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Union of Southern Service Workers Is Organizing Low-Wage Workers Across Industries [1]
['Condé Nast', 'Kim Kelly']
Date: 2023-03-20 11:00:00+00:00
If you truly want to understand the history of organized labor in this country, you must look to the South — specifically, to what Black workers and other workers of color have accomplished there despite every conceivable obstacle. Nowadays, states such as Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and North Carolina are home to antiunion “right to work” legislation that makes it extremely difficult for workers to organize. Corporate-friendly politicians have actively worked to disenfranchise and oppress poor and working-class people, especially the most marginalized. A century ago, things weren’t much different, but like today, those workers fought back. They protested, picketed, formed unions, and went on strike. Many of them were considered “unorganizable” by labor leadership and labor opponents alike, a status pinned to various groups of workers — typically casual, low-income workers of color, recent immigrants, or both — throughout the centuries
In 1935, when the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) — a landmark labor law that gave most workers the legal right to organize, bargain, and strike — was passed, it included several glaring omissions. By excluding domestic workers and agricultural workers (many of whom were Black, particularly in the South), the NLRA made it clear that, for all its New Deal-era progressivism, the politicians who passed it had decided that some workers simply weren’t worth fighting for. Fortunately, those workers took matters into their own hands and organized anyway, from the Communist tenant farmers in Alabama, described in historian Robin D. G. Kelley’s classic Hammer and Hoe, to Dorothy Lee Bolden and the National Domestic Workers Union of America in Atlanta. Now the Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW) is determined to follow in their footsteps by organizing today’s “unorganizable” Southern workers.
Jamila Allen, emcee at the November USSW summit John A. Carlos II/Post and Courier
The union was cofounded by over 150 retail, fast food, restaurant, and care workers who live and work throughout the South. USSW went public in November, but it has been built on a decade of prior organizing work by Raise Up the South, the Southern branch of the Fight for $15 and a Union campaign, and backed by the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU. Staff organizers provide support when desired, but the new union is an entirely worker-led effort, and did not bother filing for recognition from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) before going public. As far as USSW is concerned, a union is a group of workers organizing collectively, and that is exactly who they are.
“The Ignite Committee — a group of workers from different jobs and different states who were deeply involved with Raise Up — helped create the vision of the new union,” 25-year-old Jamila Allen tells Teen Vogue. She is a founding member of USSW, has been involved with Rise Up since 2018, and currently works at the Durham, NC, location of local fast food chain Freddy's Frozen Custard & Steakburgers. “Our goal for our union is to get our voices on the job and make sure workers are heard. A real voice on the job means that we would have the power to discuss with the bosses and negotiate terms about things like pay raises, health insurance, and safety conditions.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/union-southern-service-workers
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