Walmart and Hostess workers protest in the streets, remind President Obama of why he got re-elected

Not content to bask quietly in the afterglow of President Obama’s re-election victory, workers are taking to the streets in a grassroots effort to bring attention to the erosion of their rights that modern-day neo-liberal economics has promoted.

Today, “Black Friday” for shoppers across the land, workers at Walmarts around the country are staging a walkout against the low pay and benefits provided by the world’s largest retailer, an outfit that enjoyed a 9 percent hike in income for the third quarter.

Arkansas-based Walmart’s effort to get the National Labor Relations Board to issue an injunction against the Black Friday walkout failed as the board stated the matter was too complex to decide in the short time frame given it.

A group called OUR Walmart is organizing the protest with the support of the United Food and Commercial Workers, an issue in the company’s call for an injunction. No company has fought harder against unions than Walmart.

Meanwhile, Texas-based Hostess Brands Inc. is blaming its striking workers for the company’s request for bankruptcy protection. Hostess, which produces Twinkies, Wonder Bread and other popular brand-name snacks and foods, is shutting down 33 factories nationwide and adding 18,500 workers to the jobless ranks.

After negotiating contract agreements with the Teamsters union, company management tried to force major cuts in wages and benefits on its bakery workers, but the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Union agreed to strike rather than concede.

At the same time Hostess wanted its workers to swallow deep wage and benefits cuts, it also wanted to reward its executives with $1.75 million in bonuses.

“Wall Street vultures are blaming workers for getting rid of your sweets—and that’s just not right,” said AFL-CIO leader Richard Trumka in a statement. “The Wall Street hedge fund managers who run the company have squeezed every cent out of Hostess for eight years. And they’ve put their friends with no experience in the baking industry in high-level management positions.”

Critics say company leaders have failed to keep pace with a changing market, struggled with debt, and failed to invest in its operations or workforce. The Silver Point and Monarch hedge funds control more than half the company’s debt.

The situation at Hostess is typical for modern-day corporate practices. Wall Street types run the company into debt and into bankruptcy, blaming workers instead of their own greed and management incompetence.  Bankruptcy legalizes broken promises and helps clear the way for those at the top of the food chain to stuff their pockets before splitting.

This was the way of Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, and he would have further institutionalized such practices had he become president.

But Mitt Romney didn’t become president, and workers at Walmart, Hostess and other places we’ll read about tomorrow are out there on the streets reminding President Obama of why he got re-elected and that they’re not going to acquiesce to the old way of doing business any longer.

Nissan workers in Mississippi tell of fear and intimidation

(To the right is Nissan worker Pat Ruffin)

CANTON, Miss. - Pat Ruffin admits she’s scared.

But, the Nissan auto worker told a crowd of approximately 50 at the Holiday Inn Express recently, she’s also tired.

“I’m sick and tired of the videos about plant closings," she said. "That’s intimidation. That scares me. I have a family. I  have bills.”

Ruffin was one of eight employees at the giant Nissan plant in Canton to appear before the newly formed Mississippi Alliance for Fairness at Nissan to tell their stories about working at a plant where pro-union sympathies are strongly discouraged. A growing number of workers in recent months have called for an election to determine whether the United Auto Workers should represent them.

The plant employs roughly 3,300.

“Talking about a union, that is forbidden at Nissan,” Ruffin said. “They try to persuade you against unions. I want to hear both sides. I’m tired of Nissan’s side.”

Coworker Douglas Brooks agreed. “I come to work and I give my best, 100 percent. We are people with families and lives. If we live in America, let’s act like we live in America," he said. "Being from Mississippi doesn’t mean we’re all morons. There’s got to be something good about unions because they’re still around.”

Workers told a panel that included local ministers and officials such as state NAACP President Derrick Johnson that they face increasing pressure from company managers and officials to disavow any interest in joining the UAW. They are routinely called into one-on-one meetings and into group sessions where anti-union videos are shown. Some workers said their pro-union sympathies have put them under increased scrutiny from managers for any slight infraction that could lead to getting them fired.

“They probably got a picture of me up at HR (Nissan’s human resources office) with a big X across it,” openly pro-union Nissan employee Wayne Walker said. “A union troublemaker. … When you first come to this place they put the fear of a union in you. Keep you fearful. They’ll say, `You lucky to have a job.’ We want a union and a  contract.”

Nissan officials did not speak at the gathering. However,  Nissan spokesman Travis Parman said in an earlier interview that “our communications meetings with employees are not new. We continuously and routinely meet with our employees to openly discuss matters pertinent to our business.”


Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn has made no secret of his anti-union views and once strongly warned Nissan workers that a union “is not in your best interest” shortly before an election at the company’s plant in Smyrna, Tenn. Workers there rejected the union.

(Below is Isiac Jackson Jr.)

“We believe that as American citizens we have a right to free choice,” Alliance chair Isiac Jackson Jr. told the workers.  “God gave us a right to choose. We’re going to be out there walking the line for you.”
 
Jackson said the Alliance’s next goal is to gain entrance into the plant, where members can tell the other side of the union story.

Nissan worker James Brown said he believes Nissan workers in Canton would support a union if a fair election were held. “The key is to take fear and intimidation away. This is the key to having a fair election," he said. "So many of my co-workers say they want it but are afraid to come out publicly.”

Same Ol' Poor Ol' South On the Losing Side

Labor, civil rights, immigration and other social justice activists will gather in Charleston, S.C., December 7-9 to convene the 9^th bi-annual Southern Human Rights Organizers’ Conference and take what organizer Dane Strobino calls another step forward in “building a genuine Southern Workers Assembly and alliance.” 

The group was active at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, and the implications of the re-election of President Barack Obama is likely to be a major topic of discussion. They know they have their work cut for them in a region that largely was on the losing side in the presidential election, voting against Barack Obama's bid for a second term in office. Only Virginia and probably Florida went against the Southern grain.

In some key ways, the SHROC is building on the earlier work of groups such as Southern Conference for Human Welfare in the late 1930s and 1940s, an organization that championed working-class Southerners at the time when Franklin D. Roosevelt had declared the South as “the nation’s number one economic problem.” 

This is the region with the nation’s largest black population, a growing Latino population, one that used to be called the “Solid (Democratic) South” and that was a key component of Roosevelt’s election-winning coalition. You might think politics today would finally be more competitive down here. Why isn’t it?  

Here are a few reasons as seen by this Southern born-and-bred observer:  

The South is still pretty much a top-down place whose political, business, media and religious elite run things and who refuse to budge from a rock-ribbed allegiance to minimal government, a give-away-the-store attitude toward business, an image of Jesus that reflects very little of what’s taught in the Sermon on the Mount. Sadly, this is still a race-haunted South. Southerners, by the way, led in the number of ugly, racist responses to Obama’s victory on Twitter.  

What has been long clear in the Republican agenda is that the GOP would like to turn the nation into one large South—de-regulated and anti-union with the barest of services provided by government.  

If Republicans ever succeed in that goal, maybe the South will cease being the poorest region because every region will be poor.  

And the South is poor.  Let’s look at some statistics offered recently by Gene Nichol, law professor and director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina, in the Texas-based Progressive Populist .

Of the 12 poorest states in the nation, 10 are Southern. Mississippi’s shameful 23 percent poverty rate is at the very bottom. Louisiana, Arkansas, and Georgia aren’t far behind. The nation’s poverty rate is 15 percent. The South has more poor children than any other region. More than one-quarter of the children in nine Southern states are poor. Go South if you want to find people without health insurance. That’s where you’ll find more of them than in any other region. 

Was there another region where Obamacare was more cursed than in the South? Mississippi Republican Gov. Phil Bryant has said he opposes the expansion of Medicaid envisioned by Obamacare even though it would benefit more than 300,000 of the many needy in this poorest of all states and even add an estimated 9,000 new jobs. His is a typical attitude among Republican leaders in the South.

It’s a crying shame. After all the talk about the “New South” and the “Sunbelt South” and “Detroit South”, it’s still, in many ways, the same ol’, poor ol’ South”. 

Mississippi students see labor and civil rights as their social justice movement

(Martin Luther King Jr.)

On the evening of March 18, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. addressed striking sanitation workers in Memphis, and this is what he told them:

“All labor has worth. … Don’t despair. Nothing worthwhile is gained without sacrifice. The thing for you to do is stay together. … Let it be known everywhere that along with wages and all of the other securities that you are struggling for, you’re also struggling for the right to be organized and be recognized.”

Seventeen days later, King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in downtown Memphis.

(To the right, A. Philip Randolph)

The next year, a great leader of both the civil rights and labor movements, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters founder A. Philip Randolph, had this to say: “The labor movement has been the home of the working man, and traditionally, it has been the only haven for the dispossessed; and therefore, I have tried to build an alliance between the Negro and the American labor movement.”

Josh Dedmond, Monica Atkins and Tyson Jackson are wanting to build on the alliance King, Randolph and others envisioned four decades ago. They believe labor and workers’ rights can be the civil rights movement of today.

That’s why they and other Jackson, Miss.-area members of the newly formed Mississippi Student Justice Alliance are planning an “I Am” labor-and-civil rights conference in Jackson in late November. The conference is named after the “I Am A Man” sign sanitation workers carried in Memphis. The Jackson conference will feature veterans of that 1968 strike.

“This is in the same vein as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee," says Dedmond, 25, a recent Tougaloo College graduate in African-American and religious studies. SNCC played a key role in the civil rights movement. “There is an enormous power in students regarding social justice issues. The two movements are inextricable from one another.”

The Mississippi Student Justice Alliance’s target: helping workers at the giant Nissan plant in Canton, Miss., realize their goal of joining the United Auto Workers despite management’s disdain for that idea.

Dedmond, Atkins and Tyson are also now working with the UAW and its Global Organizing Institute, helping recruit and educate young people from around the world about labor issues.

“We started figuring out about the workers at Nissan and how they wanted a fair election process,” said Atkins, 23, a Chicago native who graduated from Jackson State University in April. She said she decided to stay in Mississippi after graduation because “here there is a lot more opportunity to make a difference.

Making a difference in Mississippi can be an uphill fight. King and Randolph would be the first to tell them.

At the Nissan plant, pro-UAW workers not only face an anti-union CEO in Carlos Ghosn but also a conservative state with a union-hostile “right-to-work” law embedded in its constitution, a Republican-led legislature and a Republican governor who has publicly expressed support for outside groups that would help fight a union at Nissan or Toyota in Mississippi.

What the striking workers in Memphis sought in 1968 “is exactly what the Nissan workers are asking for,” says Jackson, 31, who studies political science at Tougaloo. “That is respect.”

(To the right, Tyson Jackson at the UAW office in Canton, Miss.)

The UAW has laid the foundation for an all-out organization effort at the 3,300-worker plant. A community network that includes U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., area ministers and civil rights-era veterans and activists has pledged to assist in the union’s call for an election free of intimidation.

Mississippi’s rich civil rights history was a factor in the UAW’s decision to take a stand in Canton. In the early 1960s, state NAACP leader and civil rights martyr Medgar Evers worked hand-in-hand with state AFL-CIO leaders Claude Ramsay, Thomas Knight and Ray Smithhart. Like other labor leaders in the South, they endured many defections of white members from their ranks as a result of their stand for civil rights.

Most of the workforce at the Nissan plant in Canton is African-American. They make some of the best wages in a state that perennially ranks at the nation’s bottom in wage earnings. However, workers complain that they haven’t had a pay raise in years, have little or no say-so regarding working conditions, and face a constant barrage of anti-union propaganda.

Federal law guarantees that workers have the right to organize and join a union without harassment. The truth is, however, workers across America now face the kind of hostility that Mississippians have known since segregationist Gov. Ross Barnett secured “right to work” as state law.  They get little or no backing from Congress or the U.S. “Corporate” Supreme Court, and even some major Democrats like Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel seem antagonistic to unions.

If there’s to be a resurrection of the labor movement, the UAW seems poised to play the kind of pivotal role it played both in past labor and civil rights history. Its sit-down strikes (a tactic later embraced by civil rights activists) in the 1930s helped establish modern-day labor. In the 1960s, UAW leader Walter Reuther marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr.

“When (police commissioner) Bull Connor is destroying freedom in Birmingham, he is destroying my freedom in Detroit,” Reuther said during the famous March on Washington in August 1963.

That’s the spirit—along with those of King and Randolph—that Redmond, Atkins and Jackson are hoping to rekindle in Mississippi.

Big money pours into presidential politics while Walmart workers and Louisiana salt mine workers fight for their rights

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Just a couple weeks to election day, and Americans will see how far Big Money can determine the political future of this nation.

The world has changed since the U.S. “Corporate” Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling two years ago.  Reporter Lee Fang told the story of that change in a recent edition of The Nation magazine.  In the pharmaceutical industry alone, spending on federal elections jumped from $200,000 in 2008 to nearly $10.4 million by the very next election cycle. Fang says 98 percent of it came “from undisclosed corporate sources.”

Money can’t by everything. After all, a $222 million payroll, the fattest in all of major league baseball, couldn’t buy the New York Yankees entry into the World Series this year. In fact, the Yankees utterly flopped in the American League Championship Series, losing 0-4 to the pennant-winning Detroit Tigers and their venerable manager, the great Jim Leyland.

Of course, we’re talking politics, not baseball.

I plan to be writing at greater length about the election in the days ahead, looking at the billionaire Koch Brothers and whether they have enough cash to buy the White House as well as assessing other issues such as former President Bill Clinton’s role in the Obama candidacy.

Unlike nearly all of my Democratic and liberal friends, I am absolutely no fan of Bill Clinton. He and his old club, the Southern-dominated Democratic Leadership Council, nearly cut the heart and soul out of what was left of FDR’s Democratic Party, charting a centrist, Republican-like path that paid scant attention to labor and working-class voters while raking in big bucks from Wall Street.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, always full of hagiographic praise for Clinton, will be the first to tell us the former president deserves a ton of credit if Obama wins. I won’t buy it. If Clinton does indeed have the magic appeal to working class folks that Matthews claims, it certainly doesn’t have to do with anything he ever accomplished on behalf of working people.

Working people don’t have a lot of political leaders who’ll fight the good fight for them. Obama comes a lot closer to such a leader than Clinton ever will. Still, by and large, working people have to get out and do the fighting themselves.

And they are.

Arkansas-based Walmart, already fending off protests and worker walkouts in a dozen or more states, now faces a possible class action lawsuit for allegedly breaking federal minimum wage and overtime laws. A suit was filed this week in a federal court in Illinois claiming, among other things, the giant retailer failed to maintain accurate records of its employees’ working hours, and that employees from Walmart’s staffing agencies weren’t paid for work that they did.

A group called OUR Walmart is helping organize another walkout just one day after Thanksgiving. Walmart typically does more business that day than any other day in the year, the Associated Press reports.

Down in Louisiana, a hundred workers with the Carey Salt company of Cote Blanche won a victory with the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB ruled that the company “forced the miners into an unfair labor practices strike, and then illegally refused to take them back when the miners, represented by the Steelworkers, offered to return to work,” according to labor writer Mark Gruenberg in People’s World.

Carey Salt is a salt mine operation whose parent company is North American Salt.

The NLRB’s 3-0 (including the board’s Republican member!) ruling forces the company to go back to the bargaining table with workers’ representatives to work out a new contract. It also requires that Carey get rid of the workers it hired to replace union members, put those union workers back on the payroll, and give them back pay.

The world's retail Goliath notices its workers aren't happy

(Walmart in Laurel, Md.)

The world’s retail Goliath may be finally feeling some pain as a result of the growing number of slingshot-wielding Davids at its feet.

Some 200 demonstrators protested Walmart’s treatment of its worker outside its Bentonville, Ark., headquarters Wednesday, Oct. 10, bringing home a message that has been getting louder and louder across the nation and beyond.

Workers have long complained about poor pay, poor benefits and management insensitivity to workplace issues at Walmart, but the company has been resolute in preventing them from ever joining a union and speaking as one voice.

Is a change in store for Mr. Sam's company?

As reported recently by Josh Eidelson of Salon.com (http://www.salon.com/2012/10/09/walmart_strikes_spread_to_more_states), workers went on strike at Walmart stores in Laurel, Md., and Dallas, Texas, and others soon joined them.

Just last month, warehouse workers who handle Walmart products went back to work after a 15-day strike that forced the giant to concede to developing a plan to improve working conditions at Inland Empire and other companies that do business with Walmart.

The strike, which included a 50-mile march from Inland Empire warehouses to Los Angeles’ downtown area, won support from warehouse workers in Illinois and from as far away as Korea and Chile.

Helping to organize these workers is a one-year-old group that calls itself OUR Walmart, which is not a union but is supported by the United Food & Commercial Workers union.

James Meredith, still a loner, still on a mission, 50 years later

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(James Meredith on the Ole Miss campus in 1962)

OXFORD, Miss. – James Meredith’s new book, A Mission from God, co-authored with William Doyle, sometimes reads like the opening confession in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.

“I befuddle people,” Meredith admits. “People have an awfully hard time trying to figure me out.”

Here’s more:

“I’m not a team player. I am my own team.”

“A lot of folks think I’m a real odd bird.”

Like the unnamed narrator in Dostoevsky’s classic 19^th century novel, Meredith confesses he’s a self-absorbed loner.

“I am immortal. … I am a moment in history … My ego is so enormous. … Someone once wisecracked that my name should be changed to `I, James Meredith.’”

(To the right is Meredith during a recent book signing at Off Square Books in Oxford, Miss.)

Meredith has baffled admirers and detractors much of his life, certainly since that day 50 years ago when he, the lone black man in a sea of white, entered the campus of the University of Mississippi and enrolled as its first black student. A riot by angry whites left two dead, dozens shot, and more than a hundred more injured. President John F. Kennedy sent 20,000 troops to Oxford in what some have called "the last battle of the Civil War." Oct. 1 marks the 50^th anniversary of Meredith's admission to Ole Miss.

In his own words, the Attala County native is “a civil rights hero who absolutely hates to talk about civil rights,” a black man who rejects the term “African-American,” a man who once joined the staff of the original modern-day GOP obstructionist, the late U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina (also known as “Senator No”).

Meredith endorsed Mississippi segregationist Ross Barnett’s gubernatorial bid in 1967 and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s bid for Louisiana governor in 1991.

Meredith’s career after his dramatic showdown at Ole Miss has been a series of fits and starts: abortive runs for Congress and other offices, including president of the United States; a mixed record of business ventures; a law degree from Columbia University although he never took the bar exam and never practiced law.

When I first met James Meredith in Jackson back in the early 1980s, he had just founded what he called the Reunification Church, which he believed would help him fulfill his “divine responsibility assigned by God,” revealed in a “series of dreams,” and “use my life for the betterment of my people and mankind.”

The church turned out to be a dream that never quite worked out.

Today, nearing 80, he admits he has one great regret: “I have not done nearly enough to help America’s poor, and especially its poorest black citizens.” As for communicating his ideas of “triumphant American citizenship, black advancement, and black self-transformation” effectively to others, “I have failed completely” so far.

He always set his sights high, and he always had a strong sense of self. When the mob at Ole Miss crowded close to him in 1962, shouting epithets and threats, he said his view of himself was this: “I am a Zen samurai. I am invincible. Nothing can harm me.”

After all, he had come back to Mississippi after years in the U.S. Air Force to declare war on racism at “the holiest temple of white supremacy in America,” Ole Miss. A man who eschewed Martin Luther King’s philosophy of nonviolence, Meredith “believed in overwhelming physical force and the threat of organized violence, legally applied by the federal government” as the only means to defeat the Jim Crow South.

When he began his lonely 220-mile “March Against Fear” from Memphis to Jackson in 1966, “I could feel the spiritual presence of my late father walking beside me, and along with him were no less than Jesus Christ and the Founding Fathers of America. There was George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Frederick Douglass, along with my African and Indian royal ancestors … .”

He would be shot on the second day of that journey.

Today, when I walk the tree-lined pathways of the beautiful campus of Ole Miss, I see what James Meredith helped accomplish here. I see students of all races burrowing in their books, hurrying to their classrooms, laughing outside the Student Union. What Meredith did not only changed a university but also a state and a nation.

He admits he has always been “a loner among blacks as well as whites.” He would never be the leader on the steps of a great memorial preaching to the multitudes, never the congressman negotiating compromises over thick stacks of legislation, certainly never the civil rights leader-turned-media celebrity.

He would and will always be that lonely figure, a mystic and a mystery, who stepped onto the stage at a critical moment, braving more than his share of what Shakespeare called the “slings and arrows,” showing unimaginable courage and fortitude, enough to override those baffling moments since then. That includes even now as he rejects the statue of him on the campus he integrated as a “false idol” that “must be destroyed and ground to dust.”

Meredith is still on a mission today, and again it has to do with public education. He wants to "challenge every American citizen to commit right now to help children in the public schools in their community." And, in doing that, he says, "I'm still marching against fear" and for courage and commitment.

 

One key to the James Meredith mystery that’s never been much discussed is provided in his book: his love for Mississippi. He left it many times, but he kept coming back. “Mississippi is mine. And one must love what is his. I love Mississippi like a bee loves honey.”

That’s a profound statement from someone whose love hasn’t always been requited.