Labor's Power to Check Authoritarians

Happy Labor Day! Rather than document the attacks on organized labor that abound, we want to celebrate today a labor movement we’ve watched grow over the past decade in the South - a powerful coalition of formerly unorganized workers who’ve come together to form the Union of Southern Service Workers. We’re proud to stand with them today not only because their cause is moral, but also because they represent the greatest force in American history to challenge authoritarianism and build a multi-ethnic democracy - a moral fusion coalition of everyday people.

They’ve done an incredible job telling their own story in this short video.

It’s especially important that workers are coming together across historic dividing lines in the South. In the lead up to the Civil War, no one doubted the reason for the fight. Alexander Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederacy, stated their cause clearly: “Our new Government is founded upon… the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” Having built an economy based on free labor, the plantation owners of the South were willing to sacrifice vast resources and lives to defend it. When they were defeated, Black and white people in the South came together to reconstruct the South’s economy.

An often forgotten piece of Reconstruction history is the fusion movement that united Black and white workers across the South following the Civil War. White Populists who challenged elite economic interests joined forces with Black Republicans to form Fusion parties that controlled state government in places like Tennessee in the late 19^th century. Even after federal troops pulled out of the South and vigilante violence began to terrorize these coalitions working for change, this cross-racial alliance of workers challenged the exploitation of cheap labor and won major investments in public life. Pastors like J.W. Hood and Henry McNeil Turner stood with these movements, connecting their struggle to the prophetic call for justice and Jesus’ promise of freedom to all people.

The South’s plantation class fought back against these moral fusion movements by working to divide Black and white workers. Playing to old racist myths, they warned white men against the imagined danger of Black men taking their wives and daughters if they considered themselves equals. “White supremacy” was the official rally cry of the so-called Redemption movement in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, but racial divisive was always in service of cheap labor for mill bosses, factories, and agribusiness.

When political leaders lock arms with wealthy corporations to resist unions, they can seem insurmountable. But with faith the size of a mustard seed, everyday people can move a mountain. That’s what workers like those who’ve organized for a living wage and better working conditions through the USSW are doing. They’ve broken through the political culture and divide-and-conquer tactics that make it so difficult to form a union in the South, and they’ve taken a collective first step toward better wages and working conditions for their families.

Labor Day is a good time to remember that worker’s wins are good for all of us. When workers take home a greater share of their companies’ profits, those dollars circulate in the local community—at restaurants and small businesses. When workers have more time, they are able to volunteer at their kids’ schools and coach sports teams in local recreation leagues. Workers do better with a union. And when workers do better, everyone does better.

The history of the South also makes clear that democracy does better when unions makes us strong. The culture of low labor costs that plantation owners built in the South has been sustained by hefty corporate campaign contributions and lobbyists who serve the interests of the wealthy few. But it has also been interrupted when working people have come together, shifting the political calculus for the whole country. Unions don’t only give workers power to negotiate better contracts; they also give working people a collective voice in public life. Unions building solidarity in the South played a critical role in the coalitions that gave us the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, and the War on Poverty. The thriving middle-class of the mid-twentieth century that so many politicians remember nostalgically was built by unions.

At a moment when an authoritarian regime is undermining democracy is America, Labor Day is an important chance to remember how we’ve defeated authoritarianism in our past. When working people have refused division and found common cause with moral leaders and other allies, they’ve been at the heart of our best movements to reconstruct democracy. We celebrate that tradition, not only as a legacy but also as a living tradition in the USSW and other union organizing.

If you’d like join workers for a Labor Day rally near you today, you can find more info here.