“As the South goes, so goes the nation.”—W.E.B. DuBois
“One thing we do not need is more labor unions. We have gotten where we are without them, and we do not need them now.”— Henry McMaster, Governor of South Carolina, State of the State address, January 2024
So where exactly have we gotten? Currently, workers in the Southern U.S. have the lowest wages in the country leading to the highest poverty levels; we have the weakest worker protections and badly underfunded public services leading to the worst health outcomes and the shortest life spans; and fewer than 5% of workers have collective bargaining. One must ask, is this their goal for the rest of the country too?
How will the South be organized?
The short answer: in the same way that all U.S. working class movements have succeeded. The Southern Workers Assembly was created in 2012 to encourage Southern workers to exercise some degree of power over their work lives and their living situation regardless of their union status. Black Americans account for 20% of the population in the Southern states and more than half of all African Americans in the US live in the south. Black men in particular have the highest rate of unionization among all workers in the US. African American workers have a history of leading successful social movements and, given the historical role of slavery and white supremacy in shaping the Southern economy, labor struggles by Black workers are inherently political struggles for self-determination and against the whole system of racist exploitation. Therefore, the SWA centers our organizing work on recognizing, promoting, and following Black workers and workers of color, all the while seeking to build solidarity across lines of race, gender, and other social categories.
Of course, all workers need collective bargaining, but waiting for lightning to strike and spontaneously light the fire for unionism is not a viable strategy. And neither is relying on the occasional NLRB election for three reasons.
Reason One — The Numbers Don’t Add Up
The labor movement can’t possibly run enough elections fast enough to make a difference. In the U.S. there are roughly 160 million workers, of which about 135 million are covered by the National Labor Relations Act. Twelve million are already in unions. That leaves about 120 million private sector workers eligible for NLRB elections. While 2024 polling showed that nearly 60 million workers would join a union if they could, only 120,000 workers participated in recognition elections, which turned out to be double the number of 60,000 in 2021. At this rate, in 100 years we will have organized only 10% of the non-union workers.
Reason Two — Massive Organizing Happens in Sweeps Not One-at-a-Time
During the period 1930 to 1941, social turmoil resulted in mass working class organization and collective bargaining in major U.S. industries. SWA identified the necessary elements that were present in the upsurge and uses those lessons to guide our efforts.
The first and most important element is the existence of a committed core of experienced activists and organizers in major workplaces linked together in networks that spread throughout both industrial sectors and geographies. Their common intent was to establish collective bargaining as a democratic necessity and thereby win a better life for the entire working class. Many failures taught them through their practical experience to use sympathy strikes, defy injunctions and use brief sit down strikes to win grievances.
Other elements – including sharply defined class politics, new legislation encouraging collective bargaining, a few top union leaders who broke politically and tactically with the moribund AFL by refusing to compromise militancy and gave local organizing efforts a national voice and support— were necessary but not sufficient for success. Without the organized pre-existing network of experienced cadre, ready to act once the breakthrough occurred, in this case the Flint sit-down strike victory, massive organizing involving millions would not have spread.
Reason Three — Successful Collective Bargaining Requires Significant Power
The objective of collective bargaining and striking is to have and exert sufficient power to establish wages and conditions that materially advance the lives of millions. It is inconceivable that bargaining based on one or two workplaces within a non-union sector or corporation or region could result in meaningful collective bargaining. In today’s world, dependent as we are on the NLRB certification to bargain contracts, we must have a strategy that starts with building organization within the shops and workplaces led by a network of cadre, trained worker leaders and organizers, in many important industries and sectors. These shop floor or workplace organizations may start as organizing committees with an eye toward conducting multiple NLRB elections and thus bringing to bear sufficient power to negotiate contracts in a coordinated way. Or they may build union organizations that take up struggles and campaigns on the shop floor, winning rights and victories that work toward building power sufficient to demand recognition and collective bargaining.
Recent Examples:
Recent examples of unions successfully winning union elections in multiple locations in the same employer and using a coordinated strategy in bargaining include the Starbucks Workers United campaign of hundreds of coffee shops and the National Nurses Organizing Committee efforts from 2004 to 2010 to organize nurses in the Southern states. Non-union nurses built a network across many hospitals and in several states resulting in dozens of facilities in two for-profit hospital chains winning elections and union contracts. The work in both campaigns continues but it doesn’t appear that workers in either campaign intended that one shop would take on these corporate behemoths by themselves. Another version of this strategy is the Black Workers for Justice campaigns in the 1980s and 90s to build functioning non-majority unions in multiple locations in the private sector prior to attempting to conduct elections or by establishing meet and confer in the public sector, as public sector unions proliferated in the last several decades. The method was to build rank and file committees and make workplace demands which were won with collective actions in the workplace. In the non-union South, BWFJ organizers used these methods to build the North Carolina Public Service Workers Union, UE Local 150, where collective bargaining is prohibited by law in the public sector. Several of these committees and UE Local 150 exist to this day and provide leadership to workers in developing local assemblies in SWA.
Southern Workers Assembly Strategy
SWA learned from our working-class history and developed a strategy that applies to today’s conditions. We created an intentional and deliberate plan of organization and cadre development in multiple workplaces in discrete geographies to lay the groundwork for a “sweep” of workers forming unions. This not only gets us to scale in terms of the numbers needed to really grow the labor movement but also to exert significant power in negotiations that result from multiple elections. We think that a committee of three to five workers in a shop is sufficient to start. Our method is to establish leafleting brigades of local activists and political allies to reach out to workers at their shift change. Lately we have been using social media as a method of outreach as well.
Once there are committees in three to five workplaces, an assembly can be established to engage in collective action — mostly public facing campaigns designed to address workplace issues and develop leaders. Currently, we have a network of 17 local assemblies in four states and are always working on developing more.
Once we had a few assemblies, we started to conduct worker schools usually twice a year to meet together, build community and network, develop skills, and strategize campaigns. The worker schools were another featured methodology developed by Black Workers for Justice in its 40 year history of organizing. Several years ago SWA started to create industrial councils in manufacturing, education, hospitality, logistics, and tourism. Our newest council is being established for gig drivers.
We developed a ten-point Southern Worker Power Program creating some cohesion among the demands that assemblies and councils could fight for. The program is based on the idea that as workers we have certain rights and therefore we make demands that enforce and enhance those rights. Pieces of the program include demands related to health care, collective bargaining rights, education, ending all forms of discrimination and providing reparations for Black and Indigenous people, demilitarizing the police and ending unpaid prison labor, and a clean environment and taking steps to counteract the effects of climate change.
Experience and activism will inform the local assemblies, workplace organizations, and cadre about which of these issues to take on as well as which strategies and tactics will work; sit downs are not likely to be the preferred strategy but other ideas will occur to people. Efforts will fail and workers will learn, new tactics will be devised. SWA attempts to replicate the elements that we have some control over while paying attention to when other conditions become present for a breakthrough. When that happens, the organizations and cadre that are working in the many non-union workplaces and industries will be looking for it, they will recognize it for what it is, and they will cause a “sweep” into the unions.
SWA’s Newest Project: Electric Vehicle Rank and File Project
About 15% of carbon emissions in the U.S. come from cars. It is even higher when you calculate in trucks and other forms of transportation. It is important for the climate that people start to drive electric vehicles instead of relying on combustion engines. It is equally important that the workers don’t lose good quality jobs during that transition to a cleaner environment. Recently, SWA embarked on a new project that is very intentional about developing cadre in the new Electric Vehicle industry and associated manufacturing plants. We have done broad outreach to workers intending to go to work in this new industry and network them together so they can have a coordinated approach to organizing in their workplaces.
We identified five cities where we would start based on certain criteria. We want cities that have new construction as well as a cluster of other manufacturing plants and would therefore be hiring lots of people. We think that makes it easier for people to get hired and also, with an entirely new workforce, nobody is disadvantaged in terms of exerting leadership with their co-workers. We also want locations where SWA has a local assembly so that these workers can be networked together both by industry and geography. We have gotten a good start on this work.
One day this industry and the South will be unionized. Looking back at the lessons learned from the creation of the CIO and the elements necessary for success, we can’t control for several of them. But we can influence the most important of the elements. We can build organization, develop cadres of leadership in important industries and we can create networks of these shop floor organizations and leaders and the militant minorities in their workplaces. We can take collective action and learn what tactics are effective and which to avoid. We can pay attention to the objective conditions and when conditions exist to have a major sweep of workers into unions, there will be dozens of geographic areas and several electric vehicle locations ready to be part of that.
This essay appears courtesy of International Publishers in New York. This paper will be published in 2025 in the collection “Square Up: Building Labor’s Power in the Second Gilded Age” by Lorri Nandrea and Tony Pecinovsky.
This essay was republished from Southern Workers Assembly.