AUSTIN, Texas—Shae Parker once had to fall to the floor of the Waffle House she worked at in Columbia, S.C.., “to avoid a bullet” late at night. She dislocated her shoulder. The company tried to prevent her from talking about it there.
And when workers took their cause—safer working conditions–to their bosses, they got a cold reception. “We brought petitions with 13,000 signatures on them and they threw them away.”
“The supervisors use any tactic they can to prevent you from speaking,” Parker adds. After a strike two years ago by workers protesting lack of protection against such hazards, she quit.
Parker now spends her time for the Union of Southern Service Workers organizing other exploited employees in the deep South. Asked what consumers can do to help workers like her, her succinct answer was: “Hit ‘em in the pocketbook” by not patronizing Waffle House. She added Publix supermarkets, also a Southern anti-union chain, to that list.
Lawrence Moore, a GE Healthcare worker from Ohio, had a different way to combat company repression: Unionize. It took a year, but his colleagues voted 62-59 on January 6 to join the Machinists. But not before their employer broke labor law “by taking our information” pamphlets “from the break room,” which is neutral territory “and throwing them in the trash.
“We told them ‘We wouldn’t be your doormats anymore.’”
And Brian Reyna of the San Antonio Teachers and Support Workers local described how, in a city with “17 school districts due to redlining” and in a state which sharply restricts topics unions can “meet and confer” on, his union used social media to marshal citywide support for common causes during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Our fight is the same fight” and they drew other unions in, too. “We now have the safest reopening plans in the country,” he says.
That same unity prevailed in another campaign, to get electoral rights for San Antonio city workers. The city had an ordinance barring public workers from contributing to political campaigns.
But in a city where affordable housing, food security and job training are under municipal control, government workers, led by AFSCME, wanted a true say in who to elect to decide the issues. CWA and SEIU joined AFSCME to put repeal of that ordinance on this past November’s ballot. It passed.
Parker, Moore, Reyna and other speakers brought the trials, tribulations and wins to the AFL-CIO’s annual Martin Luther King conference, held this January in Austin, Texas. The federation chose the Texas capital to emphasize dual goals: Organizing and its benefits, and concentrating on the nation’s most union- and worker-hostile region, the South.
That hostility isn’t stopping many low-paid, exploited and ill-treated Southern workers, said Service Employees President April Verrett, whose two million members include sanitation engineers, janitors, fast food workers, airport workers and other sufferers from greed of the corporate class.
“They’ve never had a union, but the workers in the South are going to stand up and act like they’re in a union, even in a [legal] structure that prevents it. That’s the type of initiative and organizing we must do.”
AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and Verrett opened the discussion, after the formal announcement that Verrett’s two-million-member union has rejoined the AFL-CIO (see separate story).
“I want to challenge all the leaders of the AFL-CIO to lead with the same authenticity” they saw from the panel, Verrett said. Shuler picked up the theme, saying “challenging sometimes makes us uncomfortable.
“But our single fight is for all working people and we’ve all got to unify” to take working conditions “in a different direction.” To do so, “we have to juice up our expertise,” Shuler added.
Such juicing was the point of many of the small-group discussions and panels during the conference, which runs through January 12.
That’s not the only thing to juice, according to Verrett. “Support them,” she says of the Waffle House workers and similarly low-paid employees, especially in Southern states. “When somebody says ‘Should you get $25 an hour for flipping burgers?’ you should reply, ‘Absolutely.’”
That doesn’t mean the job will be easy, warned David Galvan, an Electrical Workers (IBEW) organizer in Texas.
“There’s a lot of fear” among workers “and a lot of retaliation” by bosses, he explained. “And there’s a lot of fear of termination” of workers who stand up for themselves. “For some, there’s fear of deportation, too,” if they look Latino.
“But when you start standing up in unity,” then conditions change. “If you reject a contract offer three times and say ‘No, no, no,’ you wind up with wins like a 23% increase” for one shop’s group.
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