How the South Became Anti-Union

Some 35 years ago, the Ol' Bloviator published a book called The Selling of the South, which chronicled the efforts of Southern political and economic leaders to attract new industrial plants, employing a variety of subsidies, tax exemptions and other gimmicks, but focusing in by far the greatest part on the promise of cheap, non-union labor. As the following piece, which appeared a while back at zocalopublicsquare.org, shows all too well, this practice has changed but little.


The recent crushing rejection of a United Auto Workers bid to organize a 6,500-worker Nissan assembly plant near Canton, MS seemed to present the proverbial déjà vu all over again for organized labor’s ancient and oft-thwarted crusade to gain a serious foothold among Southern workers.

This time, however, we are not talking about textile and apparel plants in the 1920s or ’30s, but about a thoroughly globalized Japanese auto manufacturer, led until a few months ago by a French-educated, Brazilian-born CEO. What might seem to be no more than a classically Southern triumph of continuity over change is better understood as an example of continuity within change—one with implications ranging well beyond regional boundaries.

Cheap labor has been the mainstay of efforts to lure industrial employers into the South since the 1880s. By the 1920s, union agents venturing into the region could expect withering inhospitality, not excluding brutal beatings by local sheriffs or company thugs. With these shows of physical force came a powerful and cohesive propaganda barrage, courtesy of racist and sectionalist politicians who linked labor unions to the abolitionists of the 1850s and the “race mixing” NAACP of the 1950s.

According to one study of Southern industrial development, it was common practice to remind workers that unions were ruled by “potbellied Yankees with big cigars in their mouths” sporting names “even a high school teacher couldn’t pronounce.” From the pulpits came warnings that “CIO means Christ Is Out,” with editors and Chamber of Commerce types chiming in to make a vote to unionize tantamount to “endorsing the closing of a factory.”

Read more: http://flagpole.com/news/cobbloviate/2017/11/22/how-the-south-became-anti-union