operation dixie

The organizing drive at HCA Healthcare's Mission Hospital in Asheville is National Nurses United's largest labor campaign ever undertaken in a state with a long history of hostility to unions. A win could help shift the power dynamic in North Carolina and the rest of the South.

 

The producer of electrical transformers receives tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer support, but a study found a top-line Howard Industries maintenance worker earns just 61 percent of the wages paid a similar worker at another Mississippi transformer manufacturing plant.

The labor movement needs to build power in the South by undertaking an effort like the historic Southern organizing drive the CIO launched in 1946. A union organizer and a student of labor history offer their blueprint for doing just that.

A union organizer and a third-generation organizer working in the South offer their ideas for building a culture of unionism in the region -- or anywhere the idea of collective development and exercise of power has waned.

When the CIO launched a campaign to organize Southern workers in 1946, the region's elite fought back by exploiting fears about race and communism -- and fear remains the biggest obstacle to organizing today, as the UAW's campaign to unionize Nissan's Canton, Miss. plant shows.