The South's patrician political leadership still has contempt for the lower classes of "Lubberland"
Would undo decades of Southern anti-union laws rooted in racism.
Would Undo Decades of Southern Anti-Union Laws Rooted in Racism
European multinationals have brought major investments to southern U.S. states, but they do not always bring the labor rights standards they abide by in their home countries.
Fifty years after Martin Luther King, Jr., stood with striking Memphis sanitation workers who were fed up with low pay and dangerous conditions, United Electrical Workers (UE) Local 150 is launching a campaign in the same spirit.
On September 3, 1991, the Imperial Food Products plant in Hamlet, North Carolina burst into flames. Twenty-five people died, trapped behind the locked doors of the red-brick factory. Most of the victims were women; many were women of color, most were single moms. Another sixty people were injured, and the blast left more than fifty children orphaned. Local officials called the fire an accident, but the women and men who worked at Imperial had been made vulnerable by the factory’s owners as well as public policy.
"Labor and community groups supporting the efforts by Boeing workers to form a union will also be in attendance," the IAM's announcement states.
Evans, the IAM's lead organizer in North Charleston, and Ken Riley, the longtime president of the local longshoremen's union, are scheduled to speak at Friday's event.
My old friend Ray Smithhart would have loved the irony of union-fighting manufacturer Nissan making a gift of $100,000 to the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute. Known in his later years as the “dean of Mississippi’s labor organizers,” Smithhart worked closely with civil rights martyr Medgar Evers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, forging a link between the labor and civil rights movements that Martin Luther King Jr. himself saw as key to the future of both.
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