Dean Hubbard
Responding to what they called “a pattern of labor abuses by Nissan against its predominantly African-American workforce in Mississippi," last week Nissan workers filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board seeking a union election at the company’s Canton plant—one of only three Nissan facilities in the world, including two in Tennessee, where workers are not represented by a union.
Nissan employees’ move to form a union comes four months after the historic “March on Mississippi,” when former Sierra Club President Aaron Mair joined more than 5,000 workers and civil-right activists in demanding that the company respect workers’ rights. The march was the largest civil rights march in Mississippi since the height of the civil rights movement.
According to the UAW, the union the workers are seeking to have represent them, the company responded to the march by escalating its anti-union campaign of threats and intimidation.
Many workers in Canton make less than $15 an hour and report that they are in many cases forced to work for years as temporary employees and are denied vacation, health, sick time benefits – or any sort of upward mobility.
Nissan makes the LEAF, an excellent electric vehicle, and in some ways the company has been a global leader in the move towards cleaner vehicles. But as Aaron Mair pointed out at the march, we can’t transition to a clean future on the backs of working people. Nissan is one of a number of foreign companies whose global workforces have union representation, but have chosen to base new manufacturing in so-called “right to work” states in the American south, where union organizing is extraordinarily difficult. As Hal Myerson pointed out in a recent article,
in their home countries, [Nissan and other European and Asian firms]...pay high wages and
are entirely and harmoniously unionized. In going to the South, however, they [pay] wages
and provid[e] benefits well beneath those that such firms as General Motors and Ford offer
their employees, and block workers’ attempts to unionize. They come to sell to the
American market and they come because the labor is cheap.
All but three of the former slave states of the south enacted so-called “right to work” legislation during the Jim Crow era. These laws, which forbid union membership as a condition of employment, have been steeped in the ideology of white supremacy since their inception. Early anti-union “right to work” efforts employed a rhetoric of racial slurs and stereotypes, and the nation’s first “right to work” campaign, in Texas, was closely associated with that state’s Ku Klux Klan. The institutionalization of these values through so-called “right to work” and voter suppression laws is now spreading from the south to the industrial heartland.
Mair and others argue that appealing to white supremacy to degrade workplace democracy is all about maintaining the power of moneyed interests over working people of all races. The environmental movement has a very real interest in making sure our clean economy corporate champions don’t use racial inequality to support the pursuit of profits at the expense of democratic rights. We simply can’t separate the degradation of the environment or the fruits of the clean energy economy from the exploitation of people based on race and class.
In a recent speech to the Texas AFL-CIO, Aaron Mair reminded attendees that the roots of the labor movement were grounded in organizing against slave labor. Mair said the labor movement is essential for workplace democracy, and workplace democracy is a prerequisite for political democracy.
Environmental protections, and an equal seat at the negotiating table, go hand in hand to create a safe environment and a just workplace.