Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press

Foreword

ix FOREWORD by Stanley Aronowitz John Sweeney, the leader of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), led a revolt of a gaggle of large unions and was elected American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) president in 1995, an unprecedented challenge in modern labor history to a sitting administration. Not since 1908 when an insurgency within the AFL opposed the reelection of its longtime leader, Samuel Gompers, and a group of industrial unions bolted from the AFL in 1935, had labor’s ranks been so divided. The main reason for the division came about because the three leading metal workers’ unions (Auto, Steel, Machinists), together comprising over 2 million, plus the giant 1.4 million State, County and Municipal Employees, the 1.2 million-member Teamsters (which had recently experienced the victory of a reform slate), the Food and Commercial Workers and its 1.1 million members, the large Service Employees with 1 million members, and some smaller organizations were deeply disturbed by the erosion of organized labor’s economic and political clout. Union membership was declining as manufacturing jobs fled overseas and to the largely nonunion American South and Southwest. The leaders of these unions believed that unless labor made organizing its first priority and transformed what they termed the “service model” of unionism—where full-time representatives spent most of their effort handling grievances and negotiating contracts—into an organizing model, economist Richard Freeman’s prediction that by 2000 the unions would represent only six or seven percent of the private sector labor force would come true. Union leaders representing a majority of the Federation’s thirteen million members were determined, or so it seemed, to reverse the long slide that had begun with the ignominious defeat of the Air Traffic Controllers strike in 1981. As a major step they would devote at x least a third of their budgets to organizing. After being elected, Sweeney announced steps to fulfill his pledge: he authorized the founding of an organizing school to attract young idealists to build the labor movement, or more precisely to bring the movement back to the unions, appointed an aggressive, experienced organizing director to work with the affiliates, and sponsored some important organizing campaigns, especially among the working poor. But the AFL-CIO organizing agenda did not spotlight or make an organizing priority of what since the end of World War One has been organized labor’s Achilles heel: the South. Beginning with textiles on the eve of World War Two, the South had become the preferred region of investment in this, the largest manufacturing industry in the United States. By 1960, the bulk of the shoe industry had migrated southward, and a decade later the vaunted Garment and Clothing Workers unions, based largely in the Northeast, especially New York, Philadelphia, Rochester , and Baltimore, were beginning to lose their hold over the men’s, women’s, and children’s apparel industries. Simultaneously auto, electrical , and steel corporations, the heart of heavy industry, discovered the advantages of the South, among them, states and communities that were pleased to grant tax-free environments and build plants and infrastructure at little or no cost to the corporations—and the core concession: a low-wage labor force working in a union-free environment, buttressed by so-called Right to Work state laws that outlawed the union shop and, perhaps equally important, public officials, ministers, and civic leaders who would be willing to fully support anti-labor policies. Some of these policies have come from the notorious Taft-Hartley amendments to the federal labor relations law; others stem from a series of Supreme Court decisions that grant the employer in organizing situations “free speech” rights to make direct appeals to employees in order to “persuade” them to vote against the union or to shun the entreaties of union organizers. Methods of persuasion include not-so-veiled threats to move the plant overseas if the union came in, firing in-plant union activists, and numerous individual bribes such as promises of pay raises or promotions to the natural leaders of the employees. In “company” towns where if you lose your job in the plant there is no alternative but to leave, organizing is an uphill battle at best. To these obstacles must be added the fact that in many instances where, miraculously, workers courageously withstand the almost unbearable pressure from the bosses and select the union as their bargaining representative, obtaining a collective bargaining agreement becomes improbable and...