Roll the union!

 The United Autoworkers strike against the Big Three car companies in late 2023 gained national attention and enthusiasm. That might have just been the beginning. 

Following the successful strike, which linked issues related to class and climate, the UAW turned its attention to organizing the unorganized. Those efforts have recently been crowned with success by the overwhelming vote of workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  

The vote was 2,628 in favor of joining the union and 985 against, meaning around 73% supported the drive. Earlier efforts to unionize the facility failed in 2014 and 2019. Next month, workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama will also vote on joining the union. 

If this trend continues, this win in the traditionally anti-union South could be as historic as last year’s victory—or the epic organizing drives of the 1930s. 

It’s no secret that for decades corporations have been shifting production to southern states, where the power of unions has traditionally been thwarted by so-called “Right to Work” (RTW) legislation. I call it “Right to Work for Less.” 

RTW laws lower labor standards, undermine the democratic process, weaken unions, and allow free riders to benefit from collective bargaining agreements without providing dues to support the process. And unfortunately, these laws have spread beyond their southern origins. 

Many people may not be aware, however, of the vile and explicitly racist origins and motivations of RTW. 

The person who came up with the name and launched the movement to enact it as law was a Texas businessman and politico named Vance Muse, who lived from 1890 to 1950. An unabashed racist and anti-Semite, he bitterly opposed the labor law reforms of the New Deal, which he referred to as “the Jew Deal.” 

At the time, the labor movement was making huge advances and helping to build working-class power. However, it faced serious obstacles in the South, where a racial caste system divided workers and kept wages low for everyone. 

Vance and his allies in the “Christian American Association,” an organization he founded to promote RTW, were opposed to unions not only for their promotion of better wages and conditions but also for their potential threat to the system of racial segregation. But they soon gained powerful supporters beyond the South and began to win major victories. 

According to Dartmouth historian Marc Dixon: “The Christian American Association out of Houston was the first to champion Right-to-Work as a full-blown political slogan in 1941. The organization stood out in a crowded field for its fiery rhetoric against President Roosevelt and especially labor. But Right-to-Work quickly moved from the fringe to the mainstream. After the war, organizations like the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers championed the laws with great effect. By the early spring of 1947, fourteen states had adopted Right-to-Work, and the Taft-Hartley Act, passed by Congress later that year, solidified the rights of states to pass and enforce these laws.” 

Muse was able to play on racial biases to promote RTW with considerable success — but not a lot of subtlety. Some of his anti-Black and antisemitic remarks are too inflammatory to include here. Suffice it to say that he believed anti-labor laws and repression were necessary to “keep the color line drawn in our social affairs” and “protect the Southern Negro [sic] from communistic propaganda and influences.” 

When union organizers with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) dreamed of launching “Operation Dixie” in the 1940s to organize southern workers and overcome segregation, Muse’s wealthy backers of millionaires, corporations, business associations, and demagogic politicians were able to largely neutralize the effort. 

It won’t be easy, but perhaps this most recent UAW victory will be a major step toward undoing that shameful legacy of racism and greed. 

I don’t know of anyone who spoke the truth about RTW—and the connection between the struggles for racial and economic justice—more clearly than the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work’” he said. “It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights.” 

King elaborated that RTW’s “purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone. … Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped.” 

Amen to that. 

(This appeared on the AFSC website. The UAW has won another victory since this came out.)

A time for solidarity

 It’s been over five years since the historic teachers strike in West Virginia. To this day, it’s one of my proudest moments as a West Virginian. Teachers, cooks, bus drivers, students and parents like me filled the state House of Delegates and Senate galleries, the upper and lower rotundas and spilled out into the hallways of the state capitol. The frustration, and also the joy of being together in the fight for working people, were palpable.

Of course, union organizing in West Virginia is nearly as old and storied as our mountains, but the 2018 teachers strike was the first time I got to witness its power first-hand.

Today, even though we’re a few states away from the action, the strike of the United Auto Workers in Michigan is pretty darn exciting. Of course, another reason West Virginians can feel close to the UAW strike is that our own Walter Reuther, a native of Wheeling, was the longest-serving president of the UAW. Reuther, having survived two attempted assassinations, served as UAW president until he died in a plane crash in 1970.

During his time as UAW President, Reuther used (with a lot of success) a strategy called “pattern bargaining” against what were “the big three” auto companies – then General Motors, Ford Motor Company and Chrysler. Pattern bargaining was essentially a tactic to leverage the competition amongst the big three in order to advance the wages or improve the working conditions of all autoworkers.

Martin Luther King Jr., on the 25th anniversary of the UAW’s founding, wrote in a letter to Reuther, “Through trials, efforts and your unswerving devotion to humanitarian causes, you have made life more meaningful for millions of working people. Through moments of difficulty and strong obstacles, you have stood firm for what you believe, knowing that in the long run ‘Truth crushed to earth will rise again.’ As I have heard you say, the true measure of a man is where he stands in moments of challenge and controversy.”

The UAW is in a great moment of challenge because up until now, the union has never carried out a simultaneous work stoppage at “the big three” auto companies – now General Motors, Ford and Stellantis.

As with any historic moment, there is always important context. During the great recession around 2007 through 2009, the auto industry got a bailout of billions of dollars from the federal government, and at the same time autoworkers took massive cuts to their wages and benefits. Pensions all but disappeared. The companies introduced “tiers” which basically meant worse pay for the same work.

Since then, the labor of the autoworkers has generated $250,000,000,000 – yes that many zeroes — a quarter of a trillion dollars for the shareholders of the three companies. CEO pay is up 40% while autoworker wages went up 6%. Try to square that 6% with inflation having gone up 18%.

Now with major federal investments in a shift toward electric vehicles, the companies are forming “joint venture” battery plants, while closing profitable ones in Ohio, Illinois and Michigan. All of these maneuvers are “profit above all” attempts to pay lower wages and weaken worker safety standards at battery plants.

So, there’s a lot on the line, and what happens in Michigan will set the stage for whether electric vehicle manufacturing will be gateway to the middle class for hundreds of thousands of families, or deepen the already gaping chasm between the CEO class and the working class of this country.

The striking autoworkers are asking for fair pay, equal pay for equal work, and ensuring that EV jobs pay a good wage and are safe for workers. What’s not to like about that?

In the same letter King wrote to Reuther, he said something that hits home today. It’s a sentiment I hope we can echo to both the teachers and school employees who went on strike in 2018, and to the autoworkers in Michigan who are on strike today: “One day all of America will be proud of your achievements, and will record your work as one of the glowing epics of our heritage.”

Garlic!

I don't have a green thumb but I do my time in the garden. This year, ours is not terribly ambitious but it has been a pretty decent year so far. First came lettuce, arugula, radishes and spinach, then peas and the occasional hot pepper. Tomatoes are coming in now, along with an eggplant or two.

One crop I take a particular interest in is garlic, something I consider to be a welcome addition to almost any recipe, with the possible exceptions of breakfast cereal and deserts. We usually plant ours after the first frost but before the ground gets too hard. This time we did it on Christmas Day (the power was out so that provided our entertainment), putting the clove sections about finger deep and covering them with mulch from the goat barn.

Garlic is pretty low maintenance. In early summer, the plants develop bulbs or scapes that we cut off (they are edible). Then just wait until the leaves start turning brown and dig them up, being careful not to damage the bulbs.

This weekend I dug up our crop, which turned out pretty good. I'm hoping it will get us through most of the coming year. As for the rest of the crops, how's that rain coming?

STALLED. Two million jobless Americans have lost unemployment benefits due to congressional inaction.

ELIMINATE THE MIDDLE MAN. Here's a novel approach to global poverty.

WALTHER REUTHER. Any op-ed that favorably mentions a great West Virginian and labor leader has a place here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

PUSH THE ROCK

Welcome to Albert Camus Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

In his work "The Myth of Sisyphus," Camus asserted that

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whet er life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

(The reader has apparently answered the question in the affirmative at the moment anyway...)

For Camus, the question of the value of life was related to his idea of the absurd, that is human life as characterized by mortality, contingency, and the lack of an inherent meaning in a universe without God. As he put it,

in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger.

His image for the human condition was derived from the mythological figure of Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to perpetually roll a heavy stone up the hill only to have it roll down again.

Come to think of it, a lot of life is kinda like that. Still, Camus wound up affirming life.

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable...."I conclude that all is well," says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted...It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing...

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. The universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

CHIP VOTE. The House passed legislation preserving and expanding the Children's Health Insurance Program 265 to 159 yesterday, not enough to override a Bush veto if it happens.

El Cabrero and his amigos held a press conference yesterday in support of the program for which we actually had press, which is a plus. High five! Great success!

CHIP AND IRAQ. The CHIP expansion mentioned above costs less than six weeks of the war in Iraq.

UNLEASHING WHATEVER UPDATE. A marriage made in heaven?

A TENTATIVE AGREEMENT between GM and the UAW has been reached. Here's hoping they got a good deal.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED