Can the UAW Finally Organize the South?

April 9, 2024

Postwar failure to organize the South entrenched racism and corporate greed. Now there’s a chance to course-correct.
D.D. Guttenplan


Hyundai workers on an assembly line at a plent in Montgomery, Alabama. (Robert Sullivan / Getty)

It was the week before school started, and my mother and I had pulled into the parking lot at Korvette’s—a discount department store in Northeast Philadelphia—ready to load up on pencils, pens, composition notebooks, and other supplies, when she stopped dead and said we were going elsewhere. Noticing my confusion, she said simply, “We don’t cross picket lines.” And so began my political education.

Many years later, at Nation associate editor Andrew Kopkind’s kitchen table in Vermont (where much of my higher political study took place), I met Jack O’Dell, a once-blacklisted ex-communist who had provided the fundraising muscle for Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaigns and was a key adviser to Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign at the time. It was O’Dell who tipped me to the importance of Operation Dixie, the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ campaign to unionize Southern workers, launched in 1946. The effort was brought down by the same postwar Red Scare that ushered in the Taft-Hartley Act (forcing many unions to purge their most effective organizers) and decades of bloated military budgets (championed by defense intellectuals, corporate profiteers, and cold-warrior union leaders alike).

But in describing Operation Dixie as “a promise abandoned,” O’Dell—who’d been a National Maritime Union organizer during the campaign—offered more than just a history lesson. He wanted people to understand that failing to organize the South had left racism and reaction unchallenged, setting back the civil rights movement by a decade and handing corporations an effective Southern strategy for resisting labor’s demands.

Which is why I was so excited to see the United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain commit to organizing in the South—a promise whose first fruits may well come later this month, when over 4,000 workers at Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, will vote for the third time in 10 years on whether to join the UAW. Previous votes have been thwarted by a combination of ineffective organizing and political threats by the state’s ruling Republicans—who have not restrained their opposition. But should the UAW succeed in Chattanooga and go on to win at Mercedes in Vance, Alabama; Hyundai in Montgomery; and Toyota in Troy, Missouri—not to mention Tesla—the effect may well be more long-lasting than anything else that happens in 2024.

FULL story: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/uaw-organize-south-union/