Much of the GOP Controlled South Is Hostile Towards Workers

The history of the American South is one of huge wealth disparities and underpaid workers, first in the form of slaves and their plantation masters and then by sharecroppers struggling to get by financially and in many cases the same large landowners who were former slaveholders.   While prosperity blossomed in many parts of the North and far West under thanks to unions and tax policies that did not give breaks to the wealthy while placing much of the burden of paying for government services and infrastructure on the lower and middle classes, the South clung to a past of control by the privileged few and labor laws that favored big businesses and large landowners to the detriment of workers.  One hears endless platitudes from southern Republicans about wanting to bring "good paying jobs" to their states, yet they push rabidly anti-labor policies under the guise of "right to work" laws and anti-unionism,  policies that continue even in Virginia although the population/ economic explosion of Northern Virginia and parts of the so-called urban crescent somewhat mask the phenomenon. Indeed, some southern states are even seeking to roll back bans on child labor.  Now, the United Auto Workers is pressing to unionize plants in the South and the usual suspects within the GOP are acting as if organized labor is an existential threat to society.  A column in the Washington Post looks at what's happening and the hysterical over reaction from Republicans.  Here are highlights:

Last year, the United Auto Workers announced an ambitious plan to organize workers and unionize foreign-owned auto plants in the South.

“One of our biggest goals coming out of this historic contract victory is to organize like we’ve never organized before,” Shawn Fain, the president of the U.A.W., said after winning significant wage and benefit gains in negotiations with Ford, General Motors and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler). “When we return to the bargaining table in 2028, it won’t just be with the Big Three. It will be the Big Five or Six.”

U.A.W. is targeting 13 automakers — including Toyota, Hyundai, Honda, Nissan, Volvo and Tesla — employing around 150,000 workers in 36 nonunion plants across the South. It faced the first major test of its strategy on Wednesday, when 4,300 workers at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tenn., began voting on whether to unionize. The vote ends Friday. If it’s successful, it will be a breakthrough for a labor movement that has struggled to build a footing in the South.

The mere potential for union success was so threatening that the day before the vote began, several of the Southern Republican governors announced their opposition to the U.A.W. campaign. . . . “As governors, we have a responsibility to our constituents to speak up when we see special interests looking to come into our state and threaten our jobs and the values we live by.”

It is no shock to see conservative Republicans opposing organized labor. But it is difficult to observe this particular struggle, taking place as it is in the South, without being reminded of the region’s entrenched hostility to unions — or any other institution or effort that might weaken the political and economic dominance of capital over the whole of Southern society.

The history of Southern political economy is to a great extent a history of the unbreakable addiction of Southern political and economic elites to no-wage and low-wage labor. Before the Civil War, of course, this meant slavery. And where the peculiar institution was most lucrative, an ideology grew from the soil of the cotton fields and rice paddies and sugar plantations, one that elevated human bondage as the only solid foundation for a stable society.

“In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina declared in an 1858 speech. . . . .A decade later and the slave system was dead, crushed underfoot by the armies of emancipation. The landowning Southern elite had lost its greatest asset — a seemingly inexhaustible supply of free labor. They would never regain it, but they would fight as hard as they could to approximate it.

The next 30 years of Southern political life would be a roiling battle to stymie Black political and economic power, part of a larger struggle to control Southern labor, Black and white alike. By the turn of the 20th century, Southern elites had silenced the Populist movement and agrarian rebellion of the 1890s — which brought poor Southerners of both races together in a fledgling and fragile political alliance — with Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement.

As the sociologist Jack M. Bloom puts it in “Class, Race and the Civil Rights Movement,”

The apparent defeat of Populism and the subsequent disenfranchisement of blacks brought about a severe setback for these whites, as well. Many of them lost the right to vote. They were subject to the harsh terms of their employers, and they remained without labor unions to counter the power the wealthy retained. When they did try to form unions, they found the region’s tradition of violence turned against them.

White supremacy had triumphed, but not all whites would be supreme.

Jim Crow did not eradicate Black political action or erase class conflict among whites. Nonetheless, it established a hierarchical order of social and economic dominance by the owners of land and capital. It also produced a world of poverty and disinvestment, of Robert Penn Warren’s torn-down mills and grass covered tracks and “whitewashed shacks, all just alike, set in a row by the cotton fields.”

It was in defense of this world that Southern political and economic elites bitterly resisted organized labor as it grew by leaps and bounds in the 1930s, backed by Franklin Roosevelt, Robert Wagner and the National Labor Relations Act.

Organized labor was, is and remains an existential threat to the political and economic elites of a region whose foremost commitment is to the maintenance of an employer-dominated economy of low-wage labor and its attendant social order. Where an earlier generation complained of C.I.O. “communism,” this one warns of U.A.W. socialism. “They proudly call themselves democratic socialists,” the statement issued on Tuesday by the Republican governors says.

You may have heard the phrase “New South.” It first took hold in the last decades of the 19th century, a slogan meant to distinguish the forward-looking merchants and industrialists of the post-Reconstruction years from those whose gaze was fixed hopelessly back toward a bygone age.

The term made a bit of a comeback in the mid-20th century to describe the modernization of the South in the years and decades after World War II. This New South was, as a result of the victories of the Civil Rights movement, a more moderate South of integration and economic growth.

Neither the vote in Chattanooga, nor the upcoming vote of auto workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant near Tuscaloosa, Ala., will be dispositive for the ultimate success of the U.A.W. campaign in the South. Win or lose, this will be a long march for organized labor.

But like a gardener taking stock of her plot for the season ahead, victory might mean the chance to refresh the soil in preparation for a new kind of New South.