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Found liable for massive fraud, is required to post a massive bond, gets a break, then files a *fraudulent* bond!

People are complicated. Love is not.

We’re not going back!

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Somebody needs to explain to DeSantis that nobody needs to do anything to make him look bad.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Never forget that he train is barreling down on Trump, even as he dances on the tracks.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

He really is that stupid.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

Come on, man.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Workers Of The World, Unite!

Workers Of The World, Unite!

by | 42 Comments

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Very good news:

Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tenn., passed a historic vote to join the United Auto Workers, the union said Friday, becoming the first Southern auto factory to approve a union with an election since the 1940s.

Workers Of The World, Unite!

The union’s unofficial vote count, which still must be confirmed by federal labor officials conducting the ballot, showed 73 percent of workers had voted yes by 10 pm E.T. on Friday night. It will take a simple majority for the vote to pass.

Republicans know what a big deal this is. On Tuesday, the day before voting at the Chattanooga plant began, six GOP governors put out a statement that was, frankly, an cry for help:

“We the governors of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas are highly concerned about the unionization campaign driven by misinformation and scare tactics that the UAW has brought into our states. As governors, we have a responsibility to our constituents to speak up when we see special interests looking to come into our state and threaten our jobs and the values we live by.

As Jamelle Bouie pointed out in his column today, those “values” boil down to making damn sure a tiny sliver of wealthy and powerful people at the top of the Southern social hierarchy get to preserve the position they’ve held since the 17th century:

The history of Southern political economy is to a great extent a history of the unbreakable addiction of Southern political and economic elites to no-wage and low-wage labor. Before the Civil War, of course, this meant slavery. And where the peculiar institution was most lucrative, an ideology grew from the soil of the cotton and rice fields and sugar plantations, one that elevated human bondage as the only solid foundation of a stable society.

As Bouie writes, the end of slavery turned Southern elites’ efforts into creating the economy of slavery by other means.

Southern elites fashioned cultural traditionalism, anti-New Dealism and free market ideology into a new mantra of “free enterprise.” It was meant to stand athwart a supposed movement “away from individual responsibility, states’ rights and local and community self-government,” in the words of the Southern States Industrial Council, a business group organized in opposition to Roosevelt’s vision for the country.

There’s a whole history to the term “free enterprise,” and if my day job ever relaxes its talons I may try to gloss that tale here, but for now the point is simply that a mythologized picture of the individual as hero breaking through the constraints of society–that “Southern man” who doesn’t need Neil Young around anymore–was a vital part of the identity politics used to crush any collective action that might threaten the heirs to the slave economy.

Now workers in Tennessee have voted by almost three to one to pursue exactly that kind of collective power. No wonder those governors were terrified of what was about to happen.

As Bouie said in his conclusion, one victory in one plant isn’t enough to say that fundamental change is already visible. But to channel my inner Churchill, while this victory isn’t the beginning of the end, we can look upon it as the end of the beginning.

Take this as a damn good note with which to begin the weekend–and a thread as open as the tailgates in Chattanooga on the UTC Mocs home dates.

Image: Ramon Casas, Ramon Casas and Pere Romeu in an Automobile, 1901

Reader Interactions

42Comments

  4. 4.

    piratedan

    these are the kind of victories that give hope to others.  Post Dobbs, victories in Kansas and Ohio point the way, victories like this one in organizing labor means that while the playing field may be tilted, it can be overcome.

  5. 5.

    Dan B

    My father was transferred to a factory in small town Arkansas.  It was Freedom to work and Jim Crow.  Blacks were never seen on Main Street.  The white schools were new.  The black school was uninsulate corrugated sheet metal.  My father quit his job to get us kids out of the south.  This unionization is a beam of sunlight on a part of the world I will never see again.

  7. 7.

    Tom Levenson

    A shorter way of making the point I had in mind at the end of this post:

    One victory in one plant doesn’t mean the world has changed. It does show that it can change.

  9. 9.

    Librarian

    Now watch TN try to stop it in some way, like passing laws against unions. I wouldn’t put anything past them.

  11. 11.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Tom Levenson: true, but you may recall that when the UAW first made a run at this plant a few years ago, the union was rejected overwhelmingly.  And that was with VW leadership telling them to vote for it!

    I have negotiated several contracts in Chattanooga and, like everywhere these days, a shocking number of the union leaders are trumpists.

    But this is at least a bit of good news!

  15. 15.

    laura

    Somewhere on the intertubes I saw a clip of a white working class man who voted for the UAW saying that he was heartened by watching the worker solidarity in the Writer’s Guild of America strike- and their success, that it was a chance worth taking…or words to that effect. a better world is possible

  16. 16.

    Martin

    I think Shawn Fain deserves a hell of a lot of credit here. I’m sure he helped with this effort, but his success with the prior UAW strike certainly helped things immensely. Winning is one of the most powerful political acts.

  17. 17.

    Fake Irishman

    Next up: Mercedes in Tuscaloosa Alabama, May 13-17.  5,000 workers.

    Win that one and oooh, Nelly.

    These are also big plants. The biggest I had heard of until now was a 900-person unit at Russell Electric.

  18. 18.

    Bupalos

    I’m tellin y’all, something changed this week. Some of the things stacked against us started wobbling and toppling.

  19. 19.

    Fake Irishman

    @Steve in the ATL:

    This is a good point, Unionists don’t necessarily vote Dem, but unions do on the whole tend to educate their members and their families into voting for their economic interests instead of their latent racist tendencies.

  20. 20.

    Fake Irishman

    @Fake Irishman:

    And on issue campaigns they’ll vote for Medicaid expansion, minimum wage increases and against Right to Work laws (see Missouri for example)

  21. 21.

    Gvg

    @Fake Irishman: But being known to vote for a losing effort can get you blackballed…I wonder if that was a factor in earlier failures, if potential yeses thought the effort to Unionize would fail and so kept their heads down and said they never thought of it. Until they felt enough other co workers and the community was behind it.

    Possibly the management also made enough people mad too. They usually do when this issue comes up.

    I also wonder why Florida’s governor didn’t join the chorus listed. I guess we don’t have any auto plants but there are other areas. I have lived here all my life and I don’t understand how ordinary people can be so anti Union. It has never been in their interest.

  24. 24.

    RaflW

    Yeah, the Republican “values we live by” can be summed up as: moar child labor , no water breaks for roofers & carpenters, and all profits to C-suites, nothing for labor. Plenty of other ways those governors are working to roll all the goodies uphill to the already-plenty-rich, but we know that, too.

  26. 26.

    RaflW

    @Bupalos: Josh Marshall at TPM has been trying to figure out Mile Johnson’s change of heart (or tactics or whatever, don’t meant to suggest ol’ Mikey really has a heart in the sense of: compassion or desire to do right).

    At the least, I suspect that there’s some really bad internal polling starting to show up for elected Republicans.

    I’ve also wondered about the ‘coincidence’ of that Fox Nooz “MTG is an Idiot” op-ed landing on the same day as the WaPo story Secret Russian foreign policy document urges action to weaken the U.S., which for whatever gut reason, I suspect was leaked by a European agency along with (here’s where I go into rank speculation) so-far unleaked but quite possibly whispered-about information that, if it got out, would damningly link MTG and possibly several other Republicans more directly with Putin’s influence ops.

    I think Johnson has gotten spooked that some bad shoe may drop that the GOP is basically infiltrated, and getting this Ukraine aid thru is an effort to protect the 165 (?) Republicans who voted yes on the rules for the bill.

    Just my late night conspiracy musings! Could be whack.

  27. 27.

    wjca

    @Gvg:  I don’t understand how ordinary people can be so anti Union. It has never been in their interest.

    People’s experience of unions can differ.  Perhaps this may help.

    My father was a carpenter his whole (post WW II) working life and, of necessity, a member of the union.  He was also not a fan of the union.  He told the story of his early days as a (very junior) union member.  He would routinely go to the union hall and ask after work.  And the local steward would tell him, loudly, “No, nothing today.”  And then, softly, “See me outside in 10 minutes.”

    Because, of course, there were contractors looking to hire.  But officially, more senior guys should be sent out first.  The thing was, the more senior guys didn’t want to go; they preferred to spend the day at the union hall playing cards.  So subterfuge was necessary.

    It left him with quite a negative view.

  29. 29.

    Geminid

    @RaflW: There was also the prospect of a successful Petition to Discharge to concentrate Johnson’s mind. A couple weeks ago, Rules Committee Chairman Tom Cole told a Politico reporter that the aid package would make it to the floor one way or another, either through regular order or by Petition to Discharge. He was quite matter-of-fact about.

    On Thursday a Republican Ukraine hawk told reporter Jake Sherman that if Johnson’s current effort to get a viable bill on the floor failed, “the floodgates would open” and enough Republicans would sign Rep. McGovern’s petition.

    I think that was a factor. And as Sen. Mullin (R-OK) said, the classified briefings by CIA Director Burns and others have been alarming and convincing

    Ed. The question of Russian influence is an interesting one. Several Republican House have publically raised this problem in the past few days, including the Foreign Relations and Intelligence Chairmen. This of course is not a new story, but the willingness of Reps. McCaul and Turner to go public told me the Ukraine hawks were taking the gloves off.

  30. 30.

    Aussie sheila

    @Fake Irishman:

    Agree. The most dangerous anti democratic force is a ruling class that knows no opposition either at the shop-floor or the ballot box. A demoralised and powerless working class is a harbinger for authoritarian politics.

  31. 31.

    Betty

    Why are you Yankees intent on destroying our beautiful Southern heritage for which we fought and died – oops, I guess we lost that one too. Power to the people!

  32. 32.

    JML

    @Gvg: 40+ years of anti-union propaganda running unrelentingly from the GOP with frequent partnerships in the media and tepid support from the left (lot of democrats have gotten fooled into being anti-teacher’s unions and being skeptical of public service unions as well, especially in the 90’s) really hurt Labor. Then you had the corporatists sending manufacturing jobs overseas in waves which wrecked memberships, and those evil bastards tanking their own pension plans to screw workers and it’s been a long, bad road for unions.

    And the unions had a lot of work to do internally with their own leadership, which had gotten complacent and unresponsive to changes in membership demographics. Needed to run out the corrupt shitheels, purge the racists, and re-learn how to organize.

    Having a pro-Labor president like Biden sure helps.

  35. 35.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @wjca: People’s experience of unions can differ.

    And there are unions and there are “unions”. My dad never had a good word to say about the one at Western Electric’s Point Breeze works in SE Baltimore where he worked for 30 years. Not because he was anti-union in general; au contraire, mon frère. He despised the incumbent union at Point Breeze, CEW**, because it was a company union firmly in management’s pocket. He was absolutely certain that if one of the big national unions*** replaced them, it could and would negotiate a much better deal for the workforce.

    Now Dad was a damn bright and personable guy who might’ve risen high in one of those unions. So why didn’t he get involved in the push to replace them? Well – he was also a very frightened guy, with too much experience of grinding poverty in his youth and doors being slammed in his face whenever he tried to better himself. His job paid well enough to support a wife and two kids and the mortgage on our modest row house, and he wasn’t about to risk losing it for being a union organizer. At least that’s how I think it shook out.

    ** IIRC this stood for “Company Electrical Workers” or maybe “Corporate”. The bastards didn’t even try to disguise it.

    *** Communications Workers of America (CWA) or the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) are the ones I recall him mentioning.

  36. 36.

    Scott

    Interesting that those Governors don’t recognize those factory workers as their constituents.

    BTW,  wait until a corporation comes looking for tax breaks.  Those tax breaks will come with some anti-union, anti-worker clauses.

  37. 37.

    Burnspbesq

    @Fake Irishman:

    one suspects that M-B and BMW are relatively indifferent to the trend toward unionization. They’re used to dealing with strong unions in their German plants.

    The biggest challenge for the UAW will be Tesla.

  38. 38.

    Thor Heyerdahl

    @Burnspbesq: It’s the law for large German companies for labor representatives to be on the corporate supervisory boards

    Codetermination in Germany

    Codetermination in Germany is a concept that involves the right of workers to participate in management of the companies they work for. Known as Mitbestimmung, the modern law on codetermination is found principally in the Mitbestimmungsgesetz of 1976. The law allows workers to elect representatives (usually trade union representatives) for almost half of the supervisory board of directors. The legislation is separate from the main German company law Act for public companies, the Aktiengesetz. It applies to public and private companies, so long as there are over 2,000 employees. For companies with 500–2,000 employees, one third of the supervisory board must be elected.

  41. 41.

    robtrim

    Good story. The underlying theme of the Trump/MAGA phenomenon is that it flourishes because of how “capitalism” has morphed into a feed-the-rich, corporate gravy train that siphons off more and more of the nation’s wealth. The examples are legion: the 2007 – 2008 financial collapse that bailed out financial institutions and large corporations like GE; the continuing tax “system” that benefits stock buybacks, overseas tax havens and management greed. Look at an historic chart of corporate taxes as a percent of GDP: https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/corporate-income-tax-revenue-share-gdp-1934-2020

    Private Equity, capitalism’s new wealth enrichment monster, is gobbling up health care resources and infrastructure (hospitals, clinics, insurance companies, medical practices) and turning them into “profit centers” with monopoly powers.

    The Blackstone Group has assets of $ 1 trillion dollars. Go to Wikipedia and check out their machinations. CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman is a good friend of Donald Trump. And Blackstone has dozens of smaller, equally voracious competitors.

    Despite the size and success of these monsters, they remain anti-union and anti-social safety net. The GOP is really their field office in Washington! America’s workers have a hard fight ahead.

  42. 42.

    SteveinPHX

    This is good news. I remember when that last vote failed. Hoping for a trend.

    I have a son doing graduate work at UTC. Also finished his undergrad work there. Lives several miles out just off Brainerd.

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