UAW Targets Mississippi Nissan Plant for its Southern
Campaign

Facing South By Joe Atkins, Labor South June 28, 2012

http://www.southernstudies.org/2012/06/uaw-targets-mississippi-nissan-plant-for-its-southern-campaign.html

After months of speculation about where the United Auto
Workers was going to focus its do-or-die Southern
campaign to organize workers, the giant 3,000-worker
Nissan plant in Canton, Miss., has emerged as
Battleground No. 1.

The $1.4 billion, nine-year-old plant has been eyed by
UAW leaders for several years as a potential prize in
its efforts to regain ground it has lost over the past
several decades. UAW membership has dropped 75 percent
in the last 30 years, and that decline has been
aggravated by the proliferation of non-unionized
foreign-owned auto plants in the South.

Early speculation had the union targeting the
Volkswagen plant near Chattanooga, Tenn., and the
Daimler-owned Mercedes plant near Tuscaloosa, Ala., but
it's Nissan's Canton plant that's in the crosshairs.

On May 1, the UAW moved its headquarters from nearby
Gluckstadt, Miss., to the Nissan Parkway directly
across from the sprawling plant. "We can look at them
every day and they can see us," said Sanchioni L.
Butler, a national organizer now working full-time in
Mississippi.

A recent press conference in Canton organized by
community leaders had U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson,
D-Miss., standing alongside state NAACP President
Derrick Johnson and others pledging their support for
the unionization effort at Canton.

"What's so important is that this was a community
effort, not the United Auto Workers," said Catherine
Gryp of the Richmond, Va.-based CRT/Tanaka public
relations firm.

The UAW has hired CRT/Tanaka to assist in its
organizing campaign.

Butler said hundreds of workers at the plant have
already pledged their support for a union.

The UAW wants to avoid a repetition of its failed 2001
campaign to organize the Nissan plant in Smyrna, Tenn.
On the day before the election, Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn
appeared in a video that was required viewing for
workers. "Bringing a union into Smyrna could result in
making Smyna not competitive, which is not in your best
interest or Nissan's," he warned them. They got the
message.

Nissan and Ghosn have already started to use similar
anti-union tactics in Canton, UAW officials said. "All
we want is a fair election," Butler said.

The union also won't find any support among
Mississippi's conservative Republican leadership. Gov.
Phil Bryant, in a speech to business leaders this week
at the University of Mississippi's Center for
Manufacturing Excellence in Oxford, expressed concern
that the UAW was going to try to organize the new
Toyota plant near Tupelo, Miss. "The automobile
industry is very fragile," said Bryant, as quoted in a
Memphis Commercial Appeal article. "That's what worries
me. If the union involvement becomes active in the
Southeastern automobile corridor, what does it do to
industry? And I just don't see a positive outcome to
that."

Mississippi is a "right-to-work" state, which makes
organizing doubly difficult. In fact, the state
embedded "right-to-work" in its constitution during the
administration of Gov. Ross Barnett in the early 1960s.
The state invested $363 million in the Nissan plant.

Working in UAW's favor this go-around is the workforce
at the Nissan plant, which is estimated to be 80
percent African-American, Butler said. That's the exact
reverse of the Smyrna plant. African- Americans have
traditionally been more inclined to vote unions than
Southern whites.

Another favorable factor may be Mississippi's history.
It was here that some of the bloodiest battles of the
civil rights movement were fought. It is here where the
idea of a social movement based on social justice at
the workplace can find fertile ground, UAW leaders
believe.

Butler and Gryp said the issue for workers at Nissan is
and will be fairness and respect at the workplace, not
money. Although Nissan workers in Canton have
historically earned less than their counterparts at
other auto plants, they still make more than most
Mississippi workers.

Over the past several years, the UAW has laid the
groundwork for a future campaign in Mississippi,
developing relationships with community, political, and
religious leaders. The test of that work lies ahead.

___________________________________________

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