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CHAPTER 11: Detroit South
- University Press of Mississippi
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DETROIT SOUTH James Fisher, his hair closely cropped, his blue Nissan work shirt clean and neatly pressed, his demeanor serious, stood at the podium in the meeting hall of the Canton United Methodist Church and surveyed the assembly before speaking. He was there to give his personal testimony—not about his religious faith, but about his job. “One of the first things they showed us when we came in was an antiunion video, people throwing rocks,” the twenty-four-year-old tooland -die worker at the company’s giant Canton, Mississippi, plant said at the January 2007 gathering. After three and a half years at Nissan, he said, the message hasn’t changed. “The unions are the devil from Detroit. That’s the way they look at it. They tell us, ‘We got a thousand applicants at the door waiting to replace you.’” The crowd of sixty or so workers, activists, and ministers had already been warmed up by two hours of labor preaching and testifying at the African American church. They punctuated every sentence or two with an “Amen!” and long nods of affirmation as Fisher talked about working in a unionized shop in Tupelo, Mississippi, before he came to Canton, the protection and security a union provides, the sharp contrast to a worksite like Nissan where no union exists. Before unions, “companies would work you twelve hours a day, seven days a week.” Today at Nissan, he said, management questions the validity of work injuries, and hires temporary workers to keep costs down. “They hire a lot of young people, a lot who don’t really look to the future. I do look to the future. I got a daughter crying on my knee, ‘When you coming home from work, daddy?’” He leaned into the podium to make the next point. “We need a voice, and this is how we’re going to get it.”1 I sat back in my metal chair several rows back and marveled at his courage. Even after getting fortified by an afternoon-long of sermonizing, Bible quoting, and gospel singing led by the Reverend J. Herbert Nelson and the Reverend Nelson Johnson of the Chapter 11 193 194 Detroit South meeting’s co-sponsor, the Southern Faith, Labor, and Community Alliance , the man was brave to speak so openly while virtually in the shadow of Nissan’s $1.4 billion, 3.5 million-square-foot plant and its nearly six thousand employees. After all, this was a company run by the fiercely antiunion Carlos Ghosn, the Brazilian-born, French-educated “wunderkind” of modernday automaking who slashed twenty-five thousand jobs on his climb to the top, a man who personally intervened in a union election at Nissan’s Smyrna, Tennessee, plant to tell workers that a “yes” vote threatened not only the plant’s future but theirs as well. “Nissan’s got this big halo, this rainbow over them,” Fisher said about the company that cuts his checks. “It’s all on the outside. We have to fight tooth and nail on the inside. They can do what they want to on the inside. It’s always somebody trying to cut somebody’s throat.”2 When Yvette Taylor got her turn at the podium, each step to the front of the hall was slow and labored. Once she reached the microphone, her nervousness was visible. She struggled for words. “So many things happened that I just don’t know where to begin.” What followed was a tale of work-related injuries, missteps in treatment, disrespect, suspicion, and finally dismissal. When she started work at the plant in 2004, the mother of ten was excited to be once again in the workplace after twenty-one years of rearing children at home. “After all the children were grown and left, I went to work.” She injured her hands and knees, however, and soon found herself caught in a bureaucracy that shifted her back and forth between home, the workplace, and interviews with plant officials who questioned her background and history of previous injuries. “I got a letter in the mail saying I was terminated. . . . What I’m dealing with now is my right hand. I can barely lift it.”3 This was one of a series of meetings of workers and local community leaders organized by the SFLCA and the United Auto Workers (UAW), which had been laying the groundwork for a possible major organizing effort at the Canton plant since early 2005. I...