Last year, Regina Elsea was earning $8.50 at Ajin USA, an auto supply manufacturer in eastern Alabama. She worked a 12-hour shift seven days each week. But in a state where the permanent unemployment rate hovers around 20%, she was thankful for the job.
But one day last June, two weeks before her wedding date, one of the robots on Elsea’s assembly line stopped working. When she went to fix it, the machine suddenly sprang to life. Elsea was impaled through the chest and died the next day.
Her tragic fate is just one of many profiled in a recent piece from Peter Waldman of Bloomberg Businessweek. Workers at similar plants have lost limbs, suffered burns, and slipped into vats of acid. According to Waldman:
“[Alabama’s manufacturing renaissance] epitomizes the global economy’s race to the bottom. Parts suppliers in the American South compete for low-margin orders against suppliers in Mexico and Asia. They promise delivery schedules they can’t possibly meet and face ruinous penalties if they fall short. Employees work ungodly hours, six or seven days a week, for months on end. Pay is low, turnover is high, training is scant, and safety is an afterthought, usually after someone is badly hurt. Many of the same woes that typify work conditions at contract manufacturers across Asia now bedevil parts plants in the South.”
David Michaels ran OSHA for the last seven years of the Obama administration. He agrees that Southern manufacturing is in a sorry state:
“The supply chain isn’t going just to Bangladesh. It’s going to Alabama and Georgia.”
But globalization isn’t the only cause behind these abhorrent conditions. An equally important factor, and one that Waldman only obliquely gestures toward, is the absence of unions.
In 1947, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act. The law enabled states to pass so-called “right-to-work” laws that forbade union shops (factories where union membership was required) and agency shops (factories that made union dues mandatory even if you chose not to join the union).
Following the passage of Taft-Hartley, unions’ size and power began to decline. Today, 28 states – including the entire Southeast and Washington, D.C. – have right-to-work laws.
These union-free Sunbelt states are particularly attractive for big corporations. When workers lack the protections and organizational support that unions offer, it’s easier for companies to keep wages low and avoid implementing workplace safety protocols.
Organizing the South will be a heavy lift. The Republican legislatures that dominate the South have no interest in disrupting the status quo. And while unions were once the exclusive province of white men, the entry of women and people of color into the workplace makes many modern unions bastions of civil rights and gender equality. It will take a dedicated corps of activists and organizers to convince these Southern workers – most of whom voted for Trump – that it’s in their best interests to unionize.
But if Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) trip to coal country last month proved anything, it’s that there’s still plenty of ways to bridge the left-right divide. Because fair wages and safe workplaces aren’t liberal or conservative – they’re common sense.
Featured image via YouTube video.
