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.
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
