Above photo: John Spink.
Clark Atlanta University has launched a new institute focused on labor issues and training a new generation of leaders to help Black Southern organizing and collective bargaining efforts.
Jobs With Justice, a nonprofit network of labor unions, community groups and activists, is partnering with Clark Atlanta on the new Institute for the Advancement of Black Strategists, which was announced in late September.
Erica Smiley, executive director of Jobs With Justice, said policies against organized labor disproportionately impact Black workers because more than half of Black Americans live in the South.
“Black workers are less likely to have fair wages compared to counterparts in other parts of the country, are less likely to have good health insurance, are less likely to have a level of economic sustainability (and) more likely to have multiple jobs to make ends meet,” Smiley told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Unionized workers only make up about 10% of the labor force nationally, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But that figure is just 4.6% in Georgia, which like many Sun Belt states has so-called “right-to-work” laws that discourage unionization.
The institute’s launch comes as workers across the South have increasingly tried to organize, to varying degrees of success.
Workers at the Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga recently voted to unionize, though counterparts at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama voted against joining a union.
Workers at the school bus manufacturer Blue Bird in Fort Valley successfully formed a union and reached its first contract with management in May.
Waffle House employees have not unionized, but through strikes, petitions and the help of a service workers union in the South, they recently won raises from the Norcross-based restaurant chain.
Workers at a number of Starbucks locations across Georgia also have voted to join a union.
It’s a trend seen across the country. The National Labor Relations Board received more than double the union election petitions in fiscal year 2024 than it did in fiscal year 2021, it said in a news release.
Earlier this year, Gov. Brian Kemp signed a bill labor groups say will discourage new labor unions. The bill would prevent businesses from receiving state economic incentives if they voluntarily recognize unions through a check of signed union cards rather than through a secret-ballot election.
Kemp’s aim is to thwart future organizing attempts by workers at automotive plants in Georgia, such as those operated by Hyundai Motor Group, which operates a new electric vehicle factory near Savannah, and the Kia Motors factory in West Point. Hyundai and Kia are among the automakers in the Sun Belt the United Auto Workers union has targeted for votes.
At an event at Clark Atlanta University in September announcing the institute, acting U.S. Secretary of Labor Julie Su said the Biden administration is trying to make sure companies that have received federal infrastructure funding are also adhering to certain labor standards and protecting workers’ rights. In Georgia, the Biden administration has invested at least $11.7 billion in clean energy, infrastructure and manufacturing, according to a White House fact sheet.
Federal infrastructure dollars have gone to projects like electric vehicle chargers, renovationsat Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and projects to help cut emissions at the Brunswick and Savannah ports.
“When the federal government says our money is not a blank check to corporations, it is an investment in America, it is an investment in America’s workers and we want those workers to do well,” Su said in an interview. “We believe that the full force of the federal government should be clear, that we have principles and standards that we want met.”
Su said Atlanta could be a model for the region on workers’ rights because of the unions, employers, local officials and community-based organizations on the ground who are working to improve labor conditions.
Clark Atlanta’s labor institute will be housed in the school’s W.E.B. Du Bois Southern Center for Studies in Public Policy, which is named after one of its most influential former professors and author of seminal texts like “The Souls of Black Folk.”
The institute is still in development, but Jobs With Justice has already been working with Clark Atlanta on its Advancing Black Strategists Initiative, a 15-month fellowship program that places Black organizing leaders with unions or nonprofits.
The institute will begin offering courses in the upcoming academic year and applications for the certificate program will open in the fall. In the long term, Smiley is hoping to create a labor studies degree, which could be the first such program at a historically Black college or university.
“If this is successful, I dare say we might finally be back on track to building the multiracial democracy of our ancestors’ dreams,” Smiley said during remarks at the event with Su, “and the souls of Black folks can once and for all be at ease.”