Workers Are Joining Labor Unions Like It’s 1919
The South’s trend toward unionization is the latest chapter in a story of racism and antisemitism that began more than a century ago
April was a busy month for the United Auto Workers Union (UAW). Last Friday, the union avoided a potential strike, reaching a tentative agreement with Daimler Truck covering thousands of workers in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia.
The Daimler Truck deal, announced by Union President Shawn Fain, includes wage increases, cost-of-living adjustments, and profit-sharing. The union hopes for a similar outcome at Alabama’s Mercedes Benz plant as part of its $40 million campaign to unionize automakers across the southern United States.
The previous week, workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tennessee automobile factory voted to join the UAW, with nearly 75% of the company's workers voting in favor of unionization. Tennessee’s labor turnaround holds particular significance given the UAW’s two previous attempts to unionize. From the Washington Post:
The vote marks the biggest organizing victory in years for the UAW and for the broader labor movement, which has long faced difficulty in Southern states. The UAW had twice previously failed to unionize the VW plant, in 2014 and 2019. VW Chattanooga will join a handful of other unionized auto factories in the South, where local laws and customs have made it hard for unions to make inroads.
Notably, the failure of the UAW's 2014 vote was due in large part to what then-president Bob King described as “extraordinary interference in the private decision of workers,” about an intense anti-unionization campaign led by then-senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who had previously been Chattanooga's mayor.
The Tennessee GOP, along with outside conservative groups launched a pressure campaign to persuade workers to reject the union, even going so far as to threaten to withhold tax incentives from the company. For its part, Volkswagen, which has German-style works councils known as Betriebsrat (groups of elected employees who work with management on behalf of the company's workforce) at the majority of its factories internationally, did not oppose the union drive.
In addition to its recent successes, the UAW has managed to boost workers’ wages at Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis late last year.
Since the pandemic, the power of unions nationwide has increased. Moreover, the UAW’s victories in southern states point to a dramatic change in worker sentiment regarding labor unions; it also underscores a rejection of so-called “Right-To-Work” (RTW) policies.
After falling to an all-time low of 48% in the years following the 2009 housing crisis, a 2022 Gallop poll found that 71% of Americans approved of labor unions, up from pre-pandemic levels and the highest point since 1965.
Unsurprisingly, governors of several Republican states have reacted to the change in the status quo with warnings of damage to the economy, job losses, and plant closures. In Georgia, the GOP-controlled legislature wants to go even further to keep unions out of their state:
The state Senate voted 31-23 Thursday to approve a bill backed by Gov. Brian Kemp that would ban companies that accept government incentives from recognizing unions without a formal, secret ballot. This would prevent unions from voluntarily obtaining recognition from a company after enrolling a majority of workers, commonly referred to as a card check. Senate Bill 362 moves to the House of Representatives for further debate.
Labor leaders and Democrats argue that the bill violates the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which governs union organizing, by blocking part of federal law that allows companies to voluntarily recognize unions that show the support of a majority of workers.
Brian Kemp and other Southern governors, go to great lengths to attract big business, shoveling billions in economic incentives to automakers and other companies. Unions, they say, threaten their state's ability to be competitive. But despite their anti-union rhetoric, recent data from the Economic Policy Institute tells a different story (emphasis added):
[S]tudies of Oklahoma after the state enacted RTW in 2001 found a significant reduction in private-sector unionization, but no measurable effect on employment growth. Similarly, researchers at the University of Kentucky examined state economic performance across Southern U.S. states from 1964 to 2004 and found that RTW status had no relationship to state economic outcomes. When studies have claimed to find such effects, it is often due to failure to control for other critical factors, such as education levels of the workforce, proximity to transportation hubs, technological advances, or natural resources.
Indeed, the trend towards organized labor reflects a desire by workers to be recognized as equal stakeholders in a capitalist model that traditionally favors shareholders and corporate profits. Historically, the fight for worker's rights has been met not only with verbal resistance but often with violent clashes.
“State records of anti-Black massacres are often not dependable because they were generated by law enforcement agencies and officials who actually participated in the violence.” ~Paul Ortiz, director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida
The post-WWI backlash against African American labor rights
By the end of the First World War, the influence of organized labor had increased, with unions gaining numerous workplace reforms, such as the 8-hour workday.
The years after World War I were marked by a dramatic rise in inflation. From 1917 to 1920, inflation rose by levels not seen in any time since. From December 1916 to June 1920, prices spiked by an annualized rate of more than 18%.
As a result of the economic environment, more than four million workers (one-fifth of the country's workforce) participated in strikes in 1919, a number unsurpassed until the years following the Great Depression.
Millions of returning Black veterans were met with intense racial animus, driven by competition for jobs. The resulting racial tensions were exacerbated in the North by the flight of African Americans escaping the Jim Crow South in what is commonly known as the Great Migration.
This new employment paradigm marked the first time white workers nationwide were forced to compete for employment head-to-head with Black workers. The dramatic change in the country’s social landscape culminated during a period known as the Red Summer of 1919, one of the worst periods of racially motivated violence in American history:
World War I intensified the Great Migration, the mass emigration of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North and Midwest in hopes of escaping the poverty and discrimination of Jim Crow laws. By the summer of 1919, approximately 500,000 African Americans had resettled in northern cities. In many cases, northern Whites—many of them newly arrived immigrants themselves—did not welcome Black newcomers.
The worst incident of racial violence in 1919 occurred in Elaine, Arkansas on September 30th. The attack on Black Arkansans lasted several days and was sparked in response to the formation of a union by Black tenant farmers.
While the massacres of African Americans in Wilmington, North Carolina, and Tulsa, Oklahoma (in 1898 and 1921 respectively) are more widely known, the Elaine Massacre holds a particular significance. Unlike other racially motivated attacks during which civilians took the law into their own hands, in Elaine white mobs were supported by federal troops (emphasis added):
Black veterans of the First World War along with tenant farmers in Phillips County, Arkansas – in which Elaine lies – mobilized a union effort in 1919 to fight for their equitable shares of harvested crops and recognition of Black land ownership. On the evening of 29 September, representatives of the Black-founded PFHUA (Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America) and approximately 100 Black farmers met at church in Hoop Spur, not far from Elaine, to discuss an organizing strategy. Two white deputies and a Black trustee came and shots were exchanged, killing one of the deputies. Later, white mobs supported by federal troops descended on the Elaine area to quell a falsely claimed plot to kill white residents. Initial reports of fatalities numbered in the dozens, but as the years passed due to eyewitness accounts and descendant testimonials it increased to 300-550, making it one of the worst racist attacks in American history.
In a perverse twist, more than one hundred African American victims of the Elaine massacre were indicted and put on trial, allegedly for engaging in an “insurrection” against white Arkansans.
As with other episodes of anti-Black violence, the media was complicit. The Arkansas Democrat (a predecessor to the current Arkansas Democrat-Gazette) provided cover for the white attackers by engaging in a misinformation campaign. The newspaper published stories asserting that individuals who joined the PFHUA did so with the tacit understanding that “ultimately he would be called upon to kill white people.” From Smithsonian Magazine:
In the days after the bloodshed in Elaine, local media coverage continued to fan the flames daily, reporting sensational stories of an organized plot against whites. A seven-man committee formed to investigate the killings. Their conclusions all too predictable: the following week they issued a statement in the Arkansas Democrat declaring the gathering in Elaine a “deliberately planned insurrection if the negroes against the whites” led by the PFHUA, whose founders used “ignorance and superstition of a race of children for monetary gains.”
Sixty-seven African American men were sent to prison, with twelve receiving the death penalty. The NAACP intervened on behalf of “The Elaine Twelve,” launching a series of legal appeals that worked their way through the Arkansas courts to the Supreme Court. In 1923, the Court overturned their convictions in a 6-2 vote.
Vance Muse and the rise of the “Right-To-Work” movement
In the years following the Red Summer, union membership waned, due in part to intense union-breaking efforts. Membership in unions declined from roughly 20% of the nonfarm labor force in 1920 to less than 10% at the start of Roosevelt’s New Deal. According to research compiled by G. William Domhoff, professor emeritus at the University of Santa Cruz, membership in unions fell from five million in 1919 to fewer than three million in 1933.
Union membership increased exponentially during the Great Depression as jobless workers looked to unions for employment security. African American workers joined unions in record numbers because of changes in union policies and favorable labor legislation. The new labor laws specifically excluded agricultural workers, allowing Southern states to preserve low-wage employment practices:
The organization in 1935 of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which sought to organize industrial workers regardless of race or ethnic background, contributed to an alleviation of the historic conflict between African Americans and trade unions. Thousands of African American workers joined unions…
…Protective labor legislation of the 1930s, such as the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, did not extend to agricultural workers, although 31.8 percent of the African American population in 1940 was employed in agriculture (40.4 percent in the South). A 1945 Bureau of Labor Statistics survey of American agricultural unionism noted that "labor unionism in agriculture has been a rather anomalous and transitory development in the American economy. It has been composed of literally hundreds of organizations that were sporadic, scattered, and short lived. The reasons why most labor unions failed in the 1930s were "the same reasons that made them vulnerable to agitation and strikes . . . [T]heir extreme mobility, the high seasonality of their work, and the low wage rates all combined to make unionization among them costly."
…Agricultural workers were further hampered in their efforts at unionization because of their low social status and political impotence, public perception of the traditional family farm, and agriculture laborers who had more "solicitude of their employers" than industrial workers had.
The term “Right-To-Work“ first appeared in an editorial written by William Ruggles. In the Labor Day 1941 edition of the Dallas Morning News, Ruggles advocated for the passage of a United States Constitution amendment banning the “closed shop,” another term used for unions. While Ruggles may have coined the phrase, it was Vance Muse, a southern lobbyist, virulent racist, and antisemite, who made these policies a reality.
Muse drew national attention due to his work on behalf of John Henry Kirby, a Texas lumberman, in the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution (SCUC), an anti-Semitic and anti-black organization that lobbied against the reelection of FDR. Despite its name, the SCUC received significant funding from well-known northern industrialists opposed to the New Deal.
Muse viewed unions, as well as President Roosevelt’s New Deal, as a conspiracy to disrupt the South's Jim Crow racial order, and claimed Marxist Jews controlled the federal government behind the scenes. After failing to block Roosevelt’s reelection, Muse formed the Christian American Association in 1936. continued to peddle anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, anti-Black racism, and opposition to organized labor.
In 1944, the Arkansas Farm Bureau Federation partnered with a group of like-minded industrialists to fund a campaign to add a right-to-work amendment to the Arkansas Constitution. Arkansas, along with Florida and California, were the first states to have right-to-work ballot initiatives:
During the Arkansas campaign, the Christian Americans insisted that right-to-work was essential to maintain the color line in labor relations…
…Similarly, the Arkansas Farm Bureau Federation justified its support of right-to-work by citing organized labor’s threat to Jim Crow. It accused the CIO of “trying to pit tenant against landlord and black against white.”
In November 1944, Arkansas and Florida became the first states to enact right-to-work laws (California voters rejected the measure). In both states, few blacks could cast free ballots, election fraud was rampant, and political power was concentrated in the hands of an elite. Right-to-work laws sought to make it stay that way.
Despite the promises, Right-To-Work laws have little to do with economic growth, good jobs, and opportunity. These policies are the last vestiges of a labor system dependent upon low wages, and is rooted in Jim Crow segregation and antisemitism. To think otherwise is to ignore history.
Great article! White ppl need to read this and really accept the lies and violence the white men had against hard working black Americans! Anyone who votes for rePUGliCONs or the death cult…are literally fucking themselves! And msm is whiny white rich monsters…rePUGliCONs!