[Fresh Ink] Southern Oligarchy and the Labor Unions

[Richard Menec]

<http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/03/voices-southern-oligarchy-and-the-labor-unions.html>

The Progressive Populist                 March 10, 2009

Southern Oligarchy and the Labor Unions

By Joseph B. Atkins

Cheap labor. Even more than race, it's the thread that connects all of 
Southern history -- from the antebellum South of John C. Calhoun and 
Jefferson Davis to Tennessee's Bob Corker, Alabama's Richard Shelby and the 
other anti-union Southerners in today's U.S. Senate.

It's at the epicenter of a sad class divide between a desperate, poorly 
educated workforce and a demagogic oligarchy, and it has been a demarcation 
line stronger than the Mason-Dixon in separating the region from the rest of 
the nation.

The recent spectacle of Corker, Shelby and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky 
leading the GOP attack on the proposed $14 billion loan to the domestic auto 
industry -- with 11 other Southern senators marching dutifully behind --  
made it crystal clear. The heart of Southern conservatism is the 
preservation of a status quo that serves elite interests.

Expect these same senators and their colleagues in the U.S. House to wage a 
similar war in the coming months against the proposed Employee Free Choice 
Act authorizing so-called "card check" union elections nationwide.

"Dinosaurs," Shelby of Alabama called General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler as 
he maneuvered to bolster the nonunion Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai and other 
foreign-owned plants in his home state by sabotaging as many as three 
million jobs nationwide.

Corker, a multimillionaire who won his seat in a mud- slinging, race-tinged 
election in 2006, was fairly transparent in his goal to expunge what he 
considers the real evil in the Big Three and U.S. industry in general: 
unions. When the concession-weary United Auto Workers balked at GOP demands 
for a near-immediate reduction in worker wages and benefits, Corker urged 
President Bush to force-feed wage cuts to UAW workers in any White 
House-sponsored bailout.

If Shelby, Corker, and McConnell figured they were helping the Japanese, 
German and Korean-owned plants in their home states, they were seriously 
misguided. The failure of the domestic auto industry would inflict a deep 
wound on the same supplier-dealer network that the foreign plants use. The 
already existing woes of the foreign-owned industry were clearly 
demonstrated in December when Toyota announced its decision to put on 
indefinite hold the opening of its $1.3 billion plant near Blue Springs in 
northeast Mississippi.

The Southern Republicans are full of contradictions. Downright hypocrisy 
might be a better description. Shelby staunchly opposes universal health 
care -- a major factor in the Big Three's financial troubles since they 
operate company plans -- yet the foreign automakers he defends benefit 
greatly from the government-run health care programs in their countries.

These same senators gave their blessing to hundreds of millions of dollars 
in subsidies to the foreign automakers to open plants in their states, yet 
they were willing to let the U.S. auto industry fall into bankruptcy.

In their zeal to destroy unions and their hard-fought wage-and-benefits 
packages, the Southern senators could not care less that workers in their 
home states are among the lowest paid in the nation. Ever wonder why the 
South remains the nation's poorest region despite generations of 
seniority-laden senators and representatives in Congress?

Why weren't these same senators protesting the high salaries in the 
financial sector when the Congress approved the $700 billion bailout of Wall 
Street? Why pick on blue-collar workers at the Big Three who last year 
agreed to huge concessions expected to save the companies an estimated $4 
billion a year by 2010? These concessions have already helped lower union 
wages to non-union levels at some auto plants.

The idea of working people joining together to have a united voice across 
the table from management scares most Southern politicians to death. After 
all, they go to the same country clubs as management. When Mississippi 
Republican Roger Wicker warned of Democratic opponent Ronnie Musgrove's ties 
to the "Big Labor Bosses" in this year's U.S. Senate race, he was protecting 
the "Big Corporate Bosses" who are his benefactors.

The South today may be more racially enlightened than ever in its history. 
However, it is still a society in which the ruling class -- the chambers of 
commerce that have taken over from yesterday's plantation owners and textile 
barons -- uses politics to maintain control over a vast, jobs-hungry 
workforce. After the oligarchy lost its war for slavery -- the cheapest 
labor of all -- it secured the next best thing in Jim Crow and the 
indentured servitude known as sharecropping and tenant farming. It still 
sees cheap, pliable, docile labor as the linchpin of the Southern economy.

In 1948, when the so-called "Dixiecrats" rebelled against the national 
Democratic Party, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina declared war on "the 
radicals, subversives, and the Reds" who want to upset the Southern way of 
life.

Seven years later, Mississippi's political godfather, the late U.S. Sen. 
James O. Eastland, told other prominent Southern pols during a meeting at 
the Peabody Hotel in Memphis that the South will "fight the CIO" (Congress 
of Industrial Organizations) and unionism with just as much vehemence and 
determination as it fights racial integration.

Eastland, Thurmond and their friends lost the integration battle. Their 
successors are still fighting the other enemy.
_____________

Joseph B. Atkins is a veteran journalist, professor of journalism at the 
University of Mississippi and author of Covering for the Bosses: Labor and 
the Southern Press (University Press of Mississippi, 2008), a book that 
details the Southern labor movement and its treatment in the press. A 
version of this column appeared in the Hattiesburg (Miss.) American and the 
Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger.