From Virginia and Tennessee through Texas is a solid block of states operating under so-called right to work laws. These laws allow workers to opt out of union membership even though the majority has voted the union in and all employees benefit from its gains and protections.
This open-shop system is a massive barrier to real workplace solidarity. And, given the machinery of anti-union propaganda and intimidation the employers have at their disposal, it is a huge obstacle in organizing new job sites.
In a right-to-work state, on average, employees earn 19 percent less in wages, have a higher chance of workplace death or injury, get 50 percent less in workers’ compensation benefits, and are more likely to be poor and send their children to poorer schools. This is the reality that workers like those at Smithfield have mobilized to change.
Management scare tactics, including physical assaults on union supporters, have defeated two organizing campaigns at the Tar Heel plant so far. However, even with no union in place, employees have collaborated with UFCW to hold work stoppages protesting safety problems, lack of access to decent drinking water, and the firing of 50 Lain 2006.
To retaliate and sow more fear, Smithfield invited immigration agents to raid the factory, which they did in February 2007, deporting 21 workers. As planned, the raid dampened the unionization drive — but UFCW will persevere, says lead organizer Eduardo Pe–a.
In June, the union launched a community support campaign. (To learn more, visit www. smithfieldjustice.com.) In August, more than a thousand people protested at a Smithfield stockholders’ meeting.
Waging another important fight in North Carolina are low-paid municipal employees, most of them Black, working with United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America to demand the right to collectively bargain, which state law denies them. Job actions and rallies have forced city councils to agree to meet with workers in Raleigh and Chapel Hill.
In Florida, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has won significant pay raises from agribusiness and fast-food chains like McDonald’s. CIW members, who are mainly Latino, Haitian, and Mayan Indian farm workers, pursue their goals via community-wide work stoppages and national coalition-building. They will march on Burger King headquarters in Miami on Nov. 30. (For more, go to www.ciw-online.org.)
In Houston, cleaners with the Justice for Janitors project of Service Employees International Union, most of them immigrants, used civil disobedience to double their wages and gain medical coverage.
Confronting “divide and conquer.” Racism, sexism and national chauvinism are the time-honored weapons by which the bosses — north, south, east and west — keep the labor force divided. They are designed to cause workers to identify with the bosses, based on skin color, nationality or gender, instead of each other, based on class interest.
And, because of the history of slavery, their effects have been especially corrosive in the Southern U.S.
New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is a tragic current example of how U.S. rulers use divisive tactics to conquer workers.
One of the govern’s first responses to the hurricane was to overturn laws regarding prevailing wages and affirmative action. Corporations locked African American area residents out of most reconstruction jobs, which they brought in Mexicans, Central Americans and Asians to do.
Companies underpaid the newcomers and even defrauded them of their wages by inviting la migra in on payday.
This terrible double injustice to Blacks and immigrants also had double benefits for big business. It gained a cheap, vulnerable workforce while seeding resentment among African Americans against immigrants.
At Smithfield, such tactics are familiar. Management there asked the employees to vote on whether they would prefer to have a holiday at Easter or on Martin Luther King Jr. Day (a state holiday), knowing that the vote would split along Latino/Black lines.
When Easter won, African American workers continued to organize for an MLK holiday, launching an education campaign explaining King’s importance as a pro-labor figure and getting 4,000 employees to sign a petition for the holiday. Because of the multiracial support they had built, when 400-500 workers defied management threats of reprisals and walked out this past MLK Day, Smithfield backed down and there were no firings.
Uniting to revive labor. Labor’s high tide arrived with the forming in the 1930s of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which split for a time from the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and began organizing all the workers in a plant without regard to race or sex. Its last campaign was Operation Dixie, an attempt to expand into the South. But because the CIO refused to decisively challenge racism for fear of alienating Southern white workers, the campaign sputtered.
This failure was one major reason why both the CIO and the AFL cut way back on unionizing drives and chained themselves to an overall strategy of advocating “labor peace” with management and begging favors from the Democrats. This approach has brought organized labor to the brink of extinction. Today, unionization nationally stands at about 12 percent, with much lower rates in the South — as low as 3 percent in South Carolina.
In order to grow again, labor has to go back to basics: organizing and fighting for workers on the bottom to lift everyone. Memphis sanitation workers did this in their strike of 1968, supported by Dr. King, and they won by linking labor with the civil rights struggle. Today, the South’s new wave of organizing, led by African Americans and immigrants and including workers of all colors and backgrounds, has the potential to build another such coalition.
What workers in the South urgently require is total backing from both of today’s national labor federations, the AFL-CIO and Change to Win. However, this will only happen through rank-and-file initiative: federation members educating themselves about Southern struggles and demanding that their labor bodies get involved.
Southern workers not only need the support of all working people, they deserve it. And this is true not only because of their courage, but because in fighting for themselves they are fighting for their sisters and brothers everywhere — from Boston Harbor to the San Diego Bay and beyond.
