FOR decades, the South has been the Achilles heel of the US labour movement. 

While unions took root and thrived in places like the industrial Midwest and the north-east, or in the ports and plants of West Coast states in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, Dixie remained a tough slog. 

This is the place where right to work was born over 70 years ago, where reactionary politics have often been the only kind of politics. And where the “colour line” dividing black workers from white ones long defined all aspects of life — including in the workplace. In many ways, it still does.

There were major organising campaigns and big strikes in the South over the years, of course, and they shouldn’t be forgotten. 

From the battles of Harlan County and the great textile strike of 1934 to Dr King and the Memphis sanitation workers and the lesser-known fights of more recent decades, Southern workers have never shied away from a fight when backed into a corner. They haven’t always come out on top, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

But eventually, many of the mines closed, the textile and furniture factories shut down and lower-wage, non-union companies like Walmart came to dominate the regional economy. 

Even the South’s relative lack of strong unions and its abundance of right-wing politicians servile to business couldn’t save it from deindustrialisation.

But it’s a new era for the Southern economy. Things are beginning to change, and the labour movement as a whole would do well to pay closer attention.

The South, already home to 35 per cent of the country’s population, is growing rapidly. Of the 10 US metropolitan areas experiencing the fastest job creation rates in 2016, six of them were in the South. 

A third of electoral college votes are here. In 2010, the region got eight new seats in Congress, with another six likely coming in 2020. More than half the US African-American population resides here, and counties in the South account for the biggest share of the country’s Latino population growth.

The labour movement regularly takes note of the importance of organising in the South, but has yet to develop a co-ordinated approach to tackling the special challenges and rapidly shifting economy there. 

At its last convention in 2013, the national AFL-CIO pledged itself to developing a Southern organising strategy. As of 2017, it’s not clear that there’s much progress to point to.

That’s something the Arkansas AFL-CIO sought to remind delegates of at this year’s national labour confab in St Louis. 

In a resolution that again appealed to the country’s biggest gathering of unions to devote itself to organising the South, workers from the Natural State were blunt in their assessment:
“…[T]he American labour movement has never developed a long-term, successful, co-ordinated effort to organise working people in the states comprising the Southern region, which has allowed anti-worker political forces to operate in the South without being effectively challenged by an organised working people’s movement.”

There have been some successful organising campaigns over the last four years, but workers from Arkansas and other Southern states are looking for more than just support in particular workplace sign-up drives. They envisage concerted efforts to elect labour-friendly candidates and pass pro-worker legislation.

But before you start thinking that this is just a Southern affair with little importance for workers in other places, consider the fact that 45 per cent of Republicans in Washington are sent there by Southern states. As the resolution makes clear, the possibility of passing any pro-labour legislation at national level depends on changing the political and legislative climate below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Though they are trying to grab more attention during the debate in St Louis, organised labour in the South isn’t waiting around. In Arkansas, they are preparing for a possible avalanche of investment heading their way.

State labour federation president Alan Hughes, who hails from the Steelworkers, says: “There’s never enough organising going on.” 
Labour, he argues, has got to go South because that’s where the people and the money are moving. In a discussion on the sidelines of the convention, he checked off a list of new industrial investments already in the works for his state.

In Pine Bluff, a mostly African-American town in south-central Arkansas, the US’s first-ever natural gas liquefaction plant, a $3.5 billion alternative energy super project, will be built over the next several years. 

It is being billed as the biggest economic development endeavour in state history. 

Only six of the operations exist in the world and Hughes estimates the Pine Bluff plant could create as many as 5,000 construction jobs up front, and around 500 permanent jobs after that.

Similar stories are playing out in other towns, too. A Chinese company, Sun Paper, has chosen Arkadelphia as the site of its first investment in the US. It will pour over a billion dollars into opening a new pulp mill. 

In Forrest City, another Chinese giant, the Shandong Ruyi Technology Group, has announced plans to spend $410 million to convert an old Sanyo TV factory into a new spinning yarn mill big enough to consume all the annual cotton harvest of the Arkansas Delta region. Another 800 permanent jobs. None of them union.

Those are the projects announced in just one state over the past year or so. But it’s happening all over the South. And Jessica Akers, secretary-treasurer of the Arkansas AFL-CIO, says unions need to be getting ready now.

“There should be community organising efforts going on right now,” she argues, “so that there is already buy-in to the union on day one when the plant opens its gates for the first time.” 

The state fed and the local Building Trades Council are exploring pre-apprenticeship models that have been tried in other places to see what might be replicated in Arkansas.

The idea of having a union has to be a positive in people’s minds before the company comes to town, not just associated with the negative things that happen on the job later on. 

In a right to work state like Arkansas, Akers says the way you sell the union to workers is by focusing on the concept of a contract.
“Where we live, people are supposed to stand behind their words.

If there is an agreement, and we’ve shaken hands on it, then it gives people confidence in each other. That’s how we have to pitch it.”

On having to work with Republicans and the union members who vote for them Akers says: “Economics is what we can move together with. Like charter schools, right to work isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. So we can say it’s bad all we want, but it’s the world we live in. So we have to manoeuvre around this reality to benefit our people as much as possible.”

It’s a pragmatic, real-world approach to advancing labour’s issues. Surveying the South’s fast-changing political economy, the Arkansas delegation and other unions in the region spent considerable time at the convention making the case for a specially tailored organising strategy.

And their resolution? Passed over, essentially. By the time it made it to the convention floor, it had been chopped down to a single “whereas” in a longer, more generic promise to organise everywhere and realise the promise of collective bargaining.

It was a lost opportunity. Special challenges call for special strategies. If labour doesn’t give sustained attention to the particularities of organising workers in the most anti-labour atmosphere in the United States, someday — and maybe not long from now — it will wake up to realise that the whole country has gone South.

This article appeared at peoplesworld.org.