Tom Conway, President of the United Steelworkers, and Rabbits, a 21st C. Wobbly from Northumbria, offer incongruous angles on labor struggles in the American South and the UK.
Operation Dixie (2.0)
By Tom Conway
Workers at Blue Bird Corporation in Fort Valley, Georgia, launched a union drive to secure better wages, work-life balance, and a voice on the job.
The company resisted them. History defied them. Geography worked against them.
But they stood together, believed in themselves, and achieved a historic victory that’s reverberating throughout the South.
About 1,400 workers at the electric bus manufacturer voted overwhelmingly in May 2023 to join the United Steelworkers (USW), reflecting the rise of collective power in a part of the country where bosses and right-wing politicians long contrived to foil it.
“It’s just time for a change,” explained Rinardo Cooper, a member of USW Local 572 and a paper machine operator at Graphic Packaging in Macon, Georgia.
Cooper, who assisted the workers at Blue Bird with their union drive, expects more Southerners to follow suit even if they face their own uphill battles.
Given the South’s pro-corporate environment, it’s no surprise that Georgia has one of the nation’s lowest union membership rates, 4.4 percent. North Carolina’s rate is even lower, at 2.8 percent. And South Carolina’s is 1.7 percent.
Many corporations actually choose to locate in the South because the low union density enables them to pay poor wages, skimp on safety, and perpetuate the system of oppression.
In a 2019 study, “The Double Standard at Work,” the AFL-CIO found that even European-based companies with good records in their home countries take advantage of workers they employ in America’s South.
They’ve “interfered with freedom of association, launched aggressive campaigns against employees’ organizing attempts, and failed to bargain in good faith when workers choose union representation,” noted the report, citing, among other abuses, Volkswagen’s union-busting efforts at a Tennessee plant.
“They keep stuffing their pockets and paying pennies on the dollar,” Cooper said of companies cashing in at workers’ expense.
The consequences are dire.
States with low union membership have significantly higher poverty, according to a 2021 study by researchers at the University of Minnesota and the University of California, Riverside. Georgia’s 14 percent poverty rate, for example, is among the worst in the country.
However, the tide is turning as workers increasingly see union membership as a clear path forward, observed Cooper, who left his own job at Blue Bird several months before the union win because the grueling schedule left him little time to spend with family.
Now, as a union paper worker, he not only makes higher wages than he did at Blue Bird but also benefits from safer working conditions and a voice on the job. And with the USW holding the company accountable, he’s free to take the vacation and other time off he earns.
Cooper’s story helped to inspire the bus company workers’ quest for better lives. But they also resolved to fight for their fair share as Blue Bird increasingly leans on their knowledge, skills, and dedication in the coming years.
The company stands to land tens of millions in subsidies from President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and other federal programs aimed at putting more electric vehicles on the roads, supercharging the manufacturing economy, and supporting good jobs.
These goals are inextricably linked, as Biden made clear in a statement congratulating the bus company workers on their USW vote. “The fact is: The middle class built America,” he said. “And unions built the middle class.”
Worker power is spreading not only in manufacturing but across numerous industries in the South.
About 500 ramp agents, truck drivers, and other workers at Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina also voted in May to form a union. Workers in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 2022 unionized the first Starbucks in the South.
And first responders in Virginia and utility workers in Georgia and Kentucky also formed unions in early 2023, while workers at Lowe’s in Louisiana launched groundbreaking efforts to unionize the home-improvement giant.
“I wouldn’t hesitate to tell any worker at any manufacturing place here that the route you need to take is the union. That’s the only fairness you’re going to get,” declared Anthony Ploof, who helped to lead dozens of co-workers at Carfair Composites USA into the USW in 2023.
Workers at the Anniston, Alabama, branch of the company make fiberglass-reinforced polymer components for vehicles, including hybrid and electric buses. Like all workers, they decided to unionize to gain a seat at the table and a means of holding their employer accountable.
Instead of fighting the union effort, as many companies do, Carfair remained neutral so the workers could exercise their will. In the end, 98 percent voted to join the USW, showing that workers overwhelmingly want unions when they’re free to choose without bullying, threats, or retaliation.
“It didn’t take much here,” said Ploof, noting workers had little experience with unions but educated themselves about the benefits and quickly came to a consensus on joining the USW.
“It’s reaching out from Carfair,” he added, noting workers at other companies in the area have approached him to ask, “How is that working out? How do we organize?”
As his new union brothers and sisters at Blue Bird prepare to negotiate their first contract, Cooper hopes to get involved in other organizing drives, lift up more workers, and continue changing the trajectory of the South.
“We just really need to keep putting the message out there, letting people know that there is a better way than what the employers are wanting you to believe,” he said.
UK Strike Wave
By Rabbits (Northumbria IWW)
Up to half a million workers in the biggest industrial action in a decade; the number of days lost to strikes biggest since the Thatcher era; largest strike in the history of the health service; worst year for strike action since 1989. Calls for indefinite strikes, hashtag #generalstrike trending.
There’s an image been going the rounds of left circles for a while – four identical photos of a woman sitting, head down and miserable, by a production line – the captions, “before Brexit, after Brexit, before the election, after the election”. It could as well say, “before the pandemic, after the pandemic” and I’m surprised I haven’t seen someone do that.
The pandemic gave focus and force to a movement against the intensification of work. The four-day week, the 6-hour day, rising complaints about work-life balance and burnout, demands for hybrid work, all threaten employers’ attempts to recoup the financial cost of Covid. For some there has been a reintensification of work after a period of relative ease working from home. For all of us, realities of life before and after the pandemic have given the lie to the tentative freedoms many of us felt and cautiously explored during the lockdown. The significance of the resistance against work discipline could be seen by the slew of articles in the business and right-wing press in the past year condemning an irresponsible and selfish horde of quietly quitting, millennial serial quitters. After the lockdown, there is a swell of feeling for a deintensification of work.
Threats to the value of shareholder returns must be dealt with so in response to these sentiments, we have a manufactured crisis – the Bank raised interest rates to trigger an artificial recession to reimpose work discipline via the cost-of-living. This has sparked widespread anger, and the traditional organs of the Left have mobilised to take the reins. The fightback against austerity has been union-led. Public sympathy for the strikes has been strong, but moral support, coins in collection buckets or posts on social media won’t address the wider issue, and nor will marches and rallies. Last summer, an RMT comrade from Bristol AFed commented, If passengers, staff and all workers across the country come together … but despite those early, heady days of chatting to fellow workers on picket lines, there is a vanishingly small chance of this now. The government’s anti-strikes bill is likely to keep future union demands – and action – modest.
The hashtag #generalstrike is over-optimistic and workers’ self-management is not on the table. The current wave of strikes is not about how the economy is run, but about workers having some say in how the proceeds of the economy are distributed. Union bureaucracies will settle for a few gains, retain authority over their members and then want to see this wave of solidarity and militancy fade into the background routine. Meanwhile, pay rises can be absorbed by productivity deals and changes to conditions so that returns to shareholders are maintained. Away from the workplace, pay rises can be absorbed by inflation until the anti-work wave is deemed to have dispersed, discipline has been reimposed and we’ve been put back in our box – and then the recession will magically go away.
If the strikes win, they will lead to a new round of maneuvers as capital accommodates to the cost. Employers’ losses to pay rises can be reabsorbed by capital, but demands for the deintensification of work are not so easy for capital to accommodate. There have been some gains, and workers getting pay rises and workers showing solidarity for each other is a wonderful thing to see and part of. But the present moment is about more than only pay rises. The price of goods is based on struggles over the price of labour, and the cost-of-living crisis is both capital’s response to the cost of Covid and to the rise of anti-work sentiment. For the first time ideas around the abolition of work are in the mainstream. Workers want more of the freedoms they saw revealed during the pandemic – including essential workers who saw others enjoying those freedoms but were unable to themselves – when a portal briefly opened, and another world was glimpsed. Time and energy are essential to a life worth living, and we must claw them back. The ‘cost-of-living crisis’ is capital’s answer to this threat. Employers fear giving us more time or more power on the job – these losses cannot be so easily reabsorbed.
In response to capital’s offensive, there is a crisis of action and a crisis of creativity, and a resort to using the same old tactics. These tactics won’t break the chain of capital consuming labour to produce surplus value, and workers consuming goods and services to reproduce themselves again as labour. There is little if any chance of using union organs to promote self-management. The unions have relied on patchwork strikes, a few days here, a few days there. UCU leadership came under fierce criticism from its members in calling off one week of these rolling strikes when the employers tabled a pay offer. Another pay offer has seen the RMT call off its next planned one-day action. The RCN has broken ranks with the GMB and Unison in shooting for a separate pay deal. EIS and the CWU have suspended strike action and are accepting employer-imposed ‘revision of conditions’ as part of their own pay deals. The unions face dwindling fighting funds and the government’s new anti-strike bill. The ultimate objective of the unions is to seek an accommodation with capital before their strike funds are too diminished and the new bill comes into force.
Independent industrial unions have made some recent gains and perhaps the future might see more small, privatised providers being targeted by syndicalist unions, but their impact is sure to remain modest. There have been some successes at unionising within private contractors in e.g., the education industry and pay deals have been won, but these are likely just to put them in line with other providers. Meanwhile, there are calls from within the trades unions to use union organs to build indefinite strikes. The UCU, for example, has a £30m fighting fund, and even at a daily cost of c.£250,000 could maintain an all-out strike for far longer than the employers could bear. For the union bureaucracy this is not on the table, occupation of admin buildings is clearly beyond the grounds of acceptable behaviour, and building a fighting industry-wide alliance with the Students’ Union or Unite and Unison which represent non-academic staff has never been under serious consideration. In the health service the RCN’s move has broken what seemed the strongest industry-wide alliance in the current strike wave.
It may be that resistance to the Minimum Service Bill will see ‘passengers, staff and all workers across the country’ coming together in a moment the like if which we haven’t seen since the Poll Tax or the Iraq War – but not if it is led by the traditional organs of the Left, with trusted Labour MPs parachuted in to steer it away from the open seas. The curse of the trades unions is representation. Recently, a comrade from the SAC commented that union members cannot be like a football team sitting in the stands hoping the coach will win the matches and I am now remembering the immediate and unprecedented outbreak via social media at the beginning of the first lockdown of neighbours spontaneously organising to check on and support vulnerable people in their communities. We didn’t need representatives to do that for us, we just upped and did it.
The government’s anti-strikes bill is intended to keep future union demands – and action – modest. Rank-and-file anger over limited gains made in the current strike wave may see the question begging, ‘how hard will workers fight against the bill i.e., fight for the unions?’ Or will future struggles see them bypass a hamstrung bureaucracy and fight on terrain of their own making? In the article quoted above, the Swedish comrade also commented, Creative workers find alternatives to striking. Victories over pay are not to be sniffed at, and perhaps more-so victories over casualisation and precarity, if there will be any. But creative alternatives are needed if we are to keep alive ideas of having control over our lives, and the deintensification of work.