Southern Workers Assembly: ‘Build rank-and-file power to fight fascism’

Photo via Southern Workers Assembly

Watch the full Southern Workers Assembly Town Hall – video at the end of this article.

“People are tired of hearing that this is the most important election of our lifetime, but it’s true,” declared Bill Fletcher, Jr., at the Southern Workers Assembly (SWA) Town Hall held last week. Fletcher is a trade union activist and Associate Fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies.

“We are in a cold civil-war period. The fascists are interested in annihilating us, overthrowing the 20th century, and rolling back all the gains won by social movements,” he said.

The SWA is a network of local unions, worker organizations, and organizing committees in the South. They have vowed that their members and allies will mobilize to oppose the fascist forces in the 2024 elections and beyond. The coalition includes United Electrical Workers Local 150, National Nurses United, Union of Southern Service Workers, Black Workers for Justice, and the International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1422.

More than 60 trade unionists from around the South met to discuss building rank-and-file power to fight fascism. The meeting opened with Fletcher tracing the historical trajectory of the far-right forces in the U.S., which he characterized as one section of capital seeking total dominance over all other sections of society. Next, the focus shifted to organizing new unions in the South.

“We need to engage in rank-and-file cadre development in non-union workplaces—the 90% of the workforce not covered by collective bargaining agreements,” Libby Devlin, a member of the SWA Coordinating Committee, said. She urged the participants on Zoom to think about organizing the unorganized as a way to build power and block fascist forces.

The meeting addressed the challenges of organizing workers in the new “Battery Belt” that is developing across the South. With the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, corporations have announced investments of $110 billion in facilities for the EV supply and production chain. This will include charging stations, mineral refining, and battery production, storage, and disposal. Eighty-five percent of these new investments are concentrated in right-to-work states, mostly in Southern states. As many as two-thirds of all EV jobs are projected to eventually be located in the South.

In 2023, the United Auto Workers overwhelmingly supported a contract that would give its members a stake in the EV transition, aiming for increased unionization in the Southern auto industry. A two-year, $40 million new-organizing campaign has been pledged by the UAW to shatter the control that multinational auto bosses hold over 150,000 non-unionized auto workers across the country, particularly in the South.

“The South is a bastion of anti-union and racist oppression,” said Ashaki Binta, a member of SWA, Black Workers for Justice, and UE. Nevertheless, “the moment is open for opportunities,” she said. “We must take advantage of this period.”

The current NLRB under the Biden administration has been labeled the most labor-friendly board in decades, but a Trump and Republican victory in 2024 would throw up major obstacles for the labor movement’s aspirations of organizing the South, the SWA noted.

Corporate interests have already embraced the reactionary, big-business environment in the region—which has the fewest number of unions, lowest wages, and the most rigid anti-labor laws in the country.

“Organization is the greatest weapon that the working class and the oppressed have,” said Binta. “In the SWA, one of our missions has been and continues to be building organization and infrastructure throughout the region in order to challenge and transform the conditions to be able to build our unions and working-class power.”

The danger posed by a Trump and Republican victory would set back the labor and progressive movements decades, if not a century, the Town Hall organizers pointed out. Indeed, the far-right is seeking to roll back the gains of the 20th century made by working people, especially workers and civil rights, they said.

Project 2025, the agenda for a second Trump administration, advocates giving state and local governments the ability to obtain waivers from federal labor laws including minimum wage and overtime pay requirements. It also calls for the ability of states to opt out of the National Labor Relations Act, which protects the rights of workers to join unions.

Fletcher called for workers to lead the mobilization: “We need to build working-class organizations that are prepared to advance and raise hell, organize mass struggle, and offer a vision beyond the status quo.” He said the working class is engaging with its allies to “block MAGA, defeat them now, and crush them politically.”

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CONTRIBUTOR

Cameron Harrison

Cameron Harrison is a trade-union activist and organizer for the CPUSA Labor Commission. Based in Detroit, he was a grocery worker and a proud member of UFCW Local 876, where he was a shop steward.