Above photo: Waffle House workers, organizing with the Union of Southern Service Workers, rally for safer working conditions and fair pay. USSW.
Organizers in the US South fight back against racist right to work laws.
Which only serve to “divide” workers.
The struggle between Black organized labor and the political establishment has been historically waged with particular fierceness in the US South—a region with the highest proportion of Black workers but with the most hostile laws against workplace organizing. States in the US South have some of the lowest rates of union coverage in the country—meaning that they have a lower share of workers who are organized in a union. The national union coverage rate stood at 11.2% as of 2023, while the rate was as low as 3% in South Carolina, 3.3% in North Carolina, 5.2% in Louisiana, and 5.4% in Georgia.
Low union density in the South has its roots in a history of states ruled by those who sought to ensure the continued superexploitation of Black labor following the end of slavery. This in part has been enforced by the regime of so-called “right to work” laws. All states in the US South have “right to work” legislation in effect, meaning that they prohibit union security agreements, which are agreements that ensure that workers who are not in the union at their workplace will contribute to the costs of union representation. Union security agreements strengthen the power of organized labor, and a 2020 study published in the American Journal of Sociology indicated that right to work laws lead to greater economic inequality.
Organized labor has long opposed right to work legislation. According to the AFL-CIO, right to work laws are “designed to take away rights from working people.”
“Backers of right to work laws claim that these laws protect workers against being forced to join a union,” writes the trade union center. But the “real purpose” of such laws are to “tilt the balance toward big corporations and further rig the system at the expense of working families.”
“These laws make it harder for working people to form unions and collectively bargain for better wages, benefits and working conditions.”
The Racist History Of “Right To Work”
Right to work laws themselves have deeply racist roots. A key advocate of “right to work” laws was Vance Muse, a conservative lobbyist with the Christian American Association who operated in the mid-19th century. Muse’s own grandson described the lobbyist as “a white supremacist, an anti-Semite, and a Communist-baiter, a man who beat on labor unions not on behalf of working people, as he said, but because he was paid to do so.”
Muse and his organization railed against the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) which at the time was launching a massive attempt to organize workers in the South dubbed “Operation Dixie”. This ambitious effort to organize Southern workers did not achieve its goals of unionizing Southern industry. Today, the South remains largely un-unionized compared to other regions of the country.
The Christian American Association (CAA) lobbied “wealthy southern planters and industrialists for funds to help break the ‘strangle hold radical labor has on our government’ through the enactment of anti-union laws,” historian Michael Pierce of the University of Arkansas writes. The CAA, Pierce says, framed “Operation Dixie” as a plan by “Jewish Marxists” to turn the country Soviet and take advantage of “gullible” Black workers. Industrialists with the Arkansas Farm Bureau accused the CIO of fomenting racial divisions and “trying to pit… black against white.”
Right to work laws first appeared on ballots in Arkansas, Florida, and California in the 1940s. Muse’s Christian Americans, who led the right to work campaign in Arkansas, were unabashedly racist in their propaganda, warning that if the right to work amendment failed, “white women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes… whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.”
In 1944, right-to-work referendums appeared on ballots in Arkansas, California, and Florida. California voters rejected right to work laws at the ballot box, but in November of 1944 the referendums in Arkansas and Florida passed and they became the first states to enact such laws.
Martin Luther King Jr. vehemently decried the racist nature of such laws. “In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans such as ‘right to work,’” said the civil rights leader in 1964. “Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions for everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer, and there are no civil rights.”
“It is not coincidental that Right-to-Work first took root in the Jim Crow South,” writes Pierce. “In those states, few blacks could cast free ballots, poll taxes prevented most working-class whites from voting, election fraud was rampant, and political power was concentrated in the hands of an elite.”
Fierce Fightback In The South
Today, right to work laws are in full force in 26 states, including every single state in the US South, as well as several states in other regions of the country. These states are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
Labor leaders must navigate these obstacles to workplace organizing, but that has not stopped the union movement from growing despite historically hostile conditions.
Workers at the Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee made history in April of last year when, after tirelessly organizing in one of the states most hostile to unions in the country, workers voted yes to unionize with the United Auto Workers.
The momentous nature of this victory is highlighted by the fierce opposition put up by Tennessee’s political establishment. In the lead-up to the vote, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee weighed in to dissuade workers from voting to unionize, joining with five other governors of states in the US South.
“We the Governors of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas are highly concerned about the unionization campaign driven by misinformation and scare tactics that the UAW has brought into our states,” read an April 16 statement. “As Governors, we have a responsibility to our constituents to speak up when we see special interests looking to come into our state and threaten our jobs and the values we live by.” The attempt by the governors ultimately failed in the face of workers’ struggle.
It is the service sector in the South in particular that comprises some of the most difficult workplaces to build labor power due to high turnover and difficult working conditions. At the forefront of organizing this sector is the newly-formed Union of Southern Service Workers. USSW organizer Tee Gonzalez has a deep familiarity with this struggle, having organized the Dunkin Donuts location he worked at in Atlanta. In fighting for fair wages, and management that were extremely inconsistent with when they would pay workers, Gonzalez and his coworkers organized a walkout, which got “everybody a raise at Dunkin, all the workers, including us,” Gonzalez told Peoples Dispatch.
According to Gonzalez, right to work laws are “the definition of anti-worker,” because they “are dividing workers” by “giving them an ‘opportunity to choose’ whether to join a union or not.”
Legislators know what they are doing with these laws, according to Gonzalez, who said that a central obstacle when organizing his coworkers was a lack of understanding of what a union even is. As a result of right to work laws, workers who are deliberately misinformed about unions and what union organization can offer workers “never even have a fair shake at it to make a right decision for themselves.”
“[The bosses] know that it is easier when not everybody’s a part of a union, and everybody can make a decision at the same time, that it is easier to divide the workers. If all the workers at a workplace went on strike, that would hurt business, and [the bosses] understand that.”