. What are they going to do when they find out the truth?

And herein lies one of the sources of the activists’ optimism.

For most Tea Party soldiers, immigration is nearly as crucial an issue as big government.
They helped push nearly 1,400 legislative bills and resolutions in the first half of 2010 targeting immigration policy and undocumented workers.

However, many in the GOP establishment don’t want immigration reform. They actually like the status quo. Why? The status quo supplies an endless source of cheap labor to industry. Undocumented workers get the least pay and benefits, have trouble organizing, and can always be replaced if they complain. In other words, they’re the perfect employees!

Thus a major split within the Republican Party regarding immigration looms on the horizon. Just wait and see.

Another source of optimism is this: Most young people don’t buy the Tea Party rhetoric or the establishment GOP’s mantras to big business.

Chandler, who worked with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in the 1960s and 1970s, first came to Mississippi to help with civil rights leader Charles Evers’ unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign in 1971. “There was nothing for the youth” in the state to encourage political activism or even awareness, he says.

“Look at the 2008 election, a majority of the under-25 age group (in Mississippi), 52 percent, voted for (President) Obama. That’s very interesting. That shows more of an awareness among the youth of another world. I think that presents an opportunity.”

Here in Mississippi, named the nation’s most conservative state in a 2011 Gallup Poll, the opportunity Chandler sees is compounded by changing demographics. More than one-third of the population is African American, a number likely to grow given recent statistics showing more African Americans leaving the North and returning to their Southern roots. Add to them other minorities such as the greatly increasing Latino population---from 10,000 in 1990 to an estimated 150,000 today. Many may be undocumented now, but they are here and are likely to stay. So are their children.

If just a quarter of the state’s struggling working-class whites were ever to realize that their best political alliance is with blacks and Latinos, not billionaires on Wall Street, Mississippi would undergo a revolutionary change.

Chandler’s MIRA organization, however, isn’t waiting for the revolution. MIRA has already earned national kudos for the alliances it has forged with the 50-member-plus state Legislative Black Caucus and with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and thus far it has been able to keep an Arizona-like bill from passing the state Legislature. In fact, it has been key to passage of six pro-immigrant bills in the Legislature, including provisions for court interpreter services and in-state tuition for college students.

The UFCW’s Turner is as battle-savvy as any organizer in the state. She helped rally hundreds of workers at the Delta Pride catfish plants in the perennially poor Mississippi Delta in the summer of 2010 when they threatened to strike rather than accept a contract offer that would have returned them in many ways to the same conditions that forced them to strike in 1990. The company relented, and a fairer contract was negotiated.

Turner is busy now with an organizing campaign at a re-opened 150-worker poultry plant in Water Valley, Miss., that was union-represented before it shut down in 2003. “In two weeks we had over 75 cards signed,” she says. “I feel good about it. Most of the people worked there before. They see the difference between having a contract and not having a contract, in working in a union plant and in a non-union plant.”

MAE President Gilbert says education activists in other states like Wisconsin and Ohio have contacted his office in recent months to ask about strategies for dealing with a powerful and intransigent political-business alliance totally hostile to unions, something Mississippians have dealt with since “right to work” legislation was adopted in 1954 and embedded in the state constitution in 1960.

“They are not used to this,” says Gilbert, whose organization represents 8,000 teachers and other school workers across the state. “They are used to having payroll deductions for union fees, collective bargaining. … Sometimes it’s hard to make lemonade out of lemons, but we try. The more people we have, the more talent and ability we have to be able to do the things we want to do.”

Although prohibited from striking or collective bargaining, his organization lobbies legislators, trains teachers, provides them legal assistance and other benefits, and works with other organizations to make the state keep the commitment to education it made in the historic 1982 Education Reform Act.

Although under the radar of the mainstream press, change is taking place in many parts of the South, which legendary labor leader Sidney Hillman once called a “venture into unplowed fields” for union organizers. The Farm Labor Organizing Committee recently won a three-year battle to get tobacco giant Reynolds American to agree to meet with it and to survey the abuse of workers—most of them migrants--on tobacco farms across North Carolina, the state with the nation’s lowest union membership rate. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida has won similar battles and is now pressuring the grocery story chain Publix to do more to improve wages for tomato pickers.

If catfish plant and poultry workers, migrant workers and teachers--those at or near the bottom end of the supply chain in this modern-day economy--can score gains or at least hold their own against the formidable powers-that-be in Mississippi, then maybe some optimism about the future is justified—and not only here.

Let's keep the history of working people from being erased

(To the right is the monument at Haymarket Square in Chicago with labor historian Jeffrey Helgeson talking of its history)

As a young boy growing up in Sanford, N.C., I recall often standing in awe in front of the giant Depression-era mural that dominated one of the walls in the city's post office. The larger-than-life people and warm, dramatic colors made an impression on me, and I somehow felt connected to it. Isn't that what good art does?

Lucky for me Paul LePage wasn't mayor of my town at that time. Likely he would have blasted the mural as an example of New Deal socialism and ordered it to be removed.

The people of Maine aren't so lucky, however. LePage is their governor, and he's apparently a typical modern-day Republican who sees anything that even hints at challenging his own religion of Darwinistic capitalism as smacking of socialism and communism.

That's why he ordered an 11-panel mural by artist Judy Taylor depicting the history of Maine's working people taken down from the lobby of the Maine Labor Department. Depictions in the mural included cobblers, textile workers, labor strikes, and, horror of horrors, 1930s-era U.S. Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, one of FDR's closest aides and a comrade-in-arms on worker issues.

A legal battle is still underway to restore the mural to its rightful place, but the nation's judiciary is hardly a refuge these days of pro-worker sentiment.

The irony is LePage, who (according to the Associated Press) never even saw the mural in person, brings to mind what Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin would do when officials, even close aides, fell out of favor. They simply disappeared from the history books and even from official photographs. They were erased as if they had never existed. Of course, Stalin often took it further, relocating them to Siberia, or worse.

A similar battle is now being waged in West Virginia, where activists are fighting to save Blair Mountain--site of a historic nine-day strike by 10,000 coal miners in 1921 who wanted to join the United Mine Workers. Massey Energy, owner of the mine where 29 miners died in an explosion in April 2010, and Arch Coal want to remove the mountain top--in other words, destroy the mountain--so they can search for coal.

These actions by LePage and the mining companies are simply the latest chapter in the attempted rewriting (or erasing) of history that conservatives commissioned long ago. It leaves us a history with many blank pages. You can see it by the dearth of statues in the United States honoring true American worker heroes, people like Mary "Mother" Jones, Ella May Wiggins, Mary Heaton Vorse, Jock Yablonsky, and Walter Reuther.

Travel across this nation and tour the handful of landmark sites in its labor history. The battles to erect monuments were often as fierce as the events that inspired them.

I've just returned from the Working Class Studies Association Conference in Chicago, where participants were given a tour of that great city's labor sites. One of the most important such sites in the nation is Haymarket Square, where in 1886 workers demonstrated for the eight-hour day and were met with a huge show of force from local police. Someone tossed a bomb, killing one and injuring dozens, and prompted a battle that left nearly a dozen people dead, seven of them policemen. Eight anarchists were tried for the incident, and four were executed, none of them as a result of "a shred of evidence," according to historian Thomas R. Brooks.

A monument finally exists on the Haymarket Square site today, but it came after many, many battles that included an earlier monument to the police at the site that was dynamited allegedly by the radical Weather Underground group in 1969. Even today it's a monument that causes much dispute and disagreement.

Another important labor site is the Ludlow Monument in Ludlow, Colo., commemorating the massacre there during a major strike at the Rockefeller-controlled Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in 1914. As many as 19 died, including eleven children and two women but only one of the militiamen who'd descended en masse on the workers with rifles, machine guns, bombs, and coal oil (which they poured onto the striking workers' makeshift tents and set on fire).

The monument was erected in 1918, defaced by unknown parties in 2003, and repaired and unveiled again in 2005.

Several years ago, I traveled back to my native North Carolina to do research for my book Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press. One of my stops was in Gastonia, N.C., at what I believed to have been the old Loray Mill, an abandoned, five-story, red-brick shuttered building when I saw it in 2003, but in 1929 it was the site of one of the most dramatic textile strikes in Southern history.

It was near here that minstrel Ella May Wiggins met her death at the hands of anti-labor goons, her last words being "Oh, Lord-a-mercy, they done shot and killed me." She was a 29-year-old mother of five who would serenade the workers during their strike against the grueling "stretch-out" (in which production requirements for workers were doubled, tripled and even quadrupled) on the factory floor and huge cuts in their wages.

I took lots of pictures on my old, now-discarded Olympus camera, but I'm still not absolutely sure it actually was the Loray Mill. I asked folks in the neighborhood, and no one knew.

That's what happens when history is discarded. People forget. Yet, I wonder if ghosts haunt that old building at night, one of them maybe even Ella May Wiggins, looking for the justice they never found in life. Call me irrational, but I'm inclined to believe that sort of thing.

FLOC's latest victory against Reynolds American may justify organizer's optimism

(To the left is a picture of FLOC leader Baldemar Velasquez during an early march in the Reynolds American campaign)

Last summer Farm Labor Organizing Committee activist Diego Reyes Jr. told me he was hopeful about the future for migrant labor in North Carolina and elsewhere in the South despite all the odds. "I believe there is going to be a change," he said. "That's where change begins."

Reyes' faith in the future may be justified. FLOC scored another in a long line of victories for migrant workers in May when tobacco giant Reynolds American announced it would meet with FLOC and other groups in an effort to assess working conditions in the fields. The agreement was a milestone in a three-year effort by FLOC to get Reynolds to take action.

"We want Reynolds to understand ... they have the power and the money to influence the system," Reyes said. "We need Reynolds to understand they have a lot of responsibility."

FLOC officials said they plan to make sure the company lives up to its agreement to look for abuse in its supply chain and to work with FLOC and other groups. "While this is a vindication of the past three years of struggle, the campaign will continue until real progress is made," FLOC officials said in a statement.

Statistics from FLOC and the National Farm Worker Ministry indicate that 24 percent of tobacco pickers (traditionally known as primers in the world of tobacco) suffer from nicotine poisoning each season. Exposure to harmful pesticides and crowded, unsanitary living conditions in labor camps and remote, substandard trailers add to the woes of an estimated 100,000 immigrant tobacco workers in North Carolina.

"As workers, we have suffered a lot in the field," said Reyes' father, Diego Reyes Sr., a 46-year farm worker who travels each year from his home in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, to work on a farm near Sanford, N.C. (In this photo are Reyes Jr. on the left and Reyes Sr. on the right. They are sitting in the remote trailer that Reyes Sr. shares with five other Latino workers.)

During the past three years, Reynolds consistently refused to meet with FLOC officials, saying it wasn't responsible for what happened in the fields of its suppliers. "We cannot enter a bargaining agreement on the workers' behalf," a Reynolds Board of Directors statement said. "They are not our employees."

It's a view that's typical in the neoliberal model for the global economy followed by Reynolds American and other major corporations, and it echoes a tactic used during the era of U.S. and European colonialism: hiring subcontractors to supply workers and thus avoid responsibility for worker abuses. During the days of the East India Company in British-controlled India this was known as the sardari labor system, and while possibly effective in alleviating guilt feelings among absentee landlords in Britain it only worsened the lot of the dark-skinned workers on the plantations and in the mines of the colonies.

Last fall FLOC intensified its campaign against Reynolds American by launching a highly public divestment campaign against major Reynolds lender, JPMorgan Chase. The Wall Street firm is a leader in the consortium of lenders that funnels close to $500 million in credit to Reynolds American.

JPMorgan Chase itself has been fighting battles on several fronts in the wake of the 2008 Wall Street crash and the ongoing recession. Hundreds of activists, workers, and religious leaders have protested in more than 200 cities against the company's role in massive home foreclosures. According to the Wall Street Journal, JPMorgan Chase has nearly $20 billion worth of home loans in foreclosure.

In late April, FLOC was successful in getting the British American Tobacco company to agree to a meeting. BAT owns 42 percent of Reynolds American.

Founded and led by the charismatic Baldemar Velasquez, FLOC has scored a number of agreements with major firms, such as Campbell, Vlasic, Heinz and Deans Foods. Perhaps its largest and most significant victory came in 2004 with its agreement with North Carolina-based Mt. Olive Pickles, the largest labor agreement in the South.