Racially charged Nissan vote a test for UAW
CANTON, Miss. — Caught among an administration that is frequently hostile to labor, a long-term decline in membership and a steady shift in jobs to the lightly unionized South, the United Automobile Workers long ago settled on this Mississippi town as a key to rebuilding its ranks and energizing the entire labor movement.
But for the 3,700 employees who will be voting Thursday and Friday on whether to unionize the sprawling Nissan plant here, the concern is more immediate: How much they can expect of their employer in a world of diminishing prospects for blue-collar workers — not just in pay and benefits, but also in status and respect.
Conversations with 20 workers reveal a workplace bitterly divided on these questions. In one camp are those who feel that Nissan has provided a standard of living that would have been unattainable had the company not opened its nearly mile-long plant in Canton more than 14 years ago.
“Most of us just have a high school education,” said Kim Barber, a quality technician who has been with Nissan since the plant opened, in an overfilled parking lot before her shift last week. “I’m almost 50. I can’t go anywhere else.”
Barber said she made about $26 an hour, roughly twice what she made in her previous job driving a forklift at a storage company, adjusting for inflation.
In another camp are those workers who believe they should not be asked to grade the company on the curve that is Mississippi’s low-wage economy.
“Nissan knew what they were doing when they put their plant around here,” said Annie Matthews, a union supporter who is also in quality control and a veteran of 14 years at the plant.
Many people had been working at McDonald’s making $7 an hour, she said, “and now this is the best thing that ever happened to them.”
Union supporters complain that the company has been stingy with benefits and bonuses, that workers on the production line are pressured to sacrifice safety to keep the line moving briskly, and that supervisors arbitrarily change policies about discipline and attendance.
And another issue looms awkwardly over the forthcoming vote: race. A large majority of the nearly 6,500 workers at the Nissan plant are AfricanAmerican. One does not have to search hard for racial overtones.
Along with some of her co-workers, Matthews, who is black, claimed that white supervisors rewarded white workers who were their friends with cushier assignments. “You’ve got Billy Bob as your manager, you go duck hunting, possum hunting together,” she said.
(The company rejected the accusation, saying that promotions and assignments were made on the basis of merit, and that the rationale for decisions was not always visible to other employees.)
The UAW, for its part, has taken pains to highlight the campaign’s racial dimension. In its news release announcing the impending vote, it quoted a worker who accused Nissan of violating AfricanAmericans’ labor rights while marketing cars to them.
Officials at the union, which has been working to organize the Canton plant since 2012, say a unionized South is crucial to restoring leverage for workers across the country, since employers can rein in wages by locating there, or merely threatening to.
“There has to be a floor at some point that workers will not go past,” said Gary Casteel, the union’s second-ranking official.