A revolution continues to roll through the South

Lot of good for regular people news tonight

Welcome to a Saturday edition of Progress Report.

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A Revolution Continues Rolling Through the South

Riding high after a historic victory in Tennessee last Friday, the United Auto Workers got more good news this week while gearing up for the next few stops in its big campaign across the South.

Just before 11 pm on Friday, UAW President Shawn Fain announced that the union had reached an agreement on a new contract with Daimler Trucks North America, avoiding what would have been a bruising strike by 7,300 workers who make buses and trucks at seven factories in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. The new deal was reached after a week of negotiating and announced one hour before the old contract expired.

Workers were demanding significant wage increases after several years of pay raises that lagged behind inflation, even as Daimler made a record $5.8 billion in profit last year. Fain said that the union had secured a 16% pay raise within the first year of the deal and 25% raise at minimum for all workers over the next four years. Workers in lower-wage positions will make $8 an hour more by the end of the contract, while highly skilled workers will make up to $17 more per hour.

The focus was especially intense at Thomas Built Buses, which pays its workers substantially less than Daimler’s truck brands, Freightliner and Western Star, despite their performing very similar tasks.

Percy Payne, a quality inspector who has spent 24 years at Thomas Built, told me earlier this week that he made $5-an-hour less than a friend who does the same job at one of the truck factories. That adds up to a nearly $10,000 annual discrepancy, even before overtime is factored in.

Inflation exacerbated the situation. Local leaders said that some of their members have been forced to sleep in their cars or use a scooter to get around in the dead of winter. One worker told me that when she returned from unpaid leave, she lost her food stamps, which led to her turning to food banks and churches, as well as the charity of her coworkers.

Extra raises at Thomas Built mean that the wage gap between the companies will now be eliminated by the end of the contract in 2028.

The union was also determined to end the two-tier compensation system imposed by Daimler in 2010.

“At that time, the company didn't have no pity on my local union,” said Ricky McDowell, a local UAW president. “They went for two-tier wages. They cut the benefits from the families. They made sure that the next generation after 2010 wouldn't have healthcare when they retire. They had no pity, and we are not gonna have no pity on them this time. We want our fair share of that profit.”

Once again, playing hardball and showing a willingness to walk — the UAW held practice pickets several times throughout the week — led to a major corporation suddenly finding the money to more fairly compensate its employees.

I spent much of the past three days at work writing and producing this report on the situation:

North Carolina, despite being one of the more politically liberal states in the South, has the second-lowest density of union members in the nation. The UAW first organized Daimler Trucks in 1990, and the following year, workers walked out on a 17-day strike until the company capitulated and agreed to a contract that included a retirement plan, serious increase in pay, and new safety precautions.

Now, workers at Daimler told me that they were again ready to strike, for as long as necessary. They felt emboldened to take a not only by their circumstances but by the overwhelming victory at VW last week.

✊ Populism over partisanship: As the VW victory reverberates across the country, the UAW is now gearing up for its second major election in the South, at a Mercedes plant in Alabama. The union’s advance has been met with incandescent rage from Gov. Kay Ivey, who will probably be even angrier when she finds out that Alabamians think more highly of the UAW than they do of their governor.

A new poll found that voters in Alabama support autoworkers’ right to unionize by a two-to-one margin, 52 to 21%, while they give Ivey a modest 48-42% approval rating. The poll, conducted for More Perfect Union in the days before the VW win, also found that Alabamians really, really believe that unions can deliver serious material improvements to members, which is exactly the opposite of what Ivey has alleged.

I wrote up the poll for MPU, so I’ll go ahead and paraphrase myself:

• 72% percent of Alabamians polled agreed that UAW representation will deliver higher wages and compensation to workers

• 71% believe that it will negotiate for better healthcare and retirement benefits

• 69% said that conditions will improve for workers.

Democrats backed the union by a 58 to 15% margin, while Republicans, though naturally less enthusiastic, were still pro-UAW by a thin 35 to 32% margin. Black Alabamians were most supportive of the union drive, and Black men most of all, with an 82-0% split.

The pro-union results were not a fluke based on a non-representative sample, either. The 500 respondents were demographically and geographically in line with the state, and to put it bluntly, they liked Donald Trump and positively loathed Joe Biden. Republicans and conservatives outnumbered Democrats and liberals by similar margins.

That Alabamians still view unions in such a positive light after years of GOP politicians and conservative media depicting them as corrupt Democratic proxies is indicative of just how much cultural identity shapes a place’s politics, especially in the absence of an alternative that offers immediate, tangible, and enticing economic incentives and quality of life enhancements.

The latter is only just starting to slowly and abstractly resurface after 40 years of neoliberalism gutting government services and privatizing everything, whereas the UAW just won record raises for members with a huge national strike.

A win for the union at Mercedes would prove that VW was not a fluke and that these companies aren’t going stop the UAW by hiring some expensive union-buster lawyers to run the same playbook that they run everywhere else. It would also provide more momentum for another live organizing campaign in Alabama, this one at a Hyundai plant.

In other news…

☕️ Coffee Talk: Starbucks Workers United finally opened contract negotiations with the bean behemoth in Atlanta this week, where the two sides engaged in two days of what they publicly called very productive conversations.

There were well over 100 delegates from various unionized stores present, and from what I’ve gleaned from a fair number of people involved, the sessions really were very encouraging. There was very justifiable skepticism among workers going into the talks, and there’s still a long way to go before reaching an agreement, but this was a step forward.

💊 Labor-pilled: Workers at a CVS Omnicare voted to become the first location to formally join the Pharmacy Guild, a new union within IAM that launched last fall. The blowout election — it finished 26-4 — at the store, which focuses on long-term care patients, is indicative of just how conditions have gotten at giant chain pharmacies.

The battle isn’t really over money — though big pay raises for part-time technicians who barely get more than the minimum wage is one of their demands — so much as the hours, meddling and monitoring, and understaffing at these places. Two more CVS locations have filed for elections, both of which are in the company’s home state of Rhode Island.

I reported on their fight shortly before I underwent heart surgery.

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⛓️‍💥 States diverge in restoring voting rights for former felons 🗳️

Nebraska lawmakers passed a new law that eliminates the long waiting period that felons face if they want to their voting rights back. Up until now, former felons who had finished their sentences and probation had to wait two years before casting a vote again.

In Mississippi, the state Senate on Wednesday approved bills to restore the voting rights of four — yes, four — people who were once convicted of non-violent felonies. One was released in 1989, one in 1994 and another in 1997. A fourth was convicted in 1979 and released so long ago that police didn’t even have proper records of it.

Why it matters: The law automatically gives 7,000 people their right to participate in representative democracy. That’s a great thing, regardless of which party might benefit from it.

It’s even better when compared to what’s happening in Mississippi. The legislature considered a broader bill, but it failed after state Sen. Angela Hill, an especially state Senator who chairs the Constitution Committee, refused to bring it up.

Hill told a local paper that “the constitution speaks for itself,” which is unfortunately true.

To quote James K. Vardaman, the state’s governor when the document was written: “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter … Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the n—– from politics.”

What’s next: Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen let the bill become law without his signature, and may find a way to challenge it in court.

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🌿 North Dakota weed activists kick it into high gear 📝

Cannabis legalization will be on the ballot in November in North Dakota — if organizers can manage to acquire at least 15,582 valid petition signatures before July 8th.

The initiative would legalize recreational marijuana consumption for people 21 and older, which is currently a misdemeanor punishable by a small fine and/or up to 30 days in jail. North Dakota legalized medicinal marijuana in 2016.

Why it matters: Nearly half of all states have legalized recreational marijuana, and you can’t accuse activists in North Dakota of not trying to join them. Voters in the state have turned away two different legalization initiatives, in 2018 and 2022, and the hope is that a new approach and argument could win the day.

This campaign is being fronted by an organization called New Economic Frontiers and led by former Bismark Mayor Steve Bakken, who insists that he has never consumed marijuana. Bakken, who now serves as a commissioner in Burleigh County, says that he wants to see marijuana legalized because he thinks cops’ time could be better spent on dealing with fentanyl and other harder, more addictive drugs.

What’s next: Organizers have two and a half months to get those signatures. If they can’t do it in time, they’ll have a year to gather them for the next general election.

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🙄 Congressmen produce a bipartisan proposal to condition aid — to schools

Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres (NY-15) teamed with GOP Rep. Mike Lawler (NY-17) to introduce a bill that would condition federal funds to college campuses on their efforts to monitor and prevent antisemitism. The schools would have to pay for an independent monitor that would publish quarterly report on campus incidents.

Why it matters: What may at first seem like a reasonable approach to combating hatred is actually a cynical and dangerous piece of performative junk.

First, consider the source: Ritchie Torres has been one of Israel’s most fervent defenders throughout his time in Congress, and since 10/7, he has made defending and distracting from war crimes a full-time job. There is no Israeli talking point that he won’t parrot, including the laughable insistence that the IDF’s murder of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers was a total mix-up.

Second, the name of the bill: The College Oversight and Legal Updates Mandating Bias Investigations and Accountability Act would be referred to by its acronym: The Columbia Act. This is a stunt to score political points, not help keep anybody safe.

Third, it’s an unnecessary distraction: Yes, there have been some terrible things said and written by protestors in and around the campus encampments, and while many of them have come from outsiders, there’s no doubt that more than a few students have crossed the line. But they represent a minuscule fraction of the protestors — far too many Jewish kids have been at the center of organizing them for them to be terrorist cells or dens of antisemitism.

(I’d also guess that some of the comments and signs were simply products of ignorance and an entire life spent in a United States that has been an agent of chaos and bringer of mass death in the Middle East. It’s not exactly the same, but when I visited Prague in 2007, I was psyched to check out the headquarters of the Communist Party there. I wound up getting yelled at by an old lady in Czech outside the building.)

Disinformation is rampant and people with power are knowingly lending it credibility. For example, on Friday, Rep. Jared Moskowitz promoted a NY Post story that claimed that a student at George Washington University carried a sign calling for the Final Solution against Jews, amplifying a purposeful misrepresentation. The photos were actually of an older man who was carrying a sign that accused Israel of pursuing its own Final Solution on the Palestinians.

I wouldn’t have made that sign, but it clearly wasn’t an endorsement of the Holocaust. That we are examining photos of individual protestors to determine their intent is ludicrous when there’s a genocide happening, a false equivalence that this bill wants to perpetuate.

Fourth, the backlash would be ugly: Conservative have spent the past few years making higher education increasingly hostile to students of color and LGBTQ+ students, communities that already faced unique challenges on many campuses. The Supreme Court just ended Affirmative Action, DEI offices have been banned in many states, and entire fields of study have been erased. If Torres and Lawler actually cared about protecting students from bias and discrimination, they’d have written a bill that also covered many other communities.

Fifth, the bill is a favor to conservatives: Not only has Torres bought right into the GOP’s anti-education agenda, he did so while allying himself with Lawler, one of the DCCC’s top targets in November. Costing Democrats elections, it seems, is OK so long as it’s done to kick the left.

If nothing else, the bill does deserve some credit for underscoring the absurdity of this moment. A whole lot of lawmakers are eager to condition funds to colleges and universities based on their efforts to police student speech, yet reject out of hand the idea of placing any conditions on military aid to Israel, even when they know it’ll be used to massacre Palestinians.

As I wrote on Wednesday, there is no shortage of actual antisemitism in this world, so term being used like a cudgel in service of silencing critics of a genocide is actually really irresponsible, not to mention infuriating. I hate that as a Jewish person myself, my immediate reaction to such allegations is narrowing my eyes skeptically or feeling resentment.

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