Southern protest

...More importantly, missing from Working Lives are interviews with workers who don't join unions or who drift away from active participation in them...

...in the South, by threats to move elsewhere in the region or overseas...

...These struggles have been little noticed because they have been historically less successful than those in the North...

...Jonathan Cobb (Jonathan Cobb is co-author with Richard Sennett of "The Hidden Injuries of Class...

...As in the North, the increasing dominance of multinationals, with vast operations and diverse products, means that owners are less vulnerable to local strikes...

...Working Lives shatters that image...

...The third reason for the regional difference in unionization is that widespread industrialization, the precondition for substantial unionization, is a comparatively recent development in the South...

...Boycott campaigns, national publicity, and national coordination have for this reason become increasingly important to labor union success...

...In the modern period, Southern unionists have won some important strike victories, most notably at J. P. Stevens & Company, and have increased their numbers between the middle 1960s and the middle 1970s from 2 million to 3 million...

...While many corporations remain virulently antiunion, union drives have become more acceptable in communities across the South, and the level of physical violence has declined...

...Particularly since World War II, the relative absence of unions and the availability of cheap labor have made the South an inviting place for corporations to open new plants...

...They appear to have been most successful in areas such as tenant farming where whites did not have much status or income to protect, where the focus was on industry-wide organizing, and where the necessity of interracial unity was particularly palpable...

...But unless unions, Northern and Southern, can break out of their traditional mold, they would seem doomed to defensive action rather than potentially serving as a catalyst for progressive change...

...Still, even early in the century workers in some sectors were able to overcome racial divisions and establish integrated unions...

...Three themes emerge from the accounts in Working Lives...

...Missing too are discussions of the changing nature of the work force and attempts to organize white-collar workers, of the bureaucratization that plagues unions, and the limitations of prevalent U. S. conceptions of unionism which would help us to understand the low levels of participation...

...By contrast, the locus of Southern industrialization was much more frequently the village mill, with labor recruited from the surrounding countryside...

...The collective efforts described in the pages of Working Lives have transformed the social climate of the South over the past eight decades...

...Given the small scale of many of the workplaces, and the company-enforced isolation of the community from outside reporters and organizers, the chances of strike victory were usually slim...

...Even in basic industries such as textiles, unionization in the South today remains only a fraction of what it is in the North...

...A second difference is the extensiveness of company towns and the persistence of paternalism in the South...

...From the IWW-affiliated Brotherhood of Timber Workers, strong in Louisiana and Texas around 1911, to the 1936 Atlanta sit-down strike against General Motors (which preceded by more than a month the Flint, Michigan, sit-down strike that figures so prominently in histories of the CIO's origins), to the organizing efforts of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the 1943 strike against the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in Winston-Salem, workers all over the South have been struggling for better wages, working conditions, and union recognition for many decades...

...In popular image, the Southern labor movement, except in mining, came into existence only recently, as major industries began moving their operations south, bringing in their wake Northern organizing efforts such as those portrayed in the movie Norma Rae...

...The strict racial division of labor enforced in many fields and factories during most of the century, and employer-inspired fears among whites of blacks driving down wages and breaking strikes, have made building class solidarity in the South a Herculean task...

...With less than one worker out of five in a union, "labor" and "labor movement" are hardly coincidental, making the title of the book and some of the rhetoric in it quite misleading...

...Despite the efforts of activist workers between 1964 and 1974, the percentage of Southern nonagri-cultural workers organized actually declined from a woefully small 16 per cent to an even smaller 14 per cent...

...the rifts among ethnic immigrant groups in the North...

...Through oral histories, essays, poems, lyrics, and photographs—nearly all culled from the fine quarterly, Southern Exposure—the reader is thrust into the claustrophobic company towns, into the factories, the fields, and the mines, onto the often bloody picket lines, and into the union-organizing meetings of Southern working-class life from 1900 to the present...

...Editor Marc Miller is probably right that further Southern unionization is critical for workers throughout the country and for the revitalization of the union movement...

...Company towns were common in the North in the early stages of industrialization, but great cities and industrial complexes soon predominated...

...In the North, worker demands are met by threats to move South...

...The most obvious regional difference is the Southern heritage of slavery and racial antagonism that.has divided workers against themselves in a more enduring way than did...

...Working Lives puts the Southern labor movement on the social map...

...As a member of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union comments in an interview, "Hard times makes peculiar bedfellows sometimes...

...In the monolithic environment of company towns, company relations weren't simply work relations but a way of life, not lightly breached...

...Companies that have moved operations South typically have left behind their grudging acceptance of unions and resolved to forestall unionization in the South as long as possible...

...Those who did protest faced not only loss of their jobs, but eviction from their homes, police attacks, and withdrawal of basic supplies and services...

...Wage scales have been so low in the South that even when corporations pay employes a fraction of what they did in the North, the wages still represent a step up for many of the region's workers...

...Southern workers therefore often have not been able to build on past Northern organizing victories but frequently have had to start from scratch...

...Today, Southern workers face corporate barriers to collective victories similar to Northern workers...

...These improvements would seem to justify the tone of guarded optimism that suffuses the pages of Working Lives...

...Why has the labor movement been less successful south of the Mason-Dixon line...

...But step outside the book's context and a more disturbing picture emerges...

...Southern protest also helped spur the passage of social programs in the 1930s, programs which, many of the veteran activists interviewed fear, we see as beneficent grants by the state rather than as the concessions wrested through collective action that they were...

...The social and emotional resistances to organizational appeals are as much a part of the Southern (and Northern) labor movement's history as the picket line and the machinations of capitalists These issues are acknowledged in the concluding chapter, but they unfortunately receive scant attention in this otherwise fine book...