OXFORD, Miss. — Somewhere in heaven Crystal Lee Sutton, the real-life “Norma Rae” of the epic labor war in the Carolina textile industry of the 1970s, has a big smile on her face.
More than anyone, Sutton—the inspiration for the 1979 film “Norma Rae” — would know the joy that the 4,300 workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, must feel after their huge victory recently to join the United Auto Workers.
Yet, with that smile comes hard-earned knowledge that the fight is far from over. Sutton, who died in 2009, and her fellow workers in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, fought a decade-long war with the giant J.P. Stevens textile company before winning their union. It took the auto workers in Chattanooga three major votes and 10 years to gain the April 20 win. They went from losing their first vote 626-712 in 2014 and second vote 776-833 in 2019, to win this time by an unofficial count of 2628 to 985, a 73% to 23% margin.
Now the fight will turn to the bargaining table to get a union contract with Volkswagen, something that took Sutton and her fellow workers six years after their union victory to get with notoriously anti-union J.P. Stevens.
Beyond Chattanooga, the UAW has set its targets on the deeper South, with a vote coming up at the 5,000-plus-worker Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama, May 13-17. Organizers are confident they have the majority support needed for victory.
The UAW, which has pledged $40 million to unionize auto plants in the South, is also eyeing other non-union, foreign-owned auto plants in the South, such as Hyundai in Alabama, Toyota in Mississippi, and Nissan in Tennessee and Mississippi.
“Being able to have a voice of your own is more important than just letting other people decide for you,” worker Manny Perez, 25, told crusading labor reporter Mike Elk of PaydayReport.com just before the final results came in at Volks-wagen.
Elk believes the UAW will secure a contract with Volkswagen without too much resistance, because of the overwhelming pro-union vote at the plant. However, anti-union forces beyond the company, such as former US Senator and Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker, will do anything they can to stall any more union progress.
Those forces will be much in play at the Mercedes-Benz plant, where management has already held required attendance anti-union meetings with workers despite the fact that such meetings violate the German company’s own stated principles of non-interference during organizing efforts.
Prior to the vote in Chattanooga, the governors of six Southern states, including Alabama, issued an ominous warning against bringing unions to the South. Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee told workers they “risk their futures” if they vote union. A so-called “labor” online site called the LaborUnionNews.com pushed anti-UAW propaganda even as it presented itself as a valid source of labor information.
In the 2014 union vote, Corker and then-Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam, both Republicans, essentially lied to the public by pretending to keep their distance while working feverishly to defeat the union behind closed doors. Haslam was part of a scheme to offer Volkswagen $300 million to expand its Chattanooga plant so long as the company worked with the state in preventing unionization there. Corker worked with LaborUnionNews.com owner Peter List back in 2014 to defeat the UAW.
“You got the whole community against you, the supervisors, the merchants, the newspapers,” the late Mississippi labor warrior Ray Smithhart, then-dean of his state’s labor organizers, told me back in 2004. “You can’t get the message across. What we needed was at least some kind of debate. This would let the employees hear both sides of the issues.”
I wish Smithhart had lived to witness the making of labor history at Chattanooga in April.
“This is a defining moment for the workers throughout the South and the rest of the country,” the University of California at Berkeley Labor Center Co-Chair Brenda Muñoz said in a statement issued after the victory. “Foreign auto manufacturers can no longer count on the Southern states to provide cheap labor at the expense of working families.”
Several factors contributed to the UAW victory in Chattanooga. A new cadre of young workers have joined the Volkswagen plant in recent years, bringing with energy and a greater willingness to consider the union cause that older workers have had. In a recent Southern Workers Assembly online discussion with workers and activists across the region, veteran organizer Ed Bruno of the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) said that young and energized organizers are key to union success today.
Another factor is the success of the UAW’s Stand Up Strike campaign in 2023 that led to union victories at General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis. Soon after the vote in Chattanooga, the UAW scored another victory with the Daimler Truck company in Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia, securing an agreement that included 25% raises for workers and an end to wage tiers.
Volkswagen, unionized everywhere else in the world except in the United States, had to comply with rules from its German base to keep hands-off in the union effort, including forbidding anti-union one-on-one sessions and required attendance at anti-union films.
Workers have complained about safety conditions at the plant and lax efforts to address safety issues even when identified. Company promises of better days to come never materialized. All factors that provide fertile soil for unionization.
Winning the South has been a dream of organized labor for more than a century. The historic labor battles in the coal mines of Kentucky and West Virginia and in the textile mills of the Carolinas in the 1920s and 1930s led to many heartbreaking defeats, just as did the Congress of Industrial Union’s “Operation Dixie” campaign in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Even in victory, Crystal Lee “Norma Rae” Sutton and her fellow workers had to fight 17 years to get both a union and contract, a struggle that included what National Labor Relations Board administrative judge Bernard Reiss called “corporate designed lawlessness.”
Today’s struggle is no less monumental. “Workers in Michigan are pitted against workers in Alabama, workers in the United States are pitted against workers in Mexico,” UAW President Shawn Fain wrote recently in In These Times magazine. “A united working class is the only effective wall against the billionaire class’ race to the bottom.”
In other words, the nation as a whole—and workers everywhere—benefit when Southern workers start carrying union cards.
Joseph B. Atkins is professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Mississippi. His books include “Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press” (University Press of Mississippi, 2008), and the novel “Casey’s Last Chance” (Sartoris Literary Group, 2015). His blog is http://www.laborsouth. blogspot.com and he can be reached at jbatkins3@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2024
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