The South

The Win For EV Workers In The South You Didn’t Hear About

August 17, 2024 Ella Fanger, Portside. Educate! Alabama, Electric Vehicles, Labor Movement, The South, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Organized labor is in the midst of a fierce campaign to make inroads at auto manufacturers in the South, most recently at the Mercedes plant in Vance, Alabama, where on May 17, 56% of workers voted narrowly against joining the United Auto Workers. But a few months before the unsuccessful vote at Mercedes, workers 100 miles away at an EV bus manufacturing plant in Anniston, Alabama, unionized and won a historic contract. In January 2024, the majority of the around 600 workers at a plant run since 2013 by New Flyer, the largest transit bus manufacturer in North America, signed a union card to join the International Union of Electrical Workers-Communications Workers of America (IUE-CWA).

New ‘Battery Belt’ Opens Organizing Front In The South

August 3, 2024 Ben Carroll, Labor Notes. Organize! Electric Vehicles, Labor Movement, The South, Unions

Towering cranes pierce the sky, contrasting with the rural surroundings. It’s an early morning in June, the air already gauzy and thick, and construction is humming at the Toyota Battery mega-site in Liberty, North Carolina. Trucks and other heavy machines dart in and out of the complex. A line of food trucks is tucked around the corner, alongside a dozen tour buses used to move workers. Production is slated to begin in 2025. By 2030, when the 7 million-square-foot complex is fully operational, it will have 14 production lines—10 dedicated to batteries for electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electrics, and four for hybrid electric vehicles—operated by 5,100 workers. The total population of Liberty is 2,655.

Tipping Is A Racist Relic

July 12, 2024 Nina Mast, Economic Policy Institute. Educate! Racism, Service Workers, Slavery, The South, Tipping, Worker Rights

In most of the country, workers in restaurants, bars, nail salons, barber shops, and various other service jobs are paid differently than workers in virtually all other occupations. For these workers, a large portion (in many cases all) of their take-home pay comes from gratuity or “tips” provided directly from the customer. While employers of workers in nearly all other occupations must pay at least the minimum wage, federal and most states’ laws establish a lower “subminimum wage” for tipped workers that effectively passes the responsibility for compensating these workers from their employers to their clientele.

Southern Worker School Charts Course For Power

June 4, 2024 Southern Workers Assembly. Organize! Labor Movement, Popular Assemblies, The South, Worker Rights and Jobs

Southern politicians have gone out of their way in word and action to make clear they stand on the side of big business and racism as they’ve recently lamented that the “Alabama [ie – Southern] model for success is under attack” and vowing to “fight unions to the gates of hell.” Nearly two hundred rank and filers who are developing a movement of workers in the South that can build power to make these politicians’ fears a reality gathered in Charlotte, NC on May 17 – 19 for the 2024 Southern Worker School. These convenings are the annual organizing conference of the Southern Workers Assembly network, which includes local workers assemblies, worker organizations, and other workers from various sectors and states throughout the region.

Organizing One Of The Largest Black Led Unions In The United States

May 28, 2024 Keith Kelleher, The Forge. Organize! Black Working Class, History, Labor Movement, The South, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

McMaid workers, led by Irma Sherman, Doris Gould, Juanita Hill, and Mary Williamson, transformed labor organizing by successfully unionizing homecare workers in Chicago in 1984, setting the groundwork for the largest union in the Midwest, and catalyzing the organizing of a field predominately staffed by working-class Black and brown women. In Part One, the McMaid homecare workers, with their union, United Labor Unions Local 880, a small, independent union founded by ACORN, the national community organization, overcame an intense anti-union campaign by management to win a solid union election victory in January, 1984. But even more obstacles lay ahead in their fight for Justice.

UAW Admits Digital Heavy, Organizing Committee Light Approach Failed Them

May 27, 2024 Mike Elk, Payday Report. Organize! Alabama, Mercedes-Benz, The South, union busting, Unions, United Auto Workers (UAW), Worker Rights and Jobs

Rather than using traditional organizing committee structures, the UAW relied heavily on digital meetings, a light staff approach from the international union, and getting workers to sign union cards via QR codes. Given the positive media coverage of the UAW in the “Stand Up Strike,” many UAW leaders were confident they could win using this approach. After filing with 70%, the UAW believed they would maintain their margin and win at similar margins to the 73% victory of UAW workers in Chattanooga. However, the UAW lost 44%-56% in Alabama amid charges that the company used backroom manipulation tactics against workers.

Operation Dixie Failed 78 Years Ago

May 26, 2024 Chandra Childers, Dave Kamper and Jennifer Sherer, Economic Policy Institute. Strategize! History, Labor Movement, Operation Dixie, The South, Worker Rights and Jobs

Volkswagen workers’ decisive recent union election victory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, makes them the first Southern U.S. auto workers to unionize a foreign-owned auto factory. Their success could also mark a historic turning point for generations of Southern workers seeking to improve their jobs and transform their states’ economies. There are also signs that vigorous enforcement of federal labor law and other pro-worker federal policies, bolstered by the Biden administration, are contributing to a more level playing field for workers attempting to organize in the South. But a long history of exploitation will take a strong, national labor movement to overcome.

How Workers Are Revolutionizing The South

May 25, 2024 David McCall, ZNetwork. Organize! Labor Movement, The South, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Donneta Williams, president of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 1025 and a longtime optical fiber maker at the Corning plant in Wilmington, North Carolina, knows how important it is for workers intent on forming a union to speak directly with peers who walk in the same shoes. So Williams agreed to send three of her colleagues to Corning’s Tarboro facility, about 145 miles away, when workers at that site approached the union with questions about organizing. Local 1025 members shared firsthand accounts of how the union boosted their wages, gave them a voice, and kept them safe on the job. And in May 2024, the workers at Tarboro filed for an election to join the USW.

Segregation Academies Still Operate Across The South

May 21, 2024 Jennifer Berry Hawes, ProPublica. Educate! Alabama, Education, Racism, Segregation, The South

A mile of Alabama country road, and a history of racism, separate the two schools. At the stop sign between them, even the road’s name changes. Threadgill Road, christened for a civil rights hero, becomes Whiskey Run. Black students take Threadgill to one campus; white students turn off Whiskey Run toward the other. Both schools are shrinking. Wilcox County, a notch in the swath of old plantation country known as the Black Belt, struggles with declining population — a common scenario across this part of the South. In such places, the existence of two separate school systems can isolate entire communities by race.

High-Profile UAW Campaign At Mercedes-Benz In Alabama Falls Short

May 18, 2024 Sarah Jaffe, In These Times. Strategize! Mercedes, The South, UAW, union busting, Unions, Worker Rights

Workers at the Mercedes-Benz U.S. International plant in Vance, Alabama came up short in their first union election on Friday, May 17, with 2,045 votes to join the United Auto Workers and 2,642 against. A brief but high-energy campaign that saw real improvements won at the plant and a worker-led effort to organize failed to create a wave after the high-profile Volkswagen workers’ win in April in Chattanooga, Tennessee. “These courageous workers reached out to us because they wanted justice. They led us. They led this fight. And what happens next is up to them,” UAW President Shawn Fain told reporters shortly after the vote count.

Southern Autoworkers’ Union Drives Can Reverse Decades Of Job Decline

May 1, 2024 Marc Bayard and Dev Wakeley, Inequality.org. Organize! Alabama, Autoworkers, Tennessee, The South, Unions, United Auto Workers (UAW), Worker Rights and Jobs

The United Auto Workers recently scored the largest union victory in decades in the South. Their success at a Tennessee Volkswagen plant could be a turning point for labor in a region long known for governmental hostility to unions. The next test will be a UAW election scheduled for the week of May 13 at a Mercedes-Benz factory in Alabama, a state that has attracted so much auto investment it has earned the nickname “the Detroit of the South.” If the roughly 5,000 Mercedes workers vote to unionize, the ripple effects could empower workers nationwide.

In Relay Race To Organize The South, Baton Passes To Mercedes Workers

May 1, 2024 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. Organize! Auto Workers, Labor Movement, Mercedes, The South, UAW, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Michael Göbel, president and CEO of Mercedes-Benz U.S. International, stepped down from his post today, according to a video message that workers were shown. Göbel had groused in an April captive-audience meeting about a worker’s claim that Mercedes had come for the “Alabama discount”: low wages. His departure is another win for Mercedes-Benz workers, who already scored pay bumps and an end to wage tiers—and they haven’t even voted on the union yet. The company and Alabama politicians are ramping up their anti-union campaign as an election draws near. The 5,200 Mercedes workers at a factory complex and electric battery plant outside Tuscaloosa will vote May 13-16 on whether to join the United Auto Workers.

UAW’s Chattanooga Victory: Score One For The North In Our Endless Civil War

April 23, 2024 Harold Meyerson , Portside. Strategize! Auto Workers, Chattanooga, The South, Unions, United Auto Workers (UAW), Victory, Volkswagen, Worker Rights and Jobs

History—good history, if conditional history—was made last Friday in Chattanooga, as workers at Volkswagen’s factory there voted to join the United Auto Workers by an overwhelming margin of 2,628 to 985, a 73 percent to 27 percent landslide. The vote was historic on any number of counts. It marks the UAW’s first successful unionization of a foreign-owned auto factory after a number of failed attempts; it marks the first unionization in many decades of a major group of workers in the non-union South; it may even mark the rebirth of a powerful union movement, something the nation has lacked over the past 40 years.

How Alabama Communists Organized In The Jim Crow South

April 16, 2024 Robin D.G. Kelly and Daniel Denvir, Portside. Organize! Alabama, Communists, History, The South, Worker Rights and Jobs

As the United Auto Workers (UAW) set their sights again on organizing factory workers in the Deep South, they do so keenly aware of the difficulties campaigning in a center of union-busting reaction. In 2019, bosses at a Chattanooga Volkswagen plant led a vicious anti-union campaign, abetted by Donald Trump’s National Labor Relations Board, that defeated an earlier UAW campaign there. When Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, waged an audacious effort to unionize in 2021, against one of the largest corporations on Earth, they likewise faltered in the face of widespread interference and intimidation.

Southern Auto Workers Are Rising

April 6, 2024 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. Organize! Auto Workers, Labor Movement, The South, UAW, Worker Rights and Jobs

Auto workers are gearing up to smash through anti-union bulwarks in Alabama and Tennessee. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, at the only Volkswagen factory in the world without a union, votes will be counted April 19 as 4,300 workers who make the Atlas SUV and the ID.4 electric vehicle decide whether to join the United Auto Workers. “We didn’t think things would happen so fast,” said VW worker Victor Vaughn. Momentum spurred them forward. The organizing committee recruited 300 co-workers as election captains. “We have well over 90 percent coverage within the plant, every position, every line,” said Vaughn.

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