MIRA fighting the good fight for immigrant workers in Mississippi ... and winning!

(Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance Executive Director and veteran labor organizer Bill Chandler)

Four years ago, noted labor writer David Bacon had this to say about the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance and its fight for immigrant workers in the nation’s most conservative state: “Blacks plus immigrants plus unions equals power.”

Yet again this past legislative session, MIRA helped worked another miracle, preventing an arch-conservative state Legislature from passing a draconian, Alabama-and-Arizona-style anti-immigration bill. Twice in this year’s session, Republican legislators tried to win approval of House Bill 488, the so-called “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act of 2012”, and both times they failed.

The proposed law’s provisions, its name antithetical to what it would do to Latino families and neighborhoods as well as law enforcement authorities, called for law enforcement authorities to arrest anyone suspected of being in the country illegally and to notify federal immigration officials of those arrests. Fines would be levied against any reluctant law enforcement agency.

“We all know that the immigration debate is far from over,” MIRA said in a statement to supporters after the legislative battle. “It’s a small victory in a larger battle for immigrants’ and workers’ rights. … Don’t let this success lull you into thinking that the mentality behind the bill is gone. We know it’s only a matter of time until the intent of the bill is revived.”

Indeed, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican elected last year with strong backing from the Mississippi Tea Party, has vowed to pursue the matter and may even call a special session of the state Legislature to take it up. Last year’s historic elections also brought Mississippi a Republican House as well as Republican Senate in the Legislature.

However, MIRA is a formidable foe that has helped defeat an estimated 220 such bills over the past decade, a time when other Southern states like Alabama and Georgia were enacting laws identical to the ones being rejected in Mississippi.

The secret to MIRA’s success thus far has been its work with the Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus, whose membership includes 31 of the House’s 122 members and 11 of the Senate’s 52 members. Each year MIRA holds a joint convention with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It also works with the NAACP and state labor leaders. MIRA Executive Director Bill Chandler is a veteran labor organizer who worked with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers during the historic strikes of the 1960s.

In this year’s battle, the failure of so-called “immigration reform” in Alabama also helped prevent such measures in Mississippi. The cost of Alabama’s anti-immigration law, the nation’s strictest, could be as much as $2.3 billion annually and up to 140,000 lost jobs, according to a University of Alabama study.

The 2010 Census estimated that Mississippi has about 90,000 Latinos—a number much too low, according to Chandler. The estimated number of undocumented workers is 45,000.

Those workers, however, fill many chicken plants and construction sites across the state, and the prospect of worker-less plants and constructions sites as well as overcrowded jails prompted an amazing coalition of business and law enforcement groups to stand alongside MIRA in opposing this year’s anti-immigrant effort. Those groups included: the state’s own chamber of commerce, called the Mississippi Economic Council; the powerful Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation, which has 200,000 member families; the Mississippi Association of Chiefs of Police; Mississippi Sheriff’s Association; Mississippi Association of (County) Supervisors; and the Mississippi Municipal League. Religious leaders also weighed in against the measure. These groups traveled across the state to tell legislators of their opposition.

Law enforcement officials particularly worried about overcrowded jails becoming even more overcrowded and filled with immigrant workers.

This is already a huge problem nationwide. Thanks to hard lobbying by the private prison industry and the federal Operation Streamline initiative, Latinos make up more than half of the inmates serving out felony convictions in federal prisons today even though Latinos only represent 16 percent of the nation’s population. The Texas Observer reports that Operation Streamline has pumped $1.2 billion into the private prison industry and cost taxpayers an additional $320 million just to fund the program.

This comes at a time in which immigration across U.S. borders is actually on the decline. The number of undocumented workers in the nation went from 12 million in the pre-recession days of 2007 to 11.2 million by 2010.

Immigrant groups like MIRA are striking back. In Florida, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is continuing its pressure on the Publix grocery store chain to pay one penny more per pound of tomatoes, money that then goes to raise the wages of the state’s largely immigrant tomato-picking workforce.

Thanks to Depression-era Southern members of Congress, federal labor law excludes farmworkers, making the job of CIW and other groups that much more difficult to win rights for migrant workers. However, CIW has been successful in getting 10 major food corporations to agree to the penny increase, which CIW estimates has put an additional $4 million in workers’ checks since January 2011.

In Alabama, religious and labor groups continue to fight that state’s disastrous anti-immigration law, and they have made their fight global by going to Daimler officials in Germany and Hyundai officials in South Korea to get their support. Both auto companies have plants in Alabama.

MIRA's Chandler told me Friday evening that indeed the battle is far from over in Mississippi. The anti-immigrant forces in the state are determined. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach--one of the authors of Arizona's anti-immigrant law--even came to Mississippi to rally support. It wasn't enough to turn the tide in their favor, but still it's too early for MIRA to pop champagne, Chandler said.

Nevertheless, Chandler admitted, some fellow activists brought champagne over anyway "and they popped it."

Immigration, targeted state workers, workers' comp, and student loan debt on tap at Labor South. Meanwhile, a swan song at one newspaper

Greetings, Labor South readers, and sorry for the pause since last posting. Lots going on, of course, on the Labor South front.

In the works is another look at the immigration situation across the South with Tea Party-inspired legislation confronting business-unfriendly realities such as worker-empty fields and construction sites. This is a clash long predicted in this blog and now playing out within the Republican Party. A fascinating part of this story is the fact that the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance continues to work miracles with the help of the Black Legislative Caucus to forestall or kill Alabama-style anti-immigrant legislation in the state.

However, on other fronts here in Mississippi--traditionally the South Exaggerated--the new Republican leadership continues its assault on workers' compensation and now, Wisconsin-style, state workers. Another issue Labor South is pursuing is the ongoing college student loan debt crisis that threatens to worsen as states cut higher education budgets and universities hike tuition rates.

Meanwhile, this writer has made a big change in deciding to discontinue his nearly 30-year-old column in Mississippi's largest newspaper, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, an act prompted by the latest round of early retirement buyouts at the Gannett-owned newspaper that claimed two of its most senior editors, both personal friends: David Hampton and Jim Ewing. I'll continue writing and publishing, of course, here at Labor South and in different venues. More on that later.

On that note, however, I thought I'd share with you my farewell column for the Clarion-Ledger, which is scheduled to run this Sunday (April 15). In this blog, I've never provided a great deal of detail on my 36 years as a working journalist. Maybe some of you might find interesting the column's history and some of the reaction it has received over the years.

Remember: I'll be posting again soon on this blog and writing plenty of columns and articles elsewhere, but here below is my swan song at the Clarion-Ledger:

...

An old IWW Wobbly tune often comes to mind when I get a nasty letter from an irate reader taking exception to something I wrote in a column.

“You ain’t done nothing if you ain’t been called a Red” goes the song, and certainly I’ve been called a “Red” and worse many times. Maybe the worst ever was this: “Do you ever consider the possibility that you are a f _____ moron? Not just disingenuous and hypocritical but cognitively impaired?”

After considering that possibility, I decided the letter writer might himself be “cognitively impaired” so maybe some empathy was in order.

I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting lately about the column because this is the last regular one that I’ll write in these pages, ending a nearly three-decade run since my first one way back in the early 1980s on the Shoccoe dam project. The pending departure of old friends and colleagues like David Hampton and Jim Ewing from the Clarion-Ledger signaled to me that perhaps I, too, should pack my pen and paper and move on. I’ll keep writing. It just won’t be here.

This will be welcome news to letter writers like the fellow quoted above. Lordy, some of them have been nasty. One writer described a column I wrote back in 1994 as “the most ridiculous, irresponsible and leftist I have ever read since I arrived in Mississippi.” Fast forward to 2010 and this is what another reader said: “What a crock of s#&%#. Just as I thought a ray of sanity had made it through the left-wing pinko fog of your Goofy, child-like dream world, you come back with this garbage.”

Then the writer added this: “Are you trying for the Bill Minor Most Disliked Person in the State Award … ?” (Note: I’ve patched up some of the punctuation.)

That’s where the writer messed up. Comparing me to Bill Minor was the best compliment he could have ever paid me. Minor is a hero of mine and, in my book, the greatest Mississippi journalist ever.

Of course, not all the letter writers wish me God’s speed to Hades. One just recently had this to say: “You are truly a friend to the decent working folks of Mississippi.” That meant a lot. So did the card my good friends Sandy and Alice Margolis once sent me to mark the Jewish New Year. On it they wrote, “We believe you have a Jewish heart because you believe in justice and truth and honor.”

What a blast being a journalist and a columnist is. For me, it has meant having a platform to pursue worthy stories that are ignored or overlooked by much of the mainstream press. Here in Mississippi those stories include the ongoing saga of workers’ compensation and the assaults against it, the plight of workers at catfish plants in the Delta, the struggle of working people anywhere to have a voice and sayso in their lives.

As a veteran political reporter, I realized years ago the old red-button issue of civil rights rarely raised a fuss among readers any more. The minute I started talking about labor unions, however, it was, Katy, bar the door! Like the late, great state AFL-CIO president Claude Ramsay once told civil rights leader Aaron Henry, “These people are going to make peace with you before they make peace with me. All you want is a seat at the table, but I want some of their money.”

A column doesn’t always have to be about politics or, even for me, labor unions. Mine has been a ticket into the lives of an unbelievably interesting assortment of people. There was traveling Pentecostal evangelist John Meador and Catholic mystic and healer Father Clarence Waguespack of Vacherie, La. I’ll never forget farmer-philosopher Aron Self, who preferred to plow with horses and mules rather than tractors. Nor will I Mamie Stitt and the other semi-pro baseball fans rooting for their hometown Verona (Miss.) Black Sox.

Bartender Clyde Goolsby, bluesman Terry "Harmonica" Bean, and shadowy civil rights-era figure Buford Posey were among the many who opened their doors to me. Places also were great subjects, whether it was Lusco’s restaurant in Greenwood (Miss.), Red Square in Moscow, a beer garden in Munich, or Durty Nelly’s, a 350-year-old tavern in County Clare, Ireland.

Maybe the column that stands out the most is the one I wrote about my first wife Marilyn and her death from cancer in 1994. I described how we met in North Carolina and how she so fascinated me with her tales of Mississippi that we eventually moved here. That column brought me dozens and dozens of letters from across the state.

And you know what? Every single one of them was full of support and well wishes. I’ll never forget it. I saved every letter.

From China to Spain to Mississippi, it's "a fight from the cradle to the grave."

(To the right is Woody Guthrie in a 1943 photograph)

The great balladeer Woody Guthrie pretty much hit the nail on the head in a letter he wrote to Folkways Records chief Moe Asch in 1946:

“I have always said in my songs and ballads that this old world is a fight from the cradle to the grave. … I believe that the real folk history of this country finds its center and its hub in the fight of the union members against the hired gun thugs of the big owners.”

Guthrie, whose 100th birthday will be celebrated in July, was recently redeemed and forgiven by his home state of Oklahoma--after decades of exile--for his pro-worker views. The public in Tulsa now get to see the archives of the composer of “This Land is Your Land” as a result of actions by the Guthrie family and the purchase of the archives by the George Kaiser Family Foundation.

In this round-up of labor activity in the U.S. South and in the Global South, a round-up that shows how both are indeed interlocked and share the same issues and challenges, the truth of Guthrie’s words is validated.

A long-awaited report from the Washington-based Fair Labor Association this week eliminated any doubt about the poor working conditions of the Chinese workers who help produce those iPads and iPhones we enjoy so much, exposing the ugly truth hidden under all the hagiography given the late Apple CEO Steven Jobs.

Those conditions include 60-to-70-hour work weeks at minimal pay, conditions that have led to a number of suicides and which the Apple corporation and its partner in China, Foxconn, say they’re going to remedy. Let’s see if they do. Foxconn has a 1.2 million workforce.

Elsewhere in Asia, working-class folks are being encouraged to stand up for their rights. Political and religious leaders in the Philippines recently urged Filipinos to finish their three-decade-old revolution against tyranny by ridding the country of the corruption left in ousted ruler Ferdinand Marcos’ wake. This comes at the same time of the 35th anniversary of the death of Larry Itliong, the Filipino immigrant who helped Cesar Chavez launch the farm workers movement and the United Farm Workers in the United States in the 1960s.

These events remind me of the Filipino activist workers I encountered during my trip last year to Taiwan, an inspiration to me.

“If you are a caregiver, you work very long hours,” Nelva Baldon, a 32-year-old caregiver and activist from the city of Iloilo in the Philippines, told me in Taipei. “The government needs to do more. We don’t have the laws protecting us. If we are sick, we have nothing. … The employers treat us like slaves. We understand we are workers, and we have to work, but they treat us like slaves.”

“We need a little confrontation sometimes,” agreed fellow caregiver Sheila Z. Mayanoia, 39, also from Iloilo.

Filipino workers like Baldon and Mayanoia are at the forefront of the cause for workers’ rights in Taiwan, said Sister Eulalia P. Loreto of the Migrant Workers’ Concern Desk at St. Christopher Catholic Church in Taipei. “Filipinos think they have to be heard. They are vocal, and they insist on their rights.”

Another interesting and related development is growing interest in the novel, For The Win, by Canadian writer and blogger-activist Cory Doctorow. The novel, discussed in a recently aired National Public Radio report, depicts a “virtual” uprising by young people in China, India and California against their government and corporate bosses, an uprising that may be “virtual” but with broad implications for real-life worker rights.

Certainly a real-life uprising is taking place in Spain, where millions of working-class people have taken to the streets to protest European Union-mandated austerity measures and the anti-labor policies of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. In a nation where 25 percent of workers and close to 50 percent of young people have no jobs, workers filled the Puerta del Sol Plaza in Madrid and other locations across the nation this week, waving red union banners, stalling public transportation, shutting down schools and factories, and demanding political accountability as to why leaders see “austerity” as the only solution for Spain and Europe’s economic woes.

Here closer to home, Mississippi legislators, now dominated by conservative Republicans, found themselves facing growing opposition to proposed draconian Alabama-style anti-immigrant legislation after business interests complained about the potential loss of cheap workers and law enforcement officials complained about the impact on their jails. That didn’t keep state House members, however, from reversing an earlier vote on workers’ compensation and approving a bill that, among other things, does the following:

- Requires employees to provide employers with medical proof that an injury or illness is directly job-related.

- Allows employers to test employees for alcohol and drugs whenever an injury on the job takes place.

Jackson, Miss., labor attorney Roger K. Doolittle said the bill is a direct and blatant attack on workers’ compensation and workers. Ironically it comes after a recent non-partisan state government study that showed that workers already get the raw end of the deal as a result of rulings and actions by the existing Mississippi Workers’ Compensation Commission.

Like Woody said so long ago, it’s “a fight from the cradle to the grave.”

Two preservers of Southern folklore celebrated for making the world know of the poor South's many riches

(Alan Lomax at a festival in Asheville, N.C. Library of Congress)

In a 1987 interview, folklorist Alan Lomax told me this great story about meeting Depression-era bluesman Robert Johnson’s mother. Lomax talked to her in her lowly shack in Sledge, Miss., and she described to him how her son got religion before he died in 1938.

Remember: this is the famous bluesman who, legend has it, sold his soul to the devil at the Delta crossroads of highways 61 and 49 in order to master his guitar. According to another legend, he died after a jealous lover (or her jealous husband) poisoned him on the night of a performance at a juke joint in Three Forks near Greenwood, Miss.

“When he was dyin’, they called me there,” she told Lomax. “When I walked in, my son was on his dyin’ bed. He said, `Mama, look on the wall, my guitar is hung up there. I’m givin’ up that devil’s instrument.’”

I thought about that story as I watched another legendary preserver of Southern folklore receive some well-deserved recognition this week. Photojournalist and music promoter Dick Waterman is featured in the cover story of the latest edition of the magazine Mississippi Observer, a product of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi. He also was honored during an event marking the magazine’s launching at the university’s Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics.

(Dick Waterman this week at the University of Mississippi's Overby Center)

A Massachusetts native and longtime Oxford, Miss., resident, Waterman helped launch the 1960s blues revival by tracking down long-forgotten masters like Son House and later managing and promoting House and other greats such as Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, Mississippi John Hurt, Mance Lipscomb, Junior Wells, and Buddy Guy. He also managed blues rockers like Bonnie Raitt.

Waterman, perhaps even better known for his photography of blues and rock musicians like Mick Jagger, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, and Willie Nelson, has always been a strong champion of musicians’ rights and worked hard to protect often-illiterate bluesmen from financial exploitation. “I don’t like bullies, male bullies, female bullies, financial or corporate bullies,” Waterman once told me. “I tried to be fair.”

The South may be forever the nation’s poorest region, but it is also arguably the nation’s richest in the music and art of its folk culture. A certain fragility always hovers around such culture. People become ashamed of its close association with poverty and rural backwardness. “Progress” always threatens, as does the nation’s corporate culture, which only values what is profitable.

Texas-born Lomax, who died in 2002, traveled the South and beyond in the 1930s and 1940s, discovering bluesman Muddy Waters on a Delta plantation and recording for the first time wandering troubadour Woody Guthrie. His amazing collection of thousands of hours of recordings and film and thousands of photographs and videotapes are now being made available online. In January, the label Global Jukebox released a collection of Lomax’s field recordings to honor what would have been his 97th birthday.

In my interview with Lomax, he told me about his historic discovery of McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, whom some consider the greatest of all blues musicians. Morganfield “was barefooted and he didn’t even own a guitar. I lent him mine.”

Lomax said this about his work. “The whole point was to give voice to the voiceless. This is the century of communication. We (whites) have monopolized the whole communication system. It is a much more severe kind of exploitation than economic exploitation. I have devoted my life to give equity to the situation.”

Dick Waterman has fought a similar battle. He battled lawyers and corporate heads to secure for bluesman Big Joe Williams a 27-year copyright renewal on his classic song Baby, Please Don’t Go. He didn’t want Williams to end up like other bluesmen who went empty-handed while others made millions on their music.

Waterman traveled 4,000 miles in his successful search for Son House, the singer and guitarist who had inspired Robert Johnson, bringing House out of obscurity and into national recognition while he was still alive and able to enjoy it.

In their own way, Lomax and Waterman are working-class heroes. They traveled across the South and knew that beyond its poverty was an unfathomable richness, and they devoted their lives to preserving it and protecting it.

Mississippi Democrat Leaders: We need to return to our populist roots

(William Jennings Bryan giving a speech on July 3, 1908)

Talk to most Mississippians down at the local coffee shop, and the first thing they’ll tell you is they’re conservative, says Mississippi Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley, and one of the last Democrats in the state still holding a regional or statewide office.

Talk to them 30 minutes, and they’ll tell you, “Wall Street is running over Main Street,” Presley says. “You’ll see a fire-breathing William Jennings Bryan populist.”

In a recent panel discussion at the University of Mississippi’s Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics, Presley and state Rep. Bobby Moak, a Bogue Chitto, Miss., Democrat and state House minority leader, talked about their party and its prospects in the new Republican-dominated Mississippi.

For Presley, the Democratic Party has to rediscover its populist roots.

“We’ve got to get Bubba back,” Presley said. “We’ve lost rural white folks. We’ve not been talking to them.”

(Bobby Moak and Brandon Presley at the recent Overby Center panel discussion. Photograph by Mykki Newton)

The party has to look beyond the racial divide that has helped cripple it in the past, a division exploited by the surging Republican Party, and re-connect with hard-working, often-struggling Mississippians, both black and white, who share core Democratic values. “It’s not right versus left. It’s top versus bottom,” Presley said. “Who is going to control the government? Those who can afford access?”

Democrats have to make sure “the lady wiping tables at the diner” has access, too.

Old-style populism created the position Presley holds. Despite the frequent racist rantings of many of them, progressive Southern politicians at the turn of the last century established commissions and agencies to protect the public by overseeing utilities, banks, railroads and insurance companies. They pumped needed money into public education, went after rogue companies taking advantage of consumers, championed small farmers and small businessmen.

In Washington, progressive Democrats like Franklin Deleanor Roosevelt pushed through legislation like the Glass-Steagall Act to rein in financial speculators and other greedy interests. Sixty years later, the party’s leader, Bill Clinton, applauded the repeal of Glass-Steagall as a milestone in “modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down those antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority.”

Clinton and the economically conservative, Southern-dominated Democratic Leadership Council steered the modern Democratic Party away from populism to its own version of corporatism, a party liberal on social issues like abortion but one as committed to Wall Street interests as the Republicans.

Of course, Democrats have always fought with one another over the soul of their party. They’re not like Republicans, who, as Moak says, “march in lockstep,” or as Presley says, “get a fax everyday on here’s what you should do.”

In the late 1800s, it was the challenge of the progressive Populist Party, the largest third party in the history of the nation, that forced Democrats to become the progressive party. In the one-party South, populist Democrats were at constant odds with the so-called “Bourbon” Democrats, or Redeemers, who, like modern-day Republicans, were inextricably linked to corporate interests and used methods like the poll tax to limit or even eliminate the franchise of poor whites as well as blacks.

With Republicans controlling both chambers of the Mississippi Legislature as well as the governor’s mansion today, the parade of bills coming up for debate is like one steady assault on people of limited access and limited means--“personhood” proposals aimed at overriding the statewide vote against such a measure, the establishment of charter schools despite underfunded existing public schools, Alabama-style anti-immigrant proposals, bills aimed at gutting workers’ compensation.

Tea-partyers and other right-wingers who mistakenly call themselves populists gain ground in places like rural Mississippi, ground ceded by Clintonites long ago, by talking religion and values. The gods they serve, however, have nothing to do with religion.

As writer Thomas Frank has observed, they “may talk Christ, but they walk corporate.” Anti-immigrant bills rarely effectively target the business owners who do the hiring. Charter schools are a Trojan horse aimed at privatizing the public school system. “Personhood” is smoke and mirrors, doomed to defeat in the first court willing to take it up.

In such a climate as today, Democrats in Mississippi have to know who they are and be willing to take a stand on what’s important, Presley said. “We get back the rural people by showing that we’re not wimps. We’ve got to show we’re not afraid to take on a fight.”

Super Tuesday, the Tea Party & the South: Preaching the gospel of raw capitalism and the evils of government

(An unknown Pentecostal preacher)

I’m a Catholic who grew up in the Pentecostal Holiness Church, and I’ll never forget the little Macedonian Pentecostal Church outside of Sanford, N.C., where my Uncle Eb preached. From the pulpit he reminded me of an Old Testament prophet with his eagle eyes, beak nose, and gravelly voice.

When my father, my brother and I were the only three in the congregation not to answer the call to come forward and pray at the altar one Sunday, Uncle Eb stared at us across the church and warned, “Remember, you’re not too young to go to hell.”

I loved those people even though Uncle Eb inspired some pretty scary visions of hellfire and damnation. They were hard-working farmers and textile workers, far from wealthy, many poor, some dirt poor, and their faith was the rock-ribbed center of their lives. They spoke in tongues, danced up and down the aisle, waved their hands in the air to feel the Holy Ghost about them. The preacher never talked about the wonders of wealth and capitalism although he gave Elvis Presley and his ilk a hard time occasionally.

It was certainly not the Pentecostal Church you’ve seen and come to know on television since the days of Jim and Tammy Bakker, a church that seems to revel in its wealth, that surrounds itself with the trappings of material goods, and whose leaders often equate a no-holds-barred capitalism with Christianity itself.

That’s the Pentecostal Church, along with other Protestant denominations and many Catholics, that has allied itself with the Tea Party movement and a hard-right Republican Party that wants to install corporate rule in this country. That’s why you’re hearing GOP presidential contender Rick Santorum (a Catholic) talking about breaking down the wall between church and state, resurrecting abortion, homosexuality, and even birth control as issues that should concern Americans even more than jobs.

As the March 6 “Super Tuesday” primaries approach and voters go to the polls in Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Oklahoma, and other states, bear in mind that Southerners dominate the Tea Party that is so central to Republican politics today. Purdue University history professor Darren Dochuk, in the New Labor Forum (Winter 2012 edition), says 39 of the 62 members in the congressional Tea Party Caucus are from the South, including 12 from Texas. Actually, he writes, they are part of a long-standing tradition of conservative evangelical leaders who’ve been aligning themselves against liberal Democrats since at least the New Deal.

In the 1940s, CIO organizer Lucy Randolph Mason, a Virginia aristocrat and committed Episcopalian who believed in the labor cause, often found herself face to face with the mill village minister, a man usually totally compromised by the financial support he got from the mill owner and one who thus considered labor unions minions from hell. She describes one of them, Preacher Jones, in her autobiography To Win These Rights: “The preacher dropped his bull-like head and hunching forward said to me: `You don’t believe in no kind of religion—you believe in a social religion and that ain’t Christianity … .’ I, too, leaned forward and asked earnestly, but politely: `Then you don’t believe in the teachings of Jesus? … His whole life … (was) all part of a great social religion.'”

In the modern South, Pentecostal, Methodist, and Baptist leaders are joined by first generation Southerners who came to Atlanta, Nashville, and the Research Triangle in North Carolina with their business and engineering degrees and pro-business ideas, set up shop, and laid the foundation for the rise of Sunbelt South politicians like Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush. For those politicians, the old bugaboo of communism that preachers used to fire congregations back in the 1940s was replaced by the bugaboo of government.

But, just as Preacher Jones was a tool of the mill owners to keep the workers pliant and passive, the religious right today is also merely a tool for the oil barons and Wall Street types who truly rule. In the 1950s and 1960s, Dochuk writes, oilmen H.L. Hunt and J. Howard Pew stayed busy “marshaling their fellow church folk in fights for right-to-work legislation and the deregulation of industry.”

From time immemorial, “the Southern oil business has been dominated by petro-patriarchs who have used their company profits to fund evangelical institutions that legitimate their business pursuits. The marriage has always been a natural one: in the freewheeling culture of Southwestern oil—where high-risk, high-reward wildcatting has romanticized the rags-to-riches man who demands to be left alone—evangelicalism has celebrated its own fierce, masculine individualism.”

Instead of Hunt and Pew, today we have the Koch brothers.

Make no mistake: MONEY is their one ultimate principle, their god, not religion, not the teachings of Jesus Christ. In the past they used fear of communism, socialism and civil rights on the bully pulpit to stir up the great unwashed. Today it’s government.

That’s why there’s something sickening when a right-wing Republican like U.S. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor gets a ton of positive publicity, as he recently did, for paying lip service to the civil rights movement. This week Cantor, joining with civil rights legend and Democratic House member John Lewis of Georgia, pushed through the Republican-dominated House a resolution to preserve the stories of members of Congress who participated in the movement.

Ah, the civil rights movement, so safely tucked away in the history books now. Let’s praise it and show how progressive we can be 40 years after the fact. And after we do, let’s get back to the business of the day and make sure those civil rights don’t interfere with the markets or with our corporate friends, the people we truly serve.

Creative organizing at Walmart, and another Southern pol brays about unions

Here's another short round-up from across the South, including a creative new approach to helping Walmart workers and the latest politician's braying in Magnolia Land

A new tactic with Walmart is working

A new strategy to push workers’ rights at the world’s largest retailer, Bentonville, Ark.-based Walmart, is utilizing what has been called “pre-New Deal unionism” and showing some real gains.

OUR Walmart and Warehouse Workers United (WWU), two initiatives backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), have organized public protests, informal meetings of workers, door-to-door membership recruiting campaigns, class-action suits against Walmart subcontractors, and strengthened contacts with workers along the retailer’s international supply chain.

According to writer Spencer Woodman in a compelling article in The Nation magazine’s January 23 edition, “thousands of employees in hundreds of Walmarts in more than thirty states” have joined OUR Walmart, a non-union, union-backed activist group seeking better wages and working conditions. WWU has also made inroads into the 100,000-plus warehouse workers at Walmart and its suppliers in getting them to stand up for their rights, whether as full time or “temp” workers.

Many of the groups’ biggest successes have been in California. However, a show of unity took place in Walmart’s own Bentonville headquarters last October. Walmart workers overcame their fears of retaliation to demand respect and better pay. They weren’t able to meet with Walmart CEO Mike Duke, like they wanted, but they made their voices heard.

“These worker associations bargain outside pre-established frameworks of negotiation, using any means legal to pressure management into recognizing their interests,” Woodman writes. It’s “an arrangement that closely resembles pre-New Deal unionism. With little institutional arbitration, this model can be seen as a rawer, more organic form of workplace struggle.”

The long, frustrating battle to organize union-hostile Walmart is well-known. However, the UFCW and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) have been pursuing different avenues for several years, particularly in establishing web sites to tell the truth about Walmart to the world. The UFCW’s Wake Up Walmart, which is now called Making Change at Walmart, and SEIU’s Walmart Watch helped force the company to try to clean up its image, taking on environmentally sensitive “green” projects and even endorsing President Obama’s healthcare plan.

Yet, as Woodman writes, Walmart’s new, spruced-up self emphatically did NOT include any changes in attitudes toward unions.

So the fight goes on. If true change does eventually come to the Bentonville company, the whole world will feel its effects.


And the anti-union braying in the South continues …

As reported in Facing South recently by Phil Mattera of Dirt Diggers Digest, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has been braying the usual anti-union diatribes we expect from Southern pols wedded to their corporate backers.

“We’ll make sure the unions understand full well that they are not needed, not wanted, and not welcome in the state of South Carolina,” Haley said recently in her State of the State address. “We love that we are one of the least unionized states in the country.”

Let’s hope workers in South Carolina will someday realize what she is actually saying—that they shouldn’t have the opportunity or perhaps even the right to join together and speak as one voice in trying to better their lot. When and if they do, Nikki Haley will be retired to that donkey (no party affiliation intended) farm where she belongs, where she can bray all day long to all the chickens and the pigs on the farm. My bet is even they’ll walk away with a shake of their heads and a plan for a much better way to spend their day.