A historic breakthrough for working people

This transcends politics... but the politics are better, too.

Welcome to a Friday night version of Progress Report.

Hello from Manhattan, where Donald Trump has spent the past three days falling asleep and ripping ass in the small, crowded courtroom where he is on trial for paying hush money to a porn star.

Any clause in the above sentence would have been anywhere from the focal point of days of news coverage to a total career-ender for anybody else. But because the media thinks Trump is impervious to scandal and humiliation, it treats him that way, a self-fulfilling prophecy in a perpetual motion machine hurtling us towards hell.

In brighter news, workers made history tonight and there are hopeful signs of a fundamental realignment. Let’s go!

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The wall has been breached.

Workers at a Volkswagen manufacturing plant in Chattanooga, TN have voted to join the United Auto Workers, the NLRB announced late Friday night. The victory for the UAW marks a historic breakthrough for the American labor movement, which has for well over a century been blockaded from asserting any significant presence in the South.

When the UAW tried to organize the same factory in 2014 and 2019, the union effort fell just short on both occasions. This time, the union, under aggressive new leadership and able to boast about the huge gains it won during this fall’s strike on the Big Three automakers, earned the support of 75% of eligible workers at Volkswagen.

“This election is big,” Kelcey Smith, a worker and union organizer, said in a statement. “People in high places told us good things can’t happen here in Chattanooga. They told us this isn’t the time to stand up, this isn’t the place. But we did stand up and we won. This is the time; this is the place. Southern workers are ready to stand up and win a better life.”

A few of my colleagues have been down in Tennessee to cover the election and just put out the video below:

The Chattanooga facility will now serve as a beachhead for UAW president Shawn Fain’s ambitious plan to unionize many other facilities across the South; next up is a Mercedes-Benz factory in Vance, AL, where workers will vote on whether to join the autoworker union in mid-May.

A new direction

In the late 1970s, soaring gas prices began steering Americans toward the smaller cars produced by foreign automakers, leading some of those companies to build out manufacturing facilities in the United States.

Hoping to avoid dealing with the UAW or pay similar wages, those companies flocked to southern states, where unions were long kept at bay by a mix of government policy (including carveouts in the New Deal itself) and cultural biases (especially racism). The UAW tried to organize factories throughout the region every now and again — an effort at Mitsubishi in Mississippi back in 2019 fell just short after some epic union-busting — but they weren’t able to make a breakthrough for decades.

A century of hostility to workers’ rights, made explicit by an extraordinary and extraordinarily desperate joint-statement by six current southern governors loaded with lies and tropes about unions, have proven no match for the post-pandemic nationwide surge in support for labor unions. Millennials and Gen Z have consistently proven most enthusiastic about the prospect of organizing their workplaces, and it was an infusion of young workers hired by VW after it expanded the factory in Chattanooga that helped lead the UAW’s campaign.

Young people have also been at the forefront of Starbucks Workers United, the upstart barista union that has organized well over 400 cafes and 10,000 workers nationwide. In many cases, stores have been organized by college students and people in the mid-to-late 20s, giving the campaign a defiance, idealism, and high risk tolerance.

After nearly three years of hyper-aggressive illegal firings and store-closings failed to break the union, the coffee mega-corporation in late February agreed to sit down and negotiate the framework for a first contract. Those negotiations will begin next week; I’m working on a story about how the union pushed the company to this point and will have more on those talks when they happen.

Starbucks Workers United is decidedly progressive, as were the organizers of Amazon Labor Union and many of the other new retail sector unions that sprung up over the past few years. But the new national affection for organized labor is not limited to the left or even the Democratic coalition.

Last summer, Gallup poll found that two-thirds of Americans approve of unions, which is why you saw Donald Trump go to Michigan during the UAW strike to hold a rally with workers at an auto parts factory (which turned out to be a non-union shop).

Even as Republican politicians have sought to take up the mantle of working people over the past decade, their actual policies toward workers have become increasingly draconian, at times to the point of absurdity.

Solidarity with CEOs

The anti-worker bills have come fast and furious over the past few months, passed and then signed by a who’s who of faux-populists, corporate monkeys, and nihilists.

Last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed HB 433, which bans local governments from requiring that employers provide outdoor workers with heat and water breaks, even during the hellish summer months. Last summer, Florida experienced 46 days with temperatures in excess of 100 degrees, an enormous increase over its previous high.

A 29-year-old farmworker died of heat stroke during that nightmarish period, and just this week, OSHA revealed that a 26-year-old farmworker was also killed by a combination of the heat and their boss’s ignorance.

Last year, Texas’s omnibus Death Star preemption bill included a ban on local governments requiring water breaks for outdoor workers.

Shamefully, it’s not just Republicans doing some version of this: California Gov. Gavin Newsom pulled a new rule that would have required employers provide indoor workers relief from the heat because he claimed it would cost too much to cool down sweltering prisons.

The labyrinthian rule-making process means that even with the state’s massive prison population exempted, it will take months and months for the rule to roll out.

One of the major players in making workers’ lives miserable on behalf of corporations is quietly having an impact this year. The deeply corporate and conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) creates model legislation for deeply lazy and easily corruptible Republicans state legislators, who often just fill in the blanks with the appropriate proper nouns and dates.

The group’s latest labor policy guide introduces two new bills, one of which bars companies from receiving taxpayer incentives if they voluntarily recognize their employees’ unions. With the amount of money at stake in these contracts, it’s essentially guaranteeing that all contractors will fight their workers tooth and nail to prove that they sufficiently oppose the unit.

Republicans in Georgia and Tennessee have already passed the law, and it’s moving forward in Alabama. It’s no coincidence that these states are benefitting big time from an influx of federal money, as part of the strategy behind the allocation of the IRA and infrastructure money was to start rebuilding the industrial base of states that had the space and workforce that could experience a political shift along with an economic one.

Another new trend in GOP class warfare is preemptively banning basic income programs and pilots. These programs are immensely helpful to working people and cost so little compared to what they return — it turns out that stable housing, food, and childcare.

Tangible wins are key

While it’s important to make note of Republicans’ phony populism and hypocrisy, if pointing those things out in and of themselves made any real difference in elections, we’d be looking at Democratic supermajorities everywhere. Far more important is being proactive with legislation that helps working families, which some Democratic lawmakers have really taken to heart.

In Colorado, for example, the legislature has passed a number of pro-worker laws, including one that protects construction workers from wage theft and another that bans mandatory captive audience meetings, which are hours-long presentations about why a union would not be good for those workers. Illinois is also on the verge of banning them.

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