Even More than Race, the South Is About Exploiting Workers

[babylonsister]

Even More than Race, the South Is About Exploiting Workers

By Joseph B. Atkins, Progressive Populist. Posted March 13, 2009.

The heart of Southern conservatism is the preservation of a status quo that serves elite interests.


Cheap labor. Even more than race, it’s the thread that connects all of Southern history—from the ante-bellum South of John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis to Tennessee’s Bob Corker, Alabama’s Richard Shelby and the other anti-union Southerners in today’s U.S. Senate.

It’s at the epicenter of a sad class divide between a desperate, poorly educated workforce and a demagogic oligarchy, and it has been a demarcation line stronger than the Mason-Dixon in separating the region from the rest of the nation.

The recent spectacle of Corker, Shelby and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky leading the GOP attack on the proposed $14 billion loan to the domestic auto industry—with 11 other Southern senators marching dutifully behind—made it crystal clear. The heart of Southern conservatism is the preservation of a status quo that serves elite interests.

Expect these same senators and their colleagues in the US House to wage a similar war in the coming months against the proposed Employee Free Choice Act authorizing so-called “card check” union elections nationwide.

“Dinosaurs,” Shelby of Alabama called General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler as he maneuvered to bolster the nonunion Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai and other foreign-owned plants in his home state by sabotaging as many as three million jobs nationwide.

Corker, a multi-millionaire who won his seat in a mud-slinging, race-tinged election in 2006, was fairly transparent in his goal to expunge what he considers the real evil in the Big Three and US industry in general: unions. When the concession-weary United Auto Workers balked at GOP demands for a near-immediate reduction in worker wages and benefits, Corker urged President Bush to force-feed wage cuts to UAW workers in any White House-sponsored bailout.

more...

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/131359/even_more_than_race%2C_the_south_is_about_exploiting_workers/?page=entire

[madaboutharry]

1. Thoughtful and on target.

However, maintaining an oligarchy is not exclusive to southern politicians, it is the goal of the entire republican party.

[burning rain]

20. True, even beyond racial nastiness...

conservative white southerners tend to be particularly obsessed with heroic individualist mythology, imagining they're latter-day John Galts or Francisco d'Anconias and can somehow have leverage on corporations as isolated individuals, i.e. without doing something "awful" and "collectivist" like push for unions or regulations on business. Of course, racial demagogy reinforces that meme as well.

[BeFree]

2. Elitists have it rough

It's hard to be an elitist. Compared to the working stiff who doesn't depend on the press to keep him wealthy, the elite have to keep up a good press image.

24/7 the image must be maintained. It's hard work.

The working man just needs to show up for his 8 hours a day, but the elite are on the spot 24/7.

It's why the elite must control the media. Otherwise a free press would crucify the elites constantly like they do when a celebrity falls from grace.

A working man doesn't really have to worry much about what he says, the press doesn't repeat any of it, otoh, the elites have to be very careful.

Have pity on the minority elitists, they live hard, mean lives.

[GreenInNC]

3. more regional bashing

Boy, this kind of top notch journalism really helps us down here.

:sarcasm:

[babylonsister]

4. More knee-jerk reaction.

Did you even bother to read this? Where are the non-union car companies located? :eyes:

[Donnachaidh]

5. the article is dead on point - and I live in a red state

Calling it like it is is NOT region bashing. FAR from it.

[madmom]

6. I don't see this as region bashing at all. It does, however, explain how and why

the southern people are being exploited.And yes, I think this kind of journalism really does help you "down there".

[Kolesar]

8. I catch your drift

I am sure that the South is "about" more than what this editorial describes.

[pberq]

12. I live "down here" and very much appreciate this article

For the past couple of years I have been involved in a difficult labor struggle here in this Southern town. The attitude represented in this article is at the core of the problem.

Currently the employer is violating labor law, but it is we, the workers, who are being told to "watch our step".

[blueworld]

13. I also understand your point but...can you help me?

I'm a hybrid. My mom's family is from the South, my pop's father emigrated from Italy. I lived "My Cousin Vinny", so to speak:) Not only do I love the South (yes we have some horrific history, but so does the north), but I've recently moved here "forever".

The exploitation of southern workers, I think, is directly related to a particularly southern phenomenon - that authoritative "Big Daddy" ethic that permeates EVERYTHING here. I believe it's related to religion directly. Southerners are mostly churchgoers & churches demand hierarchy. That "respect" ethic is why there's more poverty, military enlistment, non-unionized workers & folks dying from lack of adequate medical care here.

It's not right & we're not "stupid". Virginia has given this country 8 presidents. Southerners are by & large, warm, social, community oriented & self-reliant. But I don't care whether it's the doctor, the minister, the school teacher or the cop, they "obey" authority. There's always a damned pecking order.

People here are exploited, especially in health care, because the doctor (or cop or minister etc.) is law - show respect; don't question. Whereas northern smart-asses question everyone for any reason. I know - I am what I am & sometimes I'm as welcome as a fish in a pickle dish.

Somehow, southern hospitality & gentility have been turned against us in the workplace as well as in medical care, education & social growth. (Unless we're Appalachian moonshiners:)

Isn't it time we started questioning more even at the risk of "disrespect"? Isn't it time we realized that we can be nice, & respectful without getting beat on or beating on someone else? Isn't it time we booted out these old-timey politicians (Virgil Goode, for example) and stake our claim on the future? I'm serious. Do you know what I mean?

[OHdem10]

7. Now you know why the South remains "Poorest' .

[Frances]

9. I have a friend in my native Alabama who

was discussing an education bond that failed in her county.

She said her son told her that she cared about education, but that the rich wanted to keep the workers poorly educated so that they could pay them less. He said the workers were satisfied with their six-packs of beer.

The same could be true in other states; it just happened that Alabama is where I grew up and that's where my friend lives.

[sallyseven]

11. That plan has been in effect since I was a baby 74 years ago.

[Demeter]

10. K&R Comprehensive and Damning

[pberq]

14. Outstanding article

this is where he really gets it:

In their zeal to destroy unions and their hard-fought wage-and-benefits packages, the Southern senators could not care less that workers in their home states are among the lowest paid in the nation. Ever wonder why the South remains the nation’s poorest region despite generations of seniority-laden senators and representatives in Congress?

Why weren’t these same senators protesting the high salaries in the financial sector when the Congress approved the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street? Why pick on blue-collar workers at the Big Three who last year agreed to huge concessions expected to save the companies an estimated $4 billion a year by 2010? These concessions have already helped lower union wages to non-union levels at some auto plants.

The idea of working people joining together to have a united voice across the table from management scares most Southern politicians to death. After all, they go to the same country clubs as management. When Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker warned of Democratic opponent Ronnie Musgrove’s ties to the “Big Labor Bosses” in this year’s US Senate race, he was protecting the “Big Corporate Bosses” who are his benefactors.

The South today may be more racially enlightened than ever in its history. However, it is still a society in which the ruling class—the chambers of commerce that have taken over from yesterday’s plantation owners and textile barons—uses politics to maintain control over a vast, jobs-hungry workforce. After the oligarchy lost its war for slavery—the cheapest labor of all—it secured the next best thing in Jim Crow and the indentured servitude known as sharecropping and tenant farming. It still sees cheap, pliable, docile labor as the linchpin of the Southern economy.

The idea of anyone from the lower classes sitting at the negotiating table is the most repugnant to the ruling elite.

[ladjf]

15. Fifty years of first rate education would cure many, if not most, of

those Southern problems. The rich have long understood that the key to exploiting the masses is to deprive them of education.

The South is the "bible belt","the poverty belt", the "racists belt" and the "ignorance belt"


(I'm a life long Southerner.)

[starroute]

16. The South was settled by aristocrats and indentured servants

New England was settled by mainly middle class Puritans with a strong tradition of self-government, who divided the generally unpromising land up into family farms and made it productive through hard work. The Quakers and Germans who settled Pennsylvania had similar values of industriousness and self-control. In the early 1800's, it was chiefly these groups who spread out across the northern states, from Ohio and Michigan to Washington and Oregon.

The South, in contrast, was handed out in large estates to aristocratic owners who brought indentured servants to work the land. That basic pattern of masters and servants was set long before the initial generation of settlers worked off their indentures and were replaced by African slaves.

In the 1700's, the Appalachians got a second wave of mainly Scots-Irish immigrants -- wild border folk who were too unruly and too tribal to find a place in a rapidly modernizing Great Britain. They brought with them a strong populist element, but one based on distrust of all government and even of modernity in general.

The serious business of self-government doesn't come naturally to people. In much of the world today, the only alternatives seem to be either authoritarianism or tribal fractiousness -- and the Deep South in particular often seems to be aligned with those pre-modern parts of the world rather than with the rest of the United States.

The virtues of the South are pre-modern virtues, like generosity and honor. Its vices are pre-modern vices, like cronyism and corruption. It should not be taken as an insult to Southerners to say that they are effectively living in a third world nation -- not merely in terms of their poverty, but also in terms of their self-image and their attitudes towards the larger national community.

However, the real problem comes when they try to drag down the rest of us to preserve their own values. And especially if the Republican Party shrinks to become the preserve of a regional minority, it can only serve to unbalance the national political system.

[Donnachaidh]

18. The English emptied it's prisons in the South. n/t

[wildeyed]

19. Interesting post, starroute.

You should expand on it and re-post as an OP.

[DonCoquixote]

22. two cents

The virtues of the South are pre-modern virtues, like generosity and honor. Its vices are pre-modern vices, like cronyism and corruption.

I agree with you, but your language leaves a hole. What exactly ARE Modern virtues?, or vices?

[starroute]

24. It's always harder to see yourself objectively -- but I'll try

One modern virtue is certainly tolerance of differentness. Closely related to that would be flexibility and adaptability.

Another that there isn't exactly a word for is a kind of precision. Precision in the use of language when you're dealing with strangers and you know you might easily be misunderstood. Precision in matters of time and measurement as required by a technological civilization. Precision in legal affairs to in order deal even-handedly with a broad variety of people and situations.

A third would be the ability to think outside your own parochial concerns and community and consider the broader implications of your actions.

And a fourth could loosely be called the democratic spirit -- the willingness to assert that you're as good as the next guy and they're as good as you are and that you grovel before no one and ask no one to grovel before you.

As for modern vices -- impersonality and dehumanization are probably the worst. Exceptionalism would be another -- believing that other times and places have nothing to teach us. Also a kind of impatience -- an incessant craving for novelty and a ruthless disposition to leave behind whatever and whoever isn't up to the moment.

And, as a combination of all of those, there tends to be a certain shallowness to modern cultures, a lack of historical and "spiritual" depth. Essentially, we have no Dreamtime. Our lives are lived entirely in the present moment and as a result it's always about "us" and never about anything larger. This is tremendously apparent in our political discourse, and it may be what cripples us the most as a culture.

[DonCoquixote]

26. Ok, let me clarify

The problem I had was not with the notion of vice or virtue, but on "modern." If you read Historians, every age, from Herodotus Greeks to Twain's Americans, all made the same sort of complaints. The young was always living too fast, with no respect for tradition. I do realize there are some aspects of Vice that can be modern, especially when a focus on the present becomes ignorance of the past. However, there are pitfalls that can be exploited by our enemies if we are not careful.

1) A gilding of "previous cultures"..
I have heard many on both DU and Freeperville somehow fetishize cultures that were based on subsistence farming. Yes, Modern farming needs to give up it's love of all things chemical, but we cannot nor should not think that our ancestors lived in some "simpler time" where they were able to be more "spiritual." In all ages, life has been brutish, mean, and short, to quote Russell, the difference is, in the modern age, there has been the idea that the benefits of knowledge and technology should be enjoyed by all, which is why many of us are on this "personal computer", having access to information that would only be available in libraries. Yes, the past has a lot to teach us, after all, you can take a lot at modern architecture and modern art and see many movements that were supposed to be the 'future' be as obsolete as an 8-track tape. However, trying to roll back to these "simpler times" does not work, even the Amish are having a hard time these days.

We have to combine different virtues, and remember one thing the Greeks did teach us. Many times, the very qualities that made for virtues would be twisted and become fatal flaws, the original meaning of "hubris" The same attitudes that made people heroes in war made them lousy kings, or the same intellect that could challenge fate wound up blinding someone to danger. We not only need to combine different virtues, but we also have to be aware of how they can become our vices.

[starroute]

27. By 'modern' I meant the post-1800 world, not just a generic 'now'

I don't think I'm saying anything different from you are about virtues also being flaws -- and I tried to indicate the trade-offs in what I wrote.

However, by "modern" I was referring to something very specific -- which is the ongoing emergence since the 1700's of a society whose basic values are not based on family and the transmission of property through inheritance and marriage but rather on individual accomplishment. A society that has a high level of geographical mobility, in which people are likely not to live where they were born and grew up. A society in which people are constantly having to deal with strangers -- and coping with the resulting anxiety that arises from never being quite sure of the guidelines. A society in which the meaning of "a jury of one's peers" has somehow transmuted from "people who know you well and can understand your motivations" to "people whose neutrality is assured because they never met you and know nothing about you."

That sort of society does have distinct virtues in terms of flexibility, tolerance, and egalitarianism -- and to the extent that we're still suffering from the persistence of certain remaining strongholds of inherited wealth and influence, we clearly have no choice but to continue on the path which leads away from them -- but it also tends to be afflicted with rootlessness and self-centeredness and a peculiar narrowness of vision.

And that is very different from the garden variety you-kids-get-off-my-lawn-ism of some ancient Sumerian grousing that young people these days no longer respect their elders.

[DonCoquixote]

28. I hear that

Again, any criticism was not really aimed at you as much as at people who will read what you say, and use it to justify some sort of "return to old times." You get tons of it on the right, but you also get people on here who would be happy if all technology was gone, any agircultural advance past 1800 gone, an and everyone was reduced to barter.

At the risk of being hated, I would say that this division of past and present is present everywhere, but it is especially a western issue. In Japan, you have geisha using Cell phones. China uses it's collective talent, but also is learning to allow individuals and families to have a share in things. Dubai has a lot of Arab culture, but some parts of it look like something out of Star Wars. Perhaps because the West did a lot of damage, Asia is thinking, to quote Emperor Mejii of japan "let us learn the best the outside has to teach, but also keep the knowledge that we have." Yes, there are flaws that could be nitpicked, but the point is that, In the West, there is NOT the sense that we can keep tradition and evolve, it either has to be either or, and THAT is what we need to change.

[Mithreal]

23. K&R for starroute's post. nt

[babylonsister]

29. Please tell me more about the Scots-Irish.

"wild border folk who were too unruly and too tribal to find a place in a rapidly modernizing Great Britain."

Wow. You describe my heritage, and the other half is German.

I never knew we were considered unruly and tribal.

[unc70]

30. Simplistic and misleading "history" of the "South" and its peoples

Some valid points (the "populist" anti-government influences), but so much is simplistic, misleading, or just wrong.

Not very many aristocrats with large land grants, even fewer that survived from the 1600's into the 1700's. These would have been in Virginia, the Carolinas, or further north. The Deep South was settled much later than such grants. While the eight Lord Propieters "owned" the rights to the Carolinas, it was a commercial failure.

Indentured servants everywhere, north and south. Most settlers "paid" for their ship's passage by becoming indentured to the ship's owner/captain for 5-7 years. After working for the specified period, the indentured servant would become free and would receive his own small grant of land. (Often the ship owner had received a separate grant for each settler transported.) Being indentured is the origin of many First Families.

Indentured servants were cheap labor, particularly when malaria, typhoid, and other diseases killed so many of the settlers, free or indentured. Slaves came to the English colonies of North America much later and initially was not race-based. (Those first Africans brought into Virginia that we hear so much about were indentured, not slave, and later free.)

The total number of Africans brought to North America was roughly half a million (out of 12-13 million, most taken to Central and South America or the islands). Most of them entered the colonies in the mid and late 1700's, after most of the other migrations to the South were well established.

These early groups were also a lot more diverse than your stereotypes. Those Germans and Quakers in PA described with values in contrast with the people who settled in the South -- by the 1700's they were taking the inland route south, settling in places like the Piedmont of NC. The Quakers in places like modern Greensboro. The Moravians from the Bethlehem PA area came south and founded Salem NC, the center of a thriving German-speaking region.

Before them, there were other influences. Huguenots in various colonies, Jews, the Swiss colony at New Bern, and lots more. Already in place in the upper South in colonial times, well before most of the "Deep" South was settled.

The Deep South is another story, much later, and with its own special set of issues.

I see the exploitation of cheap labor by the rich as a universal and not restricted to any region or group of people.

[lildreamer316]

31. Okay, but there are a TON of Quaker settlements here in NC.

As well as the Waldensians in the Valdese area...and I think a few others.
Just noting.

[formercia]

17. Hooked on slavery.

Some people never change. In the North, it was cheap Canadian labor for the mills and in the South, it was cheap labor from slavery. It's exploitation of the weak and politically powerless for profit.

[burning rain]

21. Yep, and the more "progressive" conservatives...

aim for an economy in which workers are royally and equally screwed regardless of race or gender. That's their notion of progress.

[MasonJar]

25. You mention the South as a region which exploits the poor. You really

think that the South has a monopoly on exploiting the poor. WoW! In the first place, it generally costs less to live in much of the South. In the second every region of this country has negative attributes, as well as positive ones. However, I would wage that exploiting the poor is universal in the good old USA. As to my scumbag Senator, Mitch McConnell. he is not generally liked in Kentucky; he barely won this fall. He does have some powerful friends and has spent years controlling the Senate purse strings of the national GOP, and so he naturally always has enormous financial reserves with which to run. His financial resources make defeating him formidable. However, we have a sizeable Democratic majority in state government (as in governor and most elected state government positions and certainly a majority of appointed ones.) The Senate is GOPer and the House is Democratic.
We have a Toyota plant in Georgetown (central, bluegrass section of the state ), which has been the source of many jobs. I am not sure if they have a union or not, but no one apparently complains. In addition, we have two large Ford plants in Louisville. They of course are union affiliates.
Just because Kentucky is harnessed to the losers, McConnell and Bunning, does not mean the people of the state are unfeeling, meanspirited, officious, duplicitous scoundrels, who knowingly create hardship for the less fortunate.