Here is your Missouri Labor Weekly Update!
The Biggest Thing Going:
Labor Battle in Alabama
The Alabama AFL-CIO’s Annual Roadkill Bar-B-Que reminds us that things can always be worse!
Normally known for college football, Lynery Skynerd songs, and losing civil wars, Alabama has emerged as a hotbed of 2024 union activity. This week let’s take a quick detour from Missouri politics down I-55 to check in on our union sisters and brothers organizing in Dixie.
Background
The South has union members. It always has, and always will. But it’s no secret that the South has historically been hostile to union organizing. A glance at a map shows that Missouri is the only remotely southern-ish State that hasn’t fallen prey to right-to-work laws. The result is that union membership in the south tends to hover around 5% or about half the national average.
An agrarian economy, instead of an industrial base; the ugly history of slavery, Jim Crow, and institutional racism; opposition from a deeply entrenched political and economic elite, and the doom loop of the aforementioned right-to-work laws, all play roles in the South’s traditional lack of union density.
But even in the face of stiff opposition workers have always fought back. Dr. Martin Luther King, assassinated in the southern city of Memphis, spent his last moments on earth standing with the sanitation workers of AFSCME who were on strike for safer job conditions. The Warrior-Met coal miners of UMWA just spent TWO YEARS on the Alabama picket line, desperately trying to strengthen their union and help their families get what they deserve.
And in recent years unions have tried to organize the south. The UAW tried to organize Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga and Nissan workers in Mississippi, Machinists tried to unionize Boeing in South Carolina; both efforts, valiantly fought, ultimately ended in frustration.
2024 Alabama
This brings us to current-day Alabama. The South’s traditional agrarian economy is evolving under a new wave of industrialization. The Alabama auto industry alone now employs nearly 50,000 workers and exports around 9 billion worth of cars a year. But with low union density workers aren’t seeing growth in their share of the pie. Alabama is the sixth poorest state in the country, ranks 48th in health outcomes, 49th in life expectancy, and 7th in workplace fatalities. Combine a growing industrial economy, with poor quality of life and record high union approval and it was only a matter of time before Southern unions attempted to rise again.
Despite their State being last in good things and first in bad things, the anti-union establishment is absolutely desperate to maintain the status quo
Alabama Workers Stand UP
Fresh off the triumph of their nationwide stand-up strike (kicked off in Wentzville!), the United Auto Workers have launched an aggressive organizing campaign. The UAW is coordinating with other unions to align contracts, helping auto-workers in other countries raise their standard of living, spending 40 million dollars on organizing between now and 2026, and…taking another swing at organizing the South.
The first step is taking another run at the Chattanooga Volkswagen plant. Defeated in previous tries in 2014 and 2019, the success of the Stand Up strike generated so much momentum that the UAW quickly collected enough cards to trigger an election. This time a labor-friendly NLRB (THANK YOU JOE BIDEN) didn’t drag its feet to give the company’s anti-union campaign more time, promptly scheduling the plant’s election for April 17-19th (next week!).
Next up is the Deep South. Last fall the UAW began pouring serious resources into organizing Mercedes-Benz in Alabama. Beginning in the Vance plant near Tuscaloosa which manufactures Mercedes SUV’s, the workers quickly reached the 30% union card threshold by January, and just two months later cleared the 50% mark and now claim a super-majority! Last week they filed with the NLRB for an election, and while a date has not yet been set, it is anticipated that the schedule will be similar to Tennessee’s with a quick turnaround.
In February the UAW’s SECOND Alabama organizing campaign went public. Over 30% of workers at the Hyundai manufacturing plant in Montgomery announced that they had signed cards to be represented by the UAW.
There is no doubt that the autoworkers of Alabama have seen how unionizing has benefited other workers in their industry, and are ready to stand up to claim their fair share of the economic pie.
The Establishment Pushes Back
Death, taxes, and corporations trying to keep their ill-gotten profits. As expected the Alabama financial and political elites immediately hit back. Mercedes-Benz resorted to the usual captive audience meetings, threats, promises, and talk of being “family.” A great video of the opposition tactics and workers’ resilience to them is here.
And the government of Alabama itself is trying to put its weight on the scales. Anti-union Republican Governor Kay Ivey wrote on a government website about Alabama workers unionizing that “the Alabama model for economic success is under attack.” A downright ridiculous claim for a poor state where nearly 1 in 5 people live below the poverty line. The Alabama Commerce Secretary has been actively campaigning against the organizing drive. And the Alabama legislature is going even further, seeking to pass Senate Bill 231 which bans corporations that voluntarily recognize unions from receiving State tax incentives. While the odds of Mercedes voluntarily recognizing the union is basically zero, threatening the over a quarter of a BILLION dollars that Alabama taxpayers are shoveling over to Mercedes is a clear shot at threatening the stability of the plant and weakening the resolve of the workers.
What’s At Stake
For thousands of Alabama autoworkers their future is at stake, and on its own that’s enough, but the fight is so much bigger than that. It’s about how the automotive industry operates throughout the country, and even across the world. It’s about whether the anti-union wall in the south begins to crack, and eventually splits wide open. To be clear, the UAW is not the only ongoing effort to organize the South. The Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW) is taking the Fight For 15 into Dixie. Workers at Waffle Houses throughout the South, with the support of SEIU, walked out for 3 days in March in protest of a mandatory “meal credit” that is deducted from their paycheck each shift.
Tired of being smothered, Waffle House workers protest in Atlanta.
Ultimately the ability for workers to achieve, and just as importantly MAINTAIN, unions from Chattanooga to Tuscaloosa, to Montgomery to Waffle Houses across the south are linked together. Southern workers, with help from union brothers and sisters across the country, have a historic opportunity to rise up and improve the lives of themselves, their families, and their communities. As D. Taylor, President of UNITE HERE, who has been working to organize service workers across the South wisely said “If you change the South, you change America.”
Stand Up Chattanooga!
Stand Up Tuscaloosa!
Go get ’em UAW!
In Solidarity,
Stephen Webber
Missouri AFL-CIO, Communications Director
