A Hong Kong labor leader and democracy advocate sits in jail while a former U.S. secretary of labor and Democratic Party leader joins a union-busting law firm

(To the right, Lee Cheuk-yan in Hong Kong in 2013)

 

Let’s compare and contrast two major figures on the labor and political fronts of their homelands and see which one stands truer to his convictions. The two are veteran Hong Kong labor and democracy advocate Lee Cheuk-yan and former U.S. Secretary of Labor and Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez.

 

(Tom Perez)

 

Lee Cheuk-yan, general secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, today is sitting in prison after getting two concurrent 18-month sentences for his role in pro-democracy rallies in 2019. He has been a key organizer in the annual and now-banned pro-democracy candlelight vigils in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park, events that commemorate the victims of the bloody government crackdown that took place in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.

 

Tom Perez served as U.S. secretary of labor during the Obama Administration and then later took over the DNC after an inner party struggle between the pro-Perez Obama-Clinton establishment and party progressives who wanted Keith Ellison of Minnesota. Perez announced last week he is going to join the union-busting Venable LLP law firm.

 

I interviewed Lee in Hong Kong back in June 2013 and also joined in the pro-democracy vigil at Victoria Park. Pressure from Beijing at the time seemed to me comparatively muted—dock workers had just won a 40-day strike in a city without collective bargaining rights--but Lee knew it lurked in the shadows and posed an ever-present threat.

(To the right, pro-democracy vigil in Hong Kong's Victoria Park in June 2013)

 

“We have to support independent unions, and at the same time, democratic rights,” Lee told me. “Unless there is democracy in China, it will be far more difficult for Hong Kong to have a real democracy.”

 

In Hong Kong, “you have to deal with the Communist Party regime,” he said. “After the handover (when Britain relinquished its colonial rights to Hong Kong in 1997) , they had a coalition with big business. They want big business on their side. Their concern is overwhelmingly stability. They want to cooperate with the capitalists, and that the capitalists should cooperate with them. That’s the political deal. … Workers, of course, are always the ones that sacrifice.”

 

Bernie Sanders’ challenge to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential primaries became a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party in the United States. The party of Bill and Hillary Clinton had become so embedded with Wall Street and big business that American labor became more or less an afterthought.

 

Prior to Perez’ takeover, the DNC had conspired to undermine Sanders’ candidacy in favor of Clinton. Clinton won the party’s nomination but then went on to lose to Donald Trump. Instead of some serious soul-searching and a change in direction, however, the party establishment put at its head Perez, who had campaigned for Clinton. Current President Joe Biden worked hard for Perez as did other party insiders, making lots of phone calls for his friend from the Obama days.

 

The Democratic Party’s identity crisis goes back a long way, however. Barack Obama came into office in 2008 with great expectations—I’ll never forget his rousing pro-labor speech at the AFL-CIO convention in Chicago in 2005—but he quickly filled his administration with corporate neoliberals like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. Today Obama is trying to walk back his pro-corporate record, telling the New York Times recently that “the bank bailouts just angered everyone, including me.”

 

As labor secretary, Perez fought the courts for the so-called “Persuader Rule” that would require companies to disclose spending on anti-union groups and consultants—Donald Trump later dumped that rule—but now he has joined Venable, one of the firms that lobbied against the Persuader Rule.

 

“Venable’s attorneys are at the forefront of helping clients navigate dynamic regulatory, policy, and labor and employment issues,” Perez said in a press release from his new employer. “I look forward to joining them in this important work.”

 

As reported recently by the Daily Poster, Venable proudly proclaims on its website that “we regularly counsel and train clients on union avoidance, employee terminations, arbitration, and contract administration and interpretation.”

 

So here we have a former U.S. secretary of labor and Democratic Party chief who’s now openly in bed with union-busting barracudas even though American labor remains one of the Democratic Party’s most loyal supporters.

 

Across the world in Hong Kong, we have a labor leader and party chief—Lee Cheuk-yan’s resume also includes service as chair of the Hong Kong Labor Party—who has been jailed by a Communist-ruled regime that claims to be wholly dedicated to not only the workers of Hong Kong and China but of the world.

 

“I am proud I can walk with the people of Hong Kong on the road to democracy,” Lee said before he was sentenced. “We will walk together even in darkness with hope in our heart.”

 

(Han Dongfang and Labor South's Joe Atkins in Washington, D.C., in June 2014)

 

Another Hong Kong-based dissident, Han Dongfang, founder of the China Labour Bulletin and a veteran of the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square, told me and others during a June 2014 panel discussion in Washington, D.C.,  that “if you are afraid of the dark, and the dark knows this, it will be aggressive.”

 

Han, who spent 22 months in a Chinese prison for his labor organizing at the time of the 1989 crackdown, was in Victoria Park this month even though authorities had forbidden any demonstrations. As police patrolled the area to make sure everything was under control, he told a Reuters reporter, “I just feel like being here.”

 

How would Tom Perez advise Lee Cheuk-yan and Han Dongfang today? Would he say, “Surely there’s a party position for you, or, if not, a lucrative law firm that could use your experience”? We know what their answer would be.

The South's patrician political leadership still has contempt for the lower classes of "Lubberland"

 

 

(A 1670 "Mapp of Lubberland", the imaginary isle where the lazy lower classes idle away their days) 

Mississippi restaurants complained so loudly to Gov. Tate Reeves they can’t find people to work for $2.13 an hour plus tips that Reeves informed the federal government his state would no longer accept COVID-19 unemployment benefits for workers.

 

Philip Gunn, speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives and Republican like Reeves, wrote the governor that restaurants and other businesses can’t get workers “to return to work because they earn more from combined federal and state unemployment benefits than their normal wages.”

 

So Mississippi joined fellow Southern states South Carolina, Arkansas, Alabama, and other Republican-led states in the South and beyond in denying workers the $300 per week benefits that the federal government had authorized as a result of the pandemic. Unemployed workers in Mississippi will have to live on the $235 a week the state provides.

 

Inherent in all of this is the utter contempt for average working class people that the patrician leaders of the Republican-dominated South have long had. The Republican Party is the party of the rich—the property-owning business class, CEOs, the country club set, the landed gentry. Republicans in the South today aren’t really very different from the Bourbon Democrats of the Old South—arrogant, paternalistic, ever suspicious of someone from the lower classes trying to sneak a free ride.

 

Even when Republicans cloak themselves in a kind of inverse populism, like Donald Trump, the contempt is still there, just under the surface, and it shows itself in their policies and actions, such as Trump’s eviscerating of the National Labor Relations Board during his administration.

 

Restaurant workers and retail workers were hit hard by the pandemic as businesses across the land shut down. Mississippi’s unemployment rate jumped from 5.8 percent in February 2020 to 15.7 percent in April 2020. Today it hovers just a little above 6 percent.

 

Despite a federal $7.25-per-hour minimum wage, restaurant workers typically work for as little as $2.13 an hour with the hope that tips can make up the difference.

 

“To ask people to go back to work for low wages instead of receiving a `living wage’ is asinine,” Democratic Mississippi Rep. Jeramey Anderson of Moss Point said in a tweet reported by the Mississippi Free Press. “Unemployment benefits are not the problem. Our failure to address low wages in our state is the real issue.”

 

In her compelling book White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, author Nancy Isenberg tears away at the lie that the United States is a essentially a class-less country where anyone with some gumption can succeed. “We need to stop thinking that some Americans are the real Americans, the deserving, the talented, the most patriotic and hardworking, while others can be dismissed as less deserving of the American dream,” she writes. “Class is as American as it ever was British.”

 

Isenberg writes of how 17^th and early 18^th century aristocrats like the British philosopher John Locke and the Virginia planter and diarist William Byrd II considered the lower classes such as those in the colony of North Carolina lazy, shiftless, contemptible, needing-to-be-ruled residents of what they called “Lubberland”.

 

Old attitudes die hard.

 

The media are as much to blame as greedy capitalists. Every issue that raises the spectre of class conflict in America is immediately sidetracked into an issue of race or of the narrow-minded prejudices and ignorance of the Great Unwashed. The utter frustration of their voicelessness in both the Republican and Democratic parties led many in those unwashed masses to vote for Donald Trump. Of course, he had no more intention of serving their interests than did Hillary Clinton.

 

Despite a blue-collar identity betrayed again and again in a political career of compromises, Joe Biden has thus far as president stepped up to the plate in support of working class people in his domestic policies. He’s shown sensitivity to their plight during the pandemic, expressed strong support for labor unions, and challenged rather than succumbed to Republican intransigence.

 

(To the right, the poet Dylan Thomas)
 

Workers in the South are showing some feistiness in face of the political hypocrisy that’s constantly dealt them. Sure, they lost big labor battles at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, recently and at the Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi, in 2017, but they’re not simply going gently “into that good night” the poet Dylan Thomas warned us about. They’re indeed raging “against the dying of the light.”

 

Nurses won a big battle in organizing  at the Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, last September. Workers at the Valley Proteins rendering plant in Bertie Country, North Carolina, are trying to organize. Miners at Warrior Met Coal in Alabama are on strike. Organizations like the Southern Workers Assembly and the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) are sowing the seeds of a labor-conscious New South.

 

Sooner or later, enough eyes will open to the plantation mentality of political leaders like Tate Reeves of Mississippi that a change will come. The sooner the better.

 

Spike Lee's "Da 5 Bloods" and a writer's flashback to Vietnam and Old Saigon

 

Watching Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods (2020) last night was like a flashback for this old Vietnam veteran. I lived vicariously through his characters’ return to the country where they had fought decades before. Lee filmed on location, and I soaked in the sights of modern-day Saigon—pardon me, I mean Ho Chi Minh City—with its skyscrapers, McDonald’s, and, well, its vibrant sans war life.

 

No more armed solders patrolling the major thoroughfares, no more roads, sidewalks, and storefronts pockmarked from past shellings. The old Saigon—and I was there many times—was a war-torn big city of two million (nine million today), French colonial still, with whores and black marketeers everywhere, poverty at every corner, armies of lambrettas and bicycle riders waiting at every intersection, many of them ridden by beautiful women in their traditional ankle-length Ao Dai dresses, little alleyways where old men offered you reefer, opium, and their granddaughter.

 

Big as it was, there was a leisurely pace to the city, something the tropical heat required, a place where you could sip your Biere 33 at a sidewalk café and only intermittently worry about danger coming out of those shadows around the corner.

(To the right, yours truly in the center with my buddies Bob to my right and Parker to my left. Saigon, 1971.)

Spike Lee’s film, compelling but flawed, follows four vets through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City and into the countryside, where they search for the remains of their wartime squad leader and a cache of gold that they had buried near those remains. The issue of race is at the heart of the film, of course. It is, after all, a Spike Lee film, and indeed race lay close to the heart of the conflict in Vietnam, where GIs, black and white, regularly joked about killing “gooks” as if the Vietnamese people were something less than.

 

The Vietnam War was about more than race, however. Race is usually a symptom of a much larger problem. Vietnam came after more than a decade of Cold War-mongering, witch hunts by Joe McCarthy and the U.S. House for Un-American Activities Committee, the constant saber rattling of the military-industrial complex Ike warned us about. Greed usually can be found in the shadowy origins of every war. We left Vietnam with our tails between our legs, our first official loss but not our last. We keep wanting to relearn the old bitterly learned lessons.

 

(Saigon in 1971. No skyscrapers)
 

I was a war protester, a veteran of so many marches and anti-war rallies that I was burned out by the time I got drafted. So I became a soldier. I didn’t want to go to Canada. The whole time I was in the Army and in Vietnam I worried my protester days might come back to bite me in uniform, but I gave the Army too much credit. I’m glad I went to Vietnam. It’s a beautiful country even in war. I met some amazing people—my girlfriend Hanh, my Army buddy Bob (we remain in regular contact), the old Mama-San at our base who was always wanting me to get her cigarettes from the PX so she could black market them.

(To the right, a movie theater in 1971 Saigon)

 

In my mind, Da 5 Bloods begins to unravel and lose focus somewhere along the search for that hidden gold. Maybe that was appropriate. This nation went on a similar kind of misguided journey when it went to war in Vietnam, and that, too, unraveled at the end.

 

Monte Hellman, a master of "the language of the cinema"

 

(Monte Hellman in 2013)

 

Monte Hellman, one of the best but also least well-known of the New Hollywood directors of the 1960s and beyond, died last week at the age of 91. With films like the ultimate road movie Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Cockfighter (1974), the twin existential Westerns The Shooting (1966) and Ride in the Whirlwind (1966), and the neo-noir Road to Nowhere (2010), Hellman established himself as a daring minimalist in Hollywood, the Samuel Beckett of the Big Screen.

 

Hellman was trained in the theater, an intellectual whose Theatergoers Company  brought Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to the Los Angeles stage in a premiere production in the late 1950s. Working with producer/director Roger Corman early in his film career, Hellman cut his teeth on biker and terror films as well as in radio and television productions before emerging as a truly unique force behind the camera.

 

I spent a couple days at Hellman’s Airbnb in Hollywood’s Laurel Canyon back in March 2018. I was doing research for my biography of actor Harry Dean Stanton, whom Hellman had directed in three films: Ride in the Whirlwind, Two-Lane Blacktop, and Cockfighter. He wasn’t feeling well the day I interviewed him, but he sat down with me for probably an hour and talked about movies.

(Yours truly at Monte Hellman's Airbnb in Laurel Canyon in March 2018)

 

As he talked, I looked at our surroundings--books everywhere, a wide collection of Asian art, a workout machine, pool outside, a framed photograph of a young Jack Nicholson, whose career got its start via both Corman and Hellman.

 

“When I look back at my movies, I basically made movies unconsciously,” he told me. “I am an intellectual in other areas, but not in making movies.”

 

He said he never thought of his filmmaking as art. “We didn’t think of it as anything. The problem was getting through each day, getting your pages shot.”

 

I learned during the interview that Hellman could be contradictory, or maybe he was also playing with me a bit. He told me he hadn’t read British film writer Brad Stevens’ book on the director’s life and work, yet Stevens in his Acknowledgements thanks Hellman for his “thorough proof-reading/fact-checking of the manuscript.” Hellman frequently downplayed his own legacy. “In reality, I have always been a hired gun,” he said back in 1987. “I have usually taken whatever job came my way.”

 

Yet, in an interview with Notebook in 2017, he was quite critical of much modern filmmaking. “They aren’t learned in the language of the cinema," he said. “American films these days are designed by committee, by a team of people. … It’s true even in Europe nowadays. You’ve got a lot of people involved in making a lot of decisions, when it used to be one person’s call to make.”

 

As for independent filmmakers? “Of course, there are exceptions, but most independents are just another arm of the studio.”

 

Born Monte Himmelbaum in Brooklyn, New York, and educated at Stanford University and the University of California at Los Angeles, Hellman went to the South for two of his most important films, Cockfighter and Two-Lane Blacktop, the latter of which begins in California but ends up in Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina. Cahiers du Cinéma called it “one of the greatest American films of the 1970s.” For Cockfighter, a film based on Charles Willeford’s novel, Hellman went to rural Georgia to tell the story of cockfighting champ Frank Mansfield, played by Warren Oates.

 

Hellman told me he had always been fascinated by subcultures like the rural South’s cockfighting world. “The people who were the cockfighters were really interesting. They actually contributed a lot to the screen. They were cockfighters, a lot of them.”

 

Hellman chuckled about the film’s alternate title Born to Kill. “I like to say `Hatched to Kill’.”

 

Hellman’s success as a director—a success that didn’t translate to big Box Office earnings—can in part be attributed to how he worked with actors like Warren Oates, Jack Nicholson, Millie Perkins, Laurie Byrd, and Harry Dean Stanton. “I think in order to make an actor comfortable in doing all the things they have to do to expose themselves in the process of acting, you have to make them feel like you are not going to hurt them, that you will protect them,” he told me. “Except for the very beginning, when nobody knew anything about me, I have managed to convey that to actors I’ve worked with.”

 

Hellman put his actors in austere settings—the American West, the rural South, the Philippine jungle—where everything is primitive, stripped down to its essentials.  Even the language is stripped down. It’s a stark, clear-eyed way of looking at life, a cinematic language as practiced by Hellman’s own favorite directors—Samuel Fuller, John Huston, Carol Reed—and one he mastered in his own life.

 

A battle was lost but not the war in the union defeat at Amazon's Bessemer, Ala., warehouse

(A photo from the 1934 Southern textile workers' strike)
 

 The woman’s face still haunts me. Lined from many years of work on the farm and then in the cotton mills, she is nameless in my memory, just another “linthead” in the eyes of the mill owners, “white trash” others might say, someone off the cow patch and now in a factory in some Southern backwater working 12-hour days.

 

In her eyes, however, was a spark of something, a flicker of hope, and it came from the union she and countless other cotton mill workers were desperate to join back in the 1930s. “We began to feel we could be a part of a great movement,” she said in filmmakers George Stoney, Judith Helfland, and Susanne Rostock’s landmark 1995 documentary The Uprising of ’34.

 

The film details the massive uprising of textile workers in the South against the medieval work conditions imposed on them by the mills that had lured them off the farms in the hope for a better life. They first struck in the late 1920s and then again in the 1930s, only to be brutally beaten down by gun thugs doing the will of the mill owners and their investors up North.

 

It would take decades and Crystal Lee “Norma Rae” Sutton before unions successfully organized in the textile industry in the South, forcing giants like J.P. Stevens finally to recognize workers’ legal rights to join together in a united voice in seeking a fair wage and decent working conditions.

 

It’s a lesson in history worth remembering now that the workers at Amazon’s giant Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse have voted down a union by a 2-to-1 margin. Organizing in the South requires a commitment for the long haul. It needs homegrown warriors like Sutton and back in the 1920s and 1930s like Ella Mae Wiggins, Howard Kester, and Lucy Randolph Mason.

 

The South has a long and tortured labor history, something not taught in the classroom, not preached from the pulpit, not discussed in legislative halls, news pages, or in the coffee shops. It’s a hidden history because that’s the way the phalanx of Southern anti-labor forces—the politicians, businessmen, preachers, and publishers—want it.

 

The effort by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) to organize the Bessemer workers only began last June. Amazon responded with the virulent anti-union campaign one expects from any company. Only this is a $1.7 trillion giant that is the veritable symbol of modern-day capitalism. What followed were forced anti-union sessions with workers, anti-union placards everywhere, online spying to see which workers are supporting the union, the hiring of Morgan Lewis & Bockius, one of those piranha-like law firms that specialize in destroying organizing campaigns.

 

The pandemic created a ton of stress on Amazon workers with sharp demands to deliver and deliver faster growing daily while safety conditions deteriorated. Amazon is organized in other parts of the world but like the foreign auto companies that dot the South tolerates no union in Dixie.

 

As in the United Auto Workers campaign at the giant Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi, that failed by a wide margin in 2017, the workforce at the Bessemer warehouse is mostly black. President Joe Biden, prominent black Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams and Black Lives Matter came out with strong support for the Bessemer workers’ effort, but precious little was heard from the NAACP. Perhaps Amazon’s largesse to their pet projects played a role in that silence. Amazon has boasted of contributing some $27 million to the NAACP and other organizations fighting racism.

 

Some strong condemnations from the NAACP and Black Congressional Caucus of Amazon’s treatment of its workers might have made a difference. Big corporations today are every bit as brazenly anti-union as J.P. Stevens was, but they’re scared to death of being called racist. That’s the kind of bad press that shakes them to their foundations.

 

I mean, my gosh, the NAACP is silent when even troglodyte Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida came out in support of the Bessemer workers?

 

Amazon head honcho Jeff Bezos is a kind of corporate hero these days, but his company recently got slapped with a $62 million fine for stealing tips from Amazon delivery drivers over a two-year period. Yes, that’s the kind of company Amazon is.

 

Some speculate that the union loss in Bessemer may give momentum to efforts to pass the so-called PRO (Protecting the Right to Organize) Act in Congress, a piece of legislation that would undo a lot of the damaging effects of the Republican-spawned Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, ending things like right-to-work laws and forced corporate anti-union sessions. The U.S. House of Representatives has already passed the bill, but at this point a small handful of Democratic senators, including West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, have yet to sign on. Ending the filibuster is key to its passage, since Republicans are bound to use the filibuster to try to kill it.

 

The Bessemer workers, by and large, bought Amazon’s line that they don’t need a union, that the company will look out for their best interests, that things will get better. They may for a while, then it’s back to what works best for the bottom line.

 

That’s why organizers need to stick around, not give up, keep their eyes on the prize, even if it looks like a distant phantom that may never become real. Workers need that flicker of hope in their eyes that I saw in that woman in The Uprising of ’34. Without hope, what is life?

 

"Go, Johnny, Go!" offers a glimpse into the day before "the day the music died" in early rock 'n' roll. Co-hosting a showing on TCM Sunday, March 21

 

 

Rock ‘n’ roll fans and old movie lovers might want to check in at the Turner Classic Movies channel this coming Sunday, March 21, at 11 a.m. CST (12 noon EST) for a showing of the 1959 classic “Go, Johnny, Go!” with yours truly, Labor South’s Joseph B. Atkins, co-hosting along with regular host Alicia Malone.

 

Along with keeping track of labor and working class issues in the U.S. South, this ink-stained wretch has always been a film lover and that’s the why of my recent book Harry Dean Stanton: Hollywood’s Zen Rebel (University Press of Kentucky, 2020) and articles such as “Nehemiah Persoff – Intensity in-Depth” in TCM “Noir Czar” host Eddie Muller’s Noir City magazine back in 2016.

 

 “Go, Johnny, Go!” offers a glimpse into the early days of rock ‘n’ roll, the day before “the day the music died,” as Don McLean would sing in “American Pie”. Rock ‘n’ roll’s first Latino star, Ritchie Valens, makes his sole screen appearance in it, an appearance that came just months before he’d die in the same plane crash that killed Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper. That crash took place before the film was even released.

 

(Eddie Cochran)
 

Eddie Cochran, the solid for-real rocker who gave us “Summertime Blues”, made his third and last film appearance in “Go, Johnny, Go!” He died in a car wreck the year after the film came out. Chuck Berry, a co-star with legendary disc jockey Alan Freed in the film, would be charged with taking a teenager across state lines for “immoral purposes” the same year of the film’s release. That charge would eventually put him in prison.

 

Freed is a major reason the rock ‘n’ roll Hall of Fame is in Cleveland, Ohio. That’s where he gained fame playing rock ‘n’ roll—evening coining the term for the music—as well as R&B and blues before he moved to the Big Apple. A pioneer in bringing black and white artists together on the same stage, he became a target for his race-and-music mixing, one of the reasons his career would begin a downward spiral in 1960 because of a payola scandal.

 

“Go, Johnny, Go!” also features Jackie Wilson, The Flamingos, Jo Anne Campbell, The Cadillacs, and, of course, “Johnny” himself, Jimmy Clanton. Clanton was often dismissed as yet another milquetoast Fabian or Pat Boone type, but the Louisiana native studied at the feet of Dr. John and Allen Toussaint in New Orleans, recorded for Ace Records in Mississippi, and wrote many of his songs.

 

Another treat for this writer is the collection of great character actors in the film. Faces you’ll recognize, but names like Frank Wilcox, Barbara Wooddell, Herb Vigran, Milton Frome, William Fawcett, Phil Arnold, Joe Flynn, Dick Elliott, and Robert Foulkk that you won’t. Harry Dean Stanton would've fit right in.

(Harry Dean in the 1985 film "Fool for Love")

 

Yours truly got this gig Sunday as a charter member of TCM’s “Backlot” club, an organization of fans and film buffs. I entered a competition by naming 10 films I’d like to co-host. Of course, I named four Harry Dean Stanton films, a handful of noir films, and slapped “Go, Johnny, Go!” on as number 10. That’s the one they picked, along with me!

 

I first saw “Go, Johnny, Go!” back at the old Temple Theater in Sanford, North Carolina, in the early 1960s, probably a third or fourth run of the film. Restored today to beauty and prestige, the Temple back then was a musty old movie house, the kind where your shoes stuck to the floor as you walked down the aisle, a time when blacks sat in the balcony and whites below.

 

Years later I found an old DVD of the film at a Memphis flea market and would slip it in and wade through waves of nostalgia every now and then.

 

The plot’s pretty thin, the singers are lip syncing, and the guitars aren’t even plugged in, but it’s a fun romp that seems innocent through today’s world-weary eyes but which also provides a whiff of the rebellion rock ‘n’ roll truly was back in the day, a music that scared parents, preachers, and politicians, and drove racists through the roof for making both whites and blacks want to dance, and maybe even on the same dance floor!

 

Joe Biden's endorsement of the union drive at Amazon's Bessemer, Alabama, plant is a needed breath of fresh air for the U.S. labor movement

(President Joe Biden)

President Joe Biden’s endorsement of the union drive at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse is a shot in the arm for the labor movement in the U.S. South and in the country as a whole. He’s the first president to go full-scale public with his support of unions since Franklin Roosevelt, who was president when Biden was born in 1942.

 

Voting is underway at the 6,000-worker plant, and Amazon has pulled out all the stops to kill the union drive, subjecting workers to anti-union meetings and videos, using social media to identify labor activists. This is a drive even more historic than the United Auto Workers' Nissan campaign in Canton, Mississippi, when the most prominent politician to support that effort was Bernie Sanders. Amazon is the very face of modern-day capitalism.

 

Every four years Democratic leaders have paid lip service to labor, one of the party’s strongest constituencies, but more often than not they failed to follow up. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has waged a relentless anti-union war ever since it pushed through the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 over then-President Truman’s veto. That act made union organizing even more difficult by allowing states to outlaw the closed shop and thus allow workers to benefit from union contracts without joining the union. Every Southern state took advantage of that law to try and kill unions.

 

As reported recently by Labor South and also in The Atlantic, Donald Trump loved to boast his populist credentials and claim he was pro-worker. He lied about that just as he lied about a lot of things. He gutted the National Labor Relations Board and was your typical CEO in his attitudes toward labor.

 

Of course, Biden has played the neoliberal game for years, a game that generally put corporate interests on top and labor on the bottom. He worked under Barack Obama, who could speechify wistfully about the grand traditions and history of the U.S. labor movement but who as president showed limited interest in continuing those traditions and history.

 

Still, Biden has always had a working-class edge in his public persona, talking his Scranton, Pennsylvania, roots, moving easily among the strap hangers and other blue-collar folks in the crowd. From a close perspective as vice president, he witnessed the failed promises of the Obama administrations, the loss of Congress under Obama, GOP virulence, the rise of a progressive movement under Bernie Sanders, and he sees himself in an important moment of history, here as he moves toward the end of a long career that finally put him in the top job.

 

His strong endorsement of labor not only on the campaign trail but now as president of the United States is a breath of fresh air. Labor needed that.