Unions in the South; a Personal View from the Bottom Part I

I have recently been reading several books on the "ruling class" and how that has evolved in this country as opposed to much of the rest of the world. The unique nature of the United States has been a noticeable lack of strict class distinctions; at least class distinctions with barriers that can't be passed over or through. Americans like to think that we don't have a class system, that anyone can make it to the top through hard work and dedication. I think there is some truth to this but it is limited by where you start in life. I have come to believe that it is more limited by this than we want to believe.

One of the things that caught my attention in reading these books is the effect that unions have had on the distribution of wealth. Business owners have historically held the power of wealth and influence that tends to make them able to control politics as well. There are of course ebbs and flows to this control that varies with voters awareness of what is actually going on. As a rule, Americans believe in fair play. It is almost an article of faith in this country that fairness is our right as Americans and we believe very strongly as a people that we will always hew back to that line in our economic system through the power of the vote.

From the very beginnings of our nation there has been a constant give and take between those who own land and capital and those who are aspiring to do so. We are one of the few countries in the world that has evolved with this basic division as a centerpiece of our system. Americans believe in the rags to riches story. It is a part of our DNA as a nation. While it does happen occasionally it is an anomaly of a rare order. The real balancing force in our system has always been our ability to control our own government in such a way that we keep the playing field as level as possible.

In the beginnings of this country's economic development as an industrial nation it was not a level playing field at all. Owners of capital and land were able to dictate wages, working conditions, and basically control the system completely by simply utilizing the workforce as needed and let it go when sales started to trend downwards. The late nineteenth century/early twentieth century saw a huge influx of wealth into our industrial system as demand for products soared alongside our growing ability to produce them. The problem was that all of this wealth found its way to the top of the system, the owners of land and capital and very little of it found its way to the people actually doing the work.

Working conditions were dreadful and dangerous, child labor was rampant, and the natural business cycles of unregulated Capitalism wreaked havoc on much of the population when downturns occurred. With the steady increase of the supply of labor through immigration and all of the wealth and poltical control centered at the very top, there was little or no means for the working class to get their fair share. This was the beginning of the labor movement in this country, the birth of labor unions as a necessary response to a rigged system where the working class had no voice. I won't go into the long struggle to gain acceptance but it was a long and violent struggle to gain the right to negotiate for organized labor. Eventually, our native sense of fair play won out and organized labor became a force to be reckoned with. It is not coincidental that this was also the beginning of a middle class in this country. Before organized labor, there was no such thing outside of strictly agricultural regions of the country, the labor movement created the shift in monetary reward that created the middle class.

If we fast forward to the late 1970's early 1980's we start to see the weakening of the great industrial engine of the US. As world competition began catching up with American Manufacturing and industrial development we began to see other parts of the world make inroads into US dominance in these field. Japan's subsidized industries were the first to make this push but it soon became apparent to US corporate interests that the wage differential between US workers and other parts of the world were both a problem and an opportunity.

The first push came when foreign competition became competitive and US manufacturing interests began looking around for a way to remain competitive in a world economy. The first and easiest step to take was to reduce labor costs. Unfortunately, union agreements already in place made this impossible for corporations to do this in the northern industrial belt. The first and easiest step to take was to start to move these bases into areas where there was no organized labor to contend with. Ironically, the somewhat backwards and non-industrial south's historical weakness for Unions offered at least a partial solution.

This period of time saw an increase in southern manufacturing that is still going on today; although it has weakened considerably with the entry of Indochina, China, and India into these markets. Still, it was a way to keep manufacturing here while at the same time lowering labor costs considerably. At this juncture, I started my working career in the south. There were three relatively new manufacturing interests in the small Tennessee town where I want to high school. One of them made air conditioning units and microwave ovens. The second company made insulated copper wire. The third company made sewing notions; bra hooks, paper clips, straight pins, and safety pins. The first two were relative newcomers to the area when I was in high school, the sewing notions plant had moved down from Connecticut over a labor dispute in the late sixties.

The wire manufacturing concern had a very modern approach to labor relations in that they had formed internal company sponsored labor "unions" that negotiated wages and working conditions within the plant. It worked very well and the plant itself was well known for its good pay and good working conditions. Employees at this plant were very loyal to the company and the company responded by treating them well and offering extremely good pay for that area. They had very little turnover and I never knew of a labor incident at all until they were bought in the last few years in a corporate merger.

The air conditioning manufacturing plant was the largest employer in the area so it soon became a kind of test case for labor unions trying to organize in a hostile environment. This plant was well known for its hard work, harsh working conditions, overbearing management, and low pay. In short, if the corporate entities who ran it had tried, they couldn't have created an environment more rife for labor problems. Even minimal efforts to meet employee concerns would have been met with loyalty and appreciation by the workers in this plant but the management was determined that they wouldn't deal with any employee representation of any kind. It was their view that they had moved south to avoid unions and they were not going to deal with one in the south where unions actually had no political power.