UAW’s Southern Strategy: Union Revs Up Drive To Get Workers Employed By Foreign Automakers To Join Its Ranks - TPM – Talking Points Memo

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This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1482904
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“If you change the South, you change America.”

A heady mission!

The insight here is that unions can be and will be the vanguard of economic and social advancement in the South, and the UAW, its awesome spear.

Let it be!

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“Change the South”
So the “South” is a loaded diaper?

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The South is a new hope waiting to be born.

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The elected officials are often “full of shit”.

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Hopefully, the UAW, and other labor unions will be successful in their drives to create union shops in the South. As many have said lately, the Middle class made America, and unions made the Middle class!

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GOOD! As the son of a UAW organizer, this is what they need to be doing!! And these Governors need to be publicly attacked for their BS statements!

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is that a euphemism for slavery?

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There is a lot of room between what the automotive leaders in the South tout as “wages and benefits superior to what local workers have earned previously” and what would constitute compensation necessary to support a reasonable standard of living.

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Don’t forget child labor.

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The South don’t need no stinking unions because it is an economic powerhouse!

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yes

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“If you change the South, you change America.”

Finding someone who is fluent in "dumbassease " is the ongoing challenge…

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It’s great to hear that UAW is targeting the South for organizing.

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The cost of living in the south is way cheaper and it’s beautiful etc so it’s a tradeoff. I know we have a lot of liberal minded people in Arkansas but they’ve been inactive politically since Mike Beebe was Governor, then MAGA took over thanks to the Koch brothers who set up shop and got Tom #Cottonmouth elected as Senator, and Mike Huckabee as Governor. We’re going to start changing that situation in November.

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Good luck to them. But UAW’s trying to organize the VW plant in Chattanooga, should be an object lesson as to how tough it will be. I suspect Corker was typically lying about VW’s pledge. VW is part-owned by the German state of Lower Saxony and the workforce in Germany has Mitbestimmung, meaning the right to help determine plant management. IIRC, the VW management did not object to unionization at Chattanooga. But the effort still lost.

The South has always been backward, and the rights they deny aren’t just the rights of racial minorities (as women are finding out). Before the Civil War, de Tocqueville was struck by how on the Cincinnati side of the Ohio River “all was energy and bustle.” On the Kentucky side, lethargy and backwardness. That came from the two distinct labor systems. In a kind of mutated form, that still applies.

In the 1920s, Mencken wrote “The Sahara of the Bozart,” decrying the South’s lack of education and culture. We still see it with the book burning, anti-science outbursts, and general red-neckery. The general anti-intellectual atmosphere can’t really encourage too many high-tech companies that need knowledge workers to move there.

And it’s funny how despite “an eager and trainable workforce with a work ethic unparalleled anywhere in the nation,” the South, with the lowest per capita income in the country, subsists on welfare handouts from Blue-state taxpayers.

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I just hope UAW leadership have good security. Labor struggles in the U.S. have a long history of not being bloodless