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North Carolina

Workers In The South Aren’t Letting Anti-Labor Laws Stop Them

September 21, 2023 Mindy Isser, In These Times. , , , ,
Even though strikes are illegal for public sector workers in North Carolina, the difficult and sometimes dangerous work — coupled with low wages and the rising cost of living — led Perry and his co-workers to refuse to get in their trucks to pick up trash on September 6. The action reflects growing labor agitation in the South — a region where union organizing and striking are exceptionally challenging, but workers are nevertheless coming together to improve their working conditions. The day before the action, on the evening of September 5, sanitation and other city workers packed the Durham City Council meeting to present a petition demanding an immediate $5,000 bonus, payment for all work done outside job titles, and hiring all temporary workers as permanent.

If The Police Can Decide Who Qualifies As A Journalist, There Is No Free Press

June 2, 2023 Eleanor Goldfield, Truthout. , , ,
On a cold Christmas night in 2021 in the picturesque mountain city of Asheville, North Carolina, The Asheville Blade journalist Veronica Coit sat in a police station waiting to be booked. A police officer motioned toward Coit and said, “She says she’s press.” The magistrate responded: “Is she real press?” “In that very moment, he could’ve decided that we were press, which we were. The magistrate has the legal right to say ‘no’ [to booking someone].” But the magistrate didn’t exercise that right. Both Coit and their colleague Matilda Bliss were processed for trespassing while covering the eviction of unhoused people at Aston Park in Asheville.

State Bills Would Eliminate Long-Term Job Security In Higher Education

April 29, 2023 Olivia Wood, Left Voice. , , , ,
Last Tuesday, Republican legislators in the North Carolina state house of representatives proposed H.B. 715, the so-called “Higher Ed Modernization and Affordability Act.” Its actual purpose is to destabilize academic jobs and exert political surveillance over North Carolina’s sixteen public universities and 58 public community colleges. Last Thursday, the Texas state senate passed a similar bill, S.B. 18. The North Carolina bill has several provisions, but the prospective elimination of tenure is getting the most attention. Under this provision, the tenure system would be eliminated for all new hires from July 2024 onward, and all future faculty would be employed at-will or on fixed-term contracts between one and four years long.

2023 Southern Worker School: Organizing A Workers Assembly

April 11, 2023 Southern Workers Assembly. , , ,
The Southern Workers Assembly is excited to share that we will be convening a Southern Worker School in Charlotte, North Carolina on April 21 through April 23. The theme of the spring gathering is “Organizing a Workers Assembly from A to Z.” The school will focus primarily on putting forward a methodology for developing workers assemblies, drawn from our experience on the ground, and the role they play in building a social movement oriented infrastructure to organize and express worker power in the South. This will constitute the majority of Saturday’s program, combining both political discussion and more concrete skills-based training.

The Life-Threatening Consequences Of Rural ‘Maternity-Care Deserts’

February 3, 2023 Sarah Melotte and ShelHarris, In These Times. , , ,
North Carolina - As her husband drove through Western North Carolina’s winding mountain roads in December 2018, Katlyn Moss repeated instructions to him in case something went wrong. It was nighttime and snowing, and Moss was nine months pregnant. At the time, she was also an OB-GYN nurse. As her husband drove through the snowy terrain of North Carolina’s mountain region, Moss rehashed their plan for what to do if she went into labor during the 107-mile drive from her home in rural Clay County to Mission Hospital in Asheville. “I had a conversation with my husband, like, ‘If we deliver on the side of the road, this is what you’re responsible for, and this is what we’re going to do, and this is who you should call,’” Moss said. Recounting her experience last November on a mild morning in Hayesville, Moss said she knows several women from rural parts of the state who have similar delivery stories.

A New Doctors’ Union In The South Is A Model For Health Care Organizing

October 24, 2022 Jonathan Michels, Portside. , , , ,
North Carolina - Each day on his commute to the clinic, Dr Crister Brady traverses the rolling farmland of Eastern North Carolina, gliding past the neon-green tobacco fields where many of his patients live and work. Brady’s clinic, the Prospect Hill Community Health Center, is one of ten federally qualified health centers operated by Piedmont Health Services Inc. The nonprofit provides comprehensive primary care services to patients who are uninsured or who receive coverage from Medicaid and Medicare. Brady’s desire to care for underserved communities dates back to his experience providing “street medicine” to the unhoused. Today he aims to use his credibility as a physician to chip away at the artificial divisions designed to separate caregivers from their patients and each other.

This Appalachian Town Uses Co-ops To Build New Communities

June 30, 2022 Jeffrey Howard, Resilience. , , ,
The birthplace of bluegrass and home to the oldest mountain range east of the Mississippi River, Southern Appalachia is not only fertile soil for the sharing economy, but a co-op-driven movement known as the solidarity economy. Aimed at generating locally rooted wealth and ensuring its equitable distribution, the solidarity economy is fiercely democratic. For Sara Chester, co-executive director and founder of The Industrial Commons (TIC), a 501(c)3 organization that fosters employee ownership, in a solidarity economy “workers are appreciated not just for their labor but their ideas, insights, and innovations. Workers are not just a piece of the business, they are the reason the business exists.” Sometimes referred to as the co-op model, this approach is about creating prosperous and resilient communities by emphasizing worker agency and ownership, environmental sustainability, and the value of place.

Jailed For A Crime She Didn’t Commit, Dreama Caldwell Takes On The System

April 25, 2022 Jaisal Noor, The Real News Network. , ,
Alamance County, North Carolina, is probably best known for its defense of Confederate monuments and backing Republicans in every presidential campaign since Jimmy Carter. But an important grassroots fight for racial and economic justice is currently unfolding there. One of the leaders of that fight is Dreama Caldwell, a Black working mother who, in 2015, faced a $40,000 bail for a crime she didn’t commit—now she is working to organize across racial and class lines to build grassroots power in rural areas that have been abandoned by the major political parties. In the latest installment of his investigative series “Defending Democracy in the 2022 Midterm Elections,” supported by the Solutions Journalism Network, TRNN’s Jaisal Noor speaks with Caldwell about her story and her organizing work with Down Home North Carolina.

How Biogas Could Do More Harm Than Good For The Hog Industry

April 18, 2022 Cameron Oglesby, Scalawag Magazine. , , , ,
Sherri White-Williamson lives about three miles from a pork processing plant in Clinton, North Carolina. On a good day, the air smells fresh, tainted by a minor whiff of rotten egg and sewage. On a bad day, the odor from the plant is so strong, she has to keep her windows closed. The smell wafts into a local elementary school, nearby restaurants, churches, and the county history museum. Those who live and work in the area say they have to keep fans, candles, and air fresheners running at all hours to make the air tolerable. The problem is even worse for people living down the road in rural Sampson County, near large hog farms, where they must endure more potent odors and pollution coming from the lagoons filled with waste, and the systems that spray waste onto fields as fertilizer.

Black Alliance For Peace Condemns Trial Of Black Activist Dedan Waciuri

December 6, 2021 Black Alliance for Peace. , , , ,
North Carolina - After a number of delays and questionable prosecutorial behavior in their attempts to force a plea-deal because of the weakness of their case, Dedan Waciuri, a resident of Greenville, North Carolina is scheduled to be tried December 7th in the city of Greenville on two charges: “damage to government property” and “inciting a riot.” These charges stem from a protest organized in Greenville on May 31, 2020, in relation to the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and police violence directed at members of the Black community in general. The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP), a national anti-war and human rights organization believes that the charges against Dedan, a member of BAP’s Coordinating Committee, are a blatant attempt to send a message to the Black communities in Eastern North Carolina that resistance to oppression and the fight for human rights will result in confronting the full weight of the power of the state.

Community Begins Eviction Resistance To Combat Wave Of Displacement

November 5, 2021 It's Going Down. , , ,
Asheville, NC - Community members, including tenants and precariously housed people, have come together on November 4th to resist an eviction in support of a multi-generational family experiencing forced displacement by Buncombe County. A number of people have occupied the property and have refused to leave until the city and county enact real solutions to the widely experienced housing crisis. Dressed as woodland creatures, the group brought a banner that says “Everyone needs a home”. The family being evicted—a mother, grandmother and two children under 5, who wish to remain unnamed due to fear of finding suitable housing in the future—has been living in their home in the Sweeten Creek area for six years in good standing, with part of their rent covered by the Section 8 program.

North Carolina: More Felony Offenders Can Now Vote

August 24, 2021 Gary D. Robertson, Associated Press. , , ,
Raleigh, NC — Tens of thousands of North Carolina residents convicted of felonies but whose current punishments don’t include prison time can register to vote and cast ballots, a judicial panel declared Monday. Several civil rights groups and ex-offenders who sued legislative leaders and state officials in 2019 argue the current 1973 law is unconstitutional by denying the right vote to people who have completed their active sentences or received no such sentence, such as people on probation. They said the rules disproportionately affect Black residents and originated from an era of white supremacy in the 19th century. In a brief hearing following a trial last week challenging the state’s voting restrictions upon felons, Superior Court Judge Lisa Bell said two judges on the three-judge panel have agreed they would issue a formal order soon allowing more felony offenders to register.

Farmer Co-Ops Are Giving Latinx Communities Room To Grow

July 28, 2021 Victoria Bouloubasis, Civil Eats. , , ,
On Sundays, Edith Alas Ortega travels 20 minutes from her home to a farm field in Henderson County, North Carolina, and takes a deep breath. “There’s a mental and physical healing that happens out here,” she said in Spanish. Ortega is one of five members of Tierra Fértil Coop—“fertile ground” in English—an agricultural, worker-owned cooperative for and by Latinx immigrants. The group—three Salvadoran and three Mexican immigrants—meet every week on their one-acre parcel in Hendersonville that provides vegetables for the families involved as well as enough for resale, with a focus on culturally appropriate ingredients for the Latinx market. Ortega marvels at the first strawberries of the season on a recent morning in June—just 40 for now.

Dubious Arrests, Death Threats and Confederate Loyalists

May 22, 2021 By Julia Wall and Carli Brosseau, ProPublica. , , ,
Reported from a community where protesting is restricted and violence feels imminent, “Sound of Judgment” provides a rare view into the fight for justice in small-town America.

Local Activists Call Attention To Housing Rights

January 22, 2021 Dean-Paul Stephens, The Times News. , , ,
Graham, North Carolina - Amy Cooper said she and a handful of other activists came together at Court Square in Graham on Wednesday for an event touting tenants' rights while decrying evictions.  "A lot of landlords take advantage of people not knowing their rights, so one of the things we want to do is push tenants' rights so people know what they can and can't do as a tenant," Cooper said.  Cooper's thoughts echo criticism from housing advocates across the country. Last Wednesday, housing rights advocates held simultaneous nationwide demonstrations in the hopes of sparking a paradigm shift away from the current system of landlords using evictions as a threat against tenants. Many argue housing is a human right and the system should reflect that. 
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