Two blocks from the Mississippi State Capitol in downtown Jackson, Robert Shaffer, head of the state AFL-CIO, sits on a couch in his office trying to explain how unions could become more powerful in Mississippi. \u201cIt\u2019s just,\u201d he says, then pauses for an uncomfortably long time. \u201cIt\u2019s difficult.\u201d It\u2019s not that Shaffer doesn\u2019t know how to do it. His problem is getting anyone to believe him.<\/p>\n
In 1946, full of vigor from the postwar boom of organized labor, the Congress of Industrial Organizations launched Operation Dixie, the most ambitious project to unionize the South ever undertaken. Hundreds of CIO organizers fanned out across the region. The challenges of Southern racism and the frenzied anti-Communism of the McCarthy era ultimately caused Operation Dixie<\/a> to fail in its goal of ending the South\u2019s status as a haven for cheap, nonunion labor, but the unions did notch some successes along the way. One of the places they were able to interest workers in organizing was in West Point, a small town in northeast Mississippi. There, employees at a Babcock & Wilcox boiler factory began holding union elections in 1952. They lost, but they continued calling elections almost yearly until 1967, when they were victorious by a single vote, joining the Boilermakers.<\/p>\n By the mid-1980s, the plant had 100 percent union membership\u2014no easy task in a right-to-work state where anyone can opt out of paying union dues.<\/p>\n In 2016, the plant shut down. The last of its jobs were shipped to Mexico.<\/p>\n \u201cNAFTA took care of Operation Dixie,\u201d sighs Shaffer, who has a bristly white mustache and the philosophical air of a man who has seen a once-great thing taken away from him. He began working at that Babcock & Wilcox plant in 1969 and became head of the union local in 1984. Today, Shaffer is organized labor\u2019s chief lobbyist in a state where barely 7 percent of working people are union members. The ultra-Republican Mississippi legislature has made the laws so politically hostile to unions that it\u2019s difficult to think of how it could get any worse. \u201cIt\u2019s more defensive than anything else,\u201d Shaffer grumbles about his dealings with state politicians. \u201cHell, I think they got everything. How do you get any lower than the bottom of the damn ocean?\u201d<\/p>\n Every state in the South today has so-called right-to-work laws on the books\u2014anti-union legislation that makes it harder to build and maintain strong unions. They serve to drive down already paltry union density and exacerbate the region\u2019s high poverty rates.<\/p>\n Periodically (and with great regularity), the labor movement holds a fevered conversation with itself about \u201chow to organize the South.\u201d Implicit in these conversations is the greater question lurking just below the surface: Can the South even be organized?<\/p>\n Like all questions about the South, there is nowhere better to find the answer than Mississippi. Mississippi is the place most defined by the twin struggles of racial justice and labor rights that date back to slavery. Mississippi is also the most impoverished state in America. Nearly a fifth of all Mississippians live in poverty, including more than 30 percent<\/a> of the state\u2019s Black residents. Working in Mississippi is what inspired the invention of the blues. And the state still seems to live by the words of Delta musician Skip James: \u201cHard times is here, and everywhere you go, times are harder than ever been before.\u201d<\/p>\n The most recent spasm of interest in the possibility of an organized South arose earlier this year, when the nation\u2019s attention was momentarily drawn to the unsuccessful effort from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU<\/a>) to organize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala. Another recent major union vote in the South was August 2017, when the United Auto Workers (UAW<\/a>) failed in their attempt to unionize thousands of Nissan workers at a plant in Canton, Miss. Both attempts included enormous campaigns targeting more than 5,000 workers in a single location.<\/p>\n The UAW spent more than a decade on the Nissan campaign, only to lose the vote by nearly 2\u20131<\/a>. Those devastating figures in such a high-profile campaign (coming on the heels of a similar UAW loss at a factory in Tennessee in 2014) fed a grim narrative of skepticism about whether the South was simply a dark and impenetrable place that would never yield to organized labor. Many in the union world think the South\u2019s difficult political atmosphere and its long history of union-busting make it too risky to spend large sums of money on big organizing drives.<\/p>\n Successful organizing in right-to-work states simply takes more ongoing work\u2014and with limited resources, it is easy for unions to want to focus elsewhere.<\/p>\n The actual lessons of that Nissan campaign are far more nuanced, however, and somewhat hopeful. The UAW\u2019s lead Nissan organizer was Sanchioni Butler, a long-time autoworker herself who went to Canton in 2003 to lay the groundwork for unionization. She is candid about the obstacles the union faced from the very beginning, ones that plague the South broadly: a workforce divided between full-time employees and a throng of temps doing the same job for lower pay; thinly veiled threats by management and state politicians to close the plant; and widespread lack of knowledge about unions among workers themselves. One of the reasons the Nissan campaign went on so long is that the union, recognizing what it was up against, was trying to organize not just a single workplace, but the surrounding community.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t \t\u201cIt was a community campaign before it was an actual worker campaign,\u201d says Butler, who is now a political campaign organizer for the Mississippi AFL-CIO. \u201cLabor has had a bad rap of, \u2018They come in, organize and leave the town in shambles.\u2019 So that was something the UAW was trying hard not to [do].\u201d <\/p>\n\n \tIn Canton, that meant nurturing an entire parallel campaign to bring along clergy and community leaders to support the union drive\u2014an attempt to build some friendly allies in a conservative, venomously anti-union state. One of the leaders of that effort was Frank Figgers, a bearded, owlish descendant of Mississippi sharecroppers. Figgers, a well-known civil rights activist in Jackson, was a co-chair of the Mississippi Alliance for Fairness at Nissan, which pulled in clergy members and groups like the NAACP to try to make the soil more fertile for the union drive. <\/p>\n \tFirst, the group educated church leaders about the benefits of collective bargaining. Then, workers from the plant spoke up in church to let the congregations know the troubles they had on the job. <\/p>\n \tFor Figgers, there is a straight line from the legacy of slavery to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the labor movement today.<\/p>\n \t \u201cBlack workers were the free workforce in this country,\u201d Figgers says. \u201cIt took abolishing slavery for Black workers to get anything for their labor. When a union comes in, when collective bargaining comes in, that brings about equity in the workplace. That\u2019s probably why Mississippi as a state has fought against unions for so long.\u201d<\/p>\n \tMississippi\u2019s 1890 state constitution definitively snuffed out most Reconstruction-era gains for Black people, ushering in a regime of legalized white supremacy. With it came separate, unequal, racialized pay scales, the effects of which have never been mitigated. <\/p>\n \tThough the civil rights movement is often misremembered as solely about voting rights, Figgers says, it was also about rights at work\u2014in particular, winning pay equity in the racist South. There is only the barest sliver of daylight between what civil rights heroes Fannie Lou Hamer and Medgar Evers were fighting for in Mississippi a half century ago and the task of empowering Mississippi\u2019s vast, low-paid, largely Black workforce today. After years fighting for voting rights, Hamer started a farmers\u2019 co-op in Sunflower County in a bid for economic empowerment. Martin Luther King Jr. spent his later years focused on economic justice and was in Memphis supporting a sanitation workers\u2019 strike when he was assassinated. <\/p>\n \tWhile the civil rights movement has now been fully adopted as part of America\u2019s mainstream mythology, the labor movement in Mississippi remains threadbare. Butler says the fear Nissan workers felt when signing union cards is the same fear their parents and grandparents felt registering to vote. On the other hand, Butler also knows unions are one of the most effective ways to unite Black and white workers in Mississippi\u2014not in a magical sense of making centuries of racism disappear, but in a practical sense of being virtually the only institution in the South capable of making white and Black people work for a shared purpose despite antiBlack racism. Butler says she saw suspicion and resentment between Nissan workers of different races melt away as she talked with them about their shared suffering due to high healthcare costs and job injuries. \u201cAt the end of the day, everybody was being mistreated,\u201d Butler says. \u201cThey have their own \u2018aha\u2019 moment: \u2018I didn\u2019t know you went through that. I went through the exact same thing.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Despite the union\u2019s loss, the decade-plus of community education work instilled a hunger for labor rights in thousands of people, priming the region for future campaigns. The union is still present in Canton, but has not filed for another union election. (The UAW did not respond to inquiries for this story.)<\/p>\n Mississippi is a state with an infinite capacity for not learning from its own history. Today, when you visit the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in downtown Jackson to learn about the bloody struggles for freedom, you can get a refreshment at the Nissan Cafe\u2014courtesy of a $500,000 donation<\/a> Nissan made while fighting the unionization campaign.<\/p>\n It is not impossible to build strong unions in Mississippi. Robert Shaffer will tell you it can be done the same way they did it at Babcock & Wilcox: Create a strong culture around being in the union. Stay in constant contact with members. Don\u2019t take any shit from the boss. Be ready to strike.<\/p>\n And never, ever stop fighting.<\/p>\n What Shaffer cannot do is make unions flower across Mississippi; he does not have the resources. The AFL-CIO has no statewide army of staffers to put any organizing plans into action. Sometimes, even the AFL-CIO itself can\u2019t get the attention of unions. Shaffer says that a few years ago, AFL-CIO independently organized a group of hotel workers in Jackson, only for the effort to die out because they couldn\u2019t find a union to take the workers on as members. (The AFL-CIO is a federation of unions and typically does not do direct organizing; the workers needed a union to represent them in order to move ahead and get a contract.)<\/p>\n Offshoring pressures after NAFTA closed many of the state\u2019s big factories, and today Mississippi is made up of relatively small workplaces. Shaffer says most unions don\u2019t find it economically feasible to organize groups of less than 200 workers. The result is very few unionized workplaces for the hundreds of thousands of retail, healthcare, restaurant, warehouse and manufacturing workers in the state, despite the fact that everyone I spoke with firmly believes unionizing could be done if only they had the resources.<\/p>\n Shaffer dreams of another Operation Dixie to produce a new generation of believers. \u201cYou can take a group of 25 to start with, and you start building that, and you make them proud of their union,\u201d he says. \u201cIt expands. Especially somewhere like Jackson, Mississippi, man. Damn!<\/p>\n \u201cI just get so frustrated, because I don\u2019t got the power to do that shit,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s a business decision now. A hundred years ago, it was a decision for the people.\u201d<\/p>\n Even in Mississippi, there are some islands of union power. One is in Carthage, where the RWDSU represents a large Tyson poultry factory. Since the plant unionized in 1993, more than 1,100 of its current 1,800 workers have become union members. Latunya Love, a friendly, resolute woman from the nearby crossroads town of Sallis, has worked at the plant for 16 years. She spent 15 of them as a union rep.<\/p>\n A union is still not a panacea for a Mississippi poultry worker. Love, who works on the line, knife in hand, checking breast meat for bones, makes $15.05 an hour\u2014if she hits her incentive pay. The biggest complaint among workers at the plant, she says, is the pay. The plant has stayed open through the entire pandemic, despite Covid-19 outbreaks and deaths. When the company hung up a wreath, Love knew another worker died.<\/p>\n Still, the union helps make the job of standing shoulder to shoulder all day slicing and dicing poultry more tolerable. Workers at the Carthage plant get more vacation days and better benefits than their nonunion counterparts, and Love\u2019s position as a union rep gives her a direct line to management she didn\u2019t have at other jobs at McDonald\u2019s and AutoZone. Every week, Love talks to the plant\u2019s orientation class, urging dozens of new workers to sign up and join the union. She has even traveled to Alabama to help RWDSU organize workers at a car rental chain.<\/p>\n Though Love is part of one of the state\u2019s few large union companies, she knows working people in the South are a long way from the promised land. \u201cIt\u2019s like they\u2019re scared of the union in Mississippi,\u201d Love says. \u201cThe South is very scared. They\u2019re scared of change.<\/p>\n \u201cIf where I work at took that union away, everything that we have negotiated in this contract is gone. They can put you back to whatever they want to give you for money. They can take away your vacation. And you won\u2019t have nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n In the summer of 1965, farmworkers in the Mississippi Delta went on strike. With the help of civil rights organizers, more than 1,000 people formed the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union and launched a momentary wave of labor activism that saw poor agricultural workers walking off the job and building Strike City, an encampment where dozens lived in tents for months to protest low wages. Today, near a curve in the Bogue Phalia, a tributary of the Big Sunflower River outside of Leland, Miss., you can find the neatly mowed vacant field where those workers made their stand. The tiny street it sits on is called Strike City Road. Aside from that, all that is left is the memory of an extraordinary, quixotic stand for justice. In the end, the only thing they won was a footnote in history.<\/p>\n For poor Black farmworkers in the Mississippi Delta, some things have not changed in the past half century. Agricultural workers were excluded from the protections of the National Labor Relations Act when it was passed in 1935, and they still are. Traditional labor unions for Delta farmworkers are virtually nonexistent. As those who stubbornly held out at Strike City realized, the path to building power here must be conceived of very broadly (or not exist at all).<\/p>\n Mississippi\u2019s agricultural economy remains one of large white (now corporate) landowners and poor Black workers. But there is a movement to turn that dynamic around. Down a long dirt driveway off a country road outside of Clarksdale is the lovely farm of Ernestine and Dorfus Young Sr. Along with vegetables, they grow their own grapes, sell their own wine and have an idyllic, enclosed space to host local events. There, I met a group of women who are part of Mississippi\u2019s only Black women\u2019s farming cooperative, a project of the Southern Rural Black Women\u2019s Initiative (SRBWI<\/a>) that aims to help the small farmers scattered across the Delta region turn their farms into viable businesses. The women in the co-op each have their own reasons for becoming farmers. Ernestine Young left Mississippi as a child in 1965, part of the migration of Black people to the North in search of better opportunities. After 20 years in Minnesota, she was drawn home and bought a piece of land to grow almost everything you can think of.<\/p>\n Likewise, Nadean Randle grew up on a farm, left to have a career, then came home to take care of her sick mother and returned to farming, lured by love of the land. After 25 years of working for the Department of Veterans Affairs, \u201cI bought a tractor, a pickup truck and a shotgun, and called myself a farmer,\u201d Randle laughs.<\/p>\n Cora Burnside, mayor of itty-bitty Arcola, Miss., began growing veggies because her town is a food desert; she wanted fresh produce to hand out to local elderly people who have a hard time buying healthy groceries.<\/p>\n Patricia Porter and Lillie Melton, who each raise poultry on small farms near Lexington, share a lifelong love of chickens that is as strong as any career passion in the world. \u201cI didn\u2019t realize I cared so much about chickens until my father passed away,\u201d says Melton, who grew up watching him tend to the birds when she was young. \u201cI realized I enjoyed dealing with poultry!\u201d<\/p>\n The SRBWI began nearly 20 years ago, funded by foundation grants and at times, the federal government, as a broad project to help Black women in the South improve their lives. The farmers\u2019 co-op grew out of conversations with women about what they needed and has helped farms get state certifications, offered tech support and helped combine products for market. The group has a commercial kitchen in Clarksdale to help women turn their home cooking into food businesses. The co-op also has a goal of building enough capacity to sell produce to major grocery chains. The SRBWI sewing collective, like the farming co-op, is another effort to turn the skills of women in the region into sustainable income. \u201cBoth of these organizations have been moving forward for laying the groundwork for potential ways for African American women in these communities, where so much has been [extracted], to make a living,\u201d says Carol Blackmon, a consultant who helps run the SRBWI. \u201cTo make a way out of no way for themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n Co-ops are one way Mississippi\u2019s historically poor working people can build collective power in a land where unions are few and far between. Another is through a worker center, the catchall term for labor rights groups that aim to serve people unions don\u2019t reach.<\/p>\n
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