The South

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.

The South, Where Automakers Go For A Discount

February 6, 2024 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. Resist! Auto Workers, Big Auto, History, The South, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

In 1978, Volkswagen became the first foreign-owned company to manufacture cars in the United States since Rolls-Royce in the 1930s, setting up shop in Westmoreland, Pennsylvania. “This is one of the most important organized victories in years for the UAW,” said United Auto Workers President Doug Fraser after VW workers voted 865 to 17 to join the union. “We believe that there will be other foreign automakers deciding to open plants in the U.S. and we intend to organize those workers as well.” Since then, some 35 shiny new engine and assembly plants have been installed along I-75 and I-55, forming an automotive corridor from the Midwest to the South that today employs about 150,000 workers

At MLK Conference, Unionists Strategize On Organizing The South

January 18, 2024 Mark Gruenberg, Portside. Organize! MLK, The South, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Unionists at the AFL-CIO’s annual Martin Luther King conference, held January 12-14 in Montgomery, Ala., tackled what one panelist called a decades-long problem for the labor movement: Organizing the South. And that means both for more union victories, and members, and politically, too. The conference, in a birthplace of the modern civil rights movement, preceded the first actual voting of the 2024 presidential campaign: The January 15 Iowa Republican caucuses, pitted former GOP Oval Office occupant Donald Trump—a self-professed authoritarian who’d rip up the U.S. Constitution—against the rest of the field.

Southern Human Rights Organizing And The Amazon Workers’ Struggle

December 24, 2023 Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. Organize! Amazon, Human Rights, The South, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Jennifer Bates is an organizer with the BAmazon Union , the effort to organize Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama. BAmazon Union is affiliated with the Retail, Wholesale & Department Store Union (RWDSU). I spoke to Ms. Bates at the Southern Human Rights Organizers Conference (SHROC) which was recently held in Nashville. SHROC is an opportunity for human rights organizers and defenders to come together to share strategies, learn from each other, and build relationships. It’s a gathering of grassroots organizers and human rights defenders from across the U.S. and Global South.

When Black And White Tenant Farmers Joined Together

December 9, 2023 David Griscom, The Real News Network. Organize! Farmers, History, Solidarity, The South, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

It’s 1935 and class war is brewing in Arkansas. Standing before 1,500 black and white sharecroppers, the radical Methodist minister Ward Rodgers thunders, “I can lead a mob to lynch any planter in Poinsett County.” The crowd erupts with applause. These white and black sharecroppers who worked, lived, and died amid the vestiges of the Southern plantation system were no strangers to terror. The night before, a group of planters and deputy sheriffs had attacked an adult education class taught by Rodgers. The landowner class, the banks, the police, and an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan called the Nightriders had been engaged in a brutal crackdown on the workers of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union.

Laney Graduate Students Vote To Unionize

November 30, 2023 Ilah Ross, Portside. Organize! Georgia, Graduate Students, Higher Education, The South, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Laney Graduate School students have voted to unionize after years of advocacy, making Emory University the first private university to have a graduate-worker union in Georgia and the second in the South. EmoryUnite! is now officially recognized as a union under the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), meaning Emory administration is required to enter negotiations with graduate students. EmoryUnite! announced the results in a Nov. 28 Instagram post. In total, 909 students (92.6%) voted in favor of unionization while 73 students (7.4%) voted against unionization during the election on Oct. 17 and 18, according to the post. Of the approximately 1,700 Laney Ph.D. students eligible to vote in the election, 982 (57.8%) participated.

Disabled Southerners Are Building New Paths To Grassroots Power

October 31, 2023 Justin A. Davis, Waging Nonviolence. Organize! Disability Rights, Health Justice, Joe Biden, The South

Alongside some of this moment’s biggest grassroots struggles — mass movements to transform American policing, labor, health care and voting rights — the fight against ableism has been a constant undercurrent. During the late 20th century, the disability rights movement emerged in tandem with the long civil rights movement, leading to major reforms at the federal level. In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, formally banned discrimination against disabled people in employment, public services and commerce — a watershed moment for anti-ableism work.

New Report: The Failed Southern Economic Development Model

October 22, 2023 Chandra Childers, Economic Policy Institute. Educate! Economic Development, Poverty, Racism, The South

Many states across the Southern United States employ an economic model that prioritizes business interests and the wealthy over ordinary citizens. This model—which we refer to in this report as the “Southern economic development model”—is characterized by low wages, low taxes, few regulations on businesses, few labor protections, a weak safety net, and vicious opposition to unions. The model is marketed as the way to attract businesses into Southern states, with the implicit promise that this will lead to an abundance of jobs and shared economic prosperity for all Southerners. The reality is this economic development model is fundamentally flawed as a strategy for improving living conditions for most Southerners.

From Palestine To The Black South, Journalism Is Exposing Injustice

October 13, 2023 Natascha Elena Uhlmann, In These Times. Strategize! Abolition, Israel, Journalism, Liberation, Palestine, The South

There’s no shortage of dangerous narratives about the South: that people vote for their own oppressors, that the South is decades behind, that it can’t be saved. Perhaps on the last note there’s a kernel of truth: the South doesn’t need saving. If you read Scalawag magazine, you know that Southerners are saving themselves. Since 2015, Scalawag has produced essential coverage of Southern organizing for collective liberation. From investigative deep dives on Alabama prison facilities to expansive meditations on Black women’s grief, Scalawag grapples fearlessly with the crises of police violence, mass incarceration and capitalism, and spotlights organizers and movements that are fighting towards the world we so desperately need.

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

September 21, 2023 Mindy Isser, In These Times. Organize! Anti-Labor, North Carolina, The South, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

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.

Southern Worker School Charts Path For Building Workers Movement

April 30, 2023 Southern Workers Assembly. Strategize! Labor Movement, People's Assembly, The South, Worker Rights

“We heard from the rail workers. We heard from the truckers. We’ve got the longshoremen in the house, too,” said Leonard Riley, a longshore worker with the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) Local 1422 and member of the SWA Coordinating Committee, addressing a packed house at the Teamsters Local 71 union hall during the opening program of the 2023 Southern Worker School. “The reason I bring that up is because of the power that’s in this room. We’ve got bus drivers over there, teachers over here. There’s power in this room. It’s going to take strategy, planning, coming together, and finding out where the power connectors are to mobilize and exercise it.”

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