Can labor transform the South?
NLF Highlights for January 2024
The 2022 unionization campaign at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, is one of several high-profile organizing efforts in the South that have ended in a defeat for labor. With a large swath of southern state governments under Republican trifecta control, and social relations still impacted by the conventions of Jim Crow, the region has remained a major challenge for organizing. Not surprisingly, the six states with the worst labor conditions in terms of wage policies, worker protections, and organizing rights are in the South.
Stepping into this breach is the Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW), with the conviction that for the U.S. labor movement to succeed, the South must cease to operate as a bastion of low wages and workplace exploitation. Backed by the Service Employees International Union, the USSW is focused on the difficult sector of low-wage service work – fast food, retail, etc. – made all the more difficult by high turnover. USSW is trying an unconventional approach: organizing sector-wide across the service industry, using direct action as the tactic of choice, and blurring the line between community and workplace action. And workers have won impressive victories, including wage raises.
The USSW has no illusions about the task ahead of it, writes Ben Wilkins, in The Long Road to Recognition: Southern Service Workers Find Their Power in the forthcoming winter 2024 issue of New Labor Forum. The USSW itself came out of a decade of movement building. At a time when public support for unions is higher than in recent memory, the USSW seeks to build on growing pro-union sentiment, while it implements an organizing plan for the long haul.
And the latest episode of our podcast Reinventing Solidarity continues the conversation about strategic organizing. It features a discussion with Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce, the authors of a new book titled Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World.
- The Long Road to Recognition: Southern Service Workers Find Their Power – Ben Wilkins, New Labor Forum
- Reinventing Solidarity Episode 46 – “Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World”
The Long Road to Recognition: Southern Service Workers Find Their Power
Low-wage service workers in the U.S. South face significant barriers to building power at the workplace due to a plethora of anti-union state laws, exclusion from federal labor protections, and the persistent super-exploitation of Black Southern labor. Against these odds, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) launched the Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW) on November 17, 2022 in Columbia, South Carolina. USSW seeks to express and amplify the power of low-wage workers through direct action, community-based alliances, multi-industry organizing tactics, and fostering multiracial unity. Ultimately, the goal of USSW is to transform poverty wage service jobs in the South into dignified union jobs.
In the work of creating a more just and sustainable world, which strategies hold the most promise for overcoming the enormous obstacles inherent in 21st century capitalism? A recent book, Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World by Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce, tackles this question head on. Based on interviews with leading activists, the authors draw vital lessons from organizations and movements – including the New Georgia Project, Make the Road, the Fight for 15, Occupy Wall Street, and the Gay Men’s Health Crisis – that have achieved substantial victories. Here, we present the book’s authors in conversation with MacArthur fellow and United We Dream co-founder Cristina Jimenez.
Listen here: SLU.CUNY.EDU/PODCAST
