The Failure of Labor Unionism in the US South

Abstract

The failure of labor unions to succeed in the American South, largely because national unions proved unable or unwilling to confront white supremacy head on, offers an important key to understanding post–World War II American politics, especially the rise of the civil rights movement. Looking at the 1930s and 1940s, it is clear that the failure was not the result of a cultural aversion to collective action on the part of white workers in the South, as several histories have suggested, but rather stemmed from the refusal of the conservative leadership in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to organize an otherwise militant southern workforce composed of both whites and Blacks. These lost opportunities, especially among southern woodworkers and textile workers, contrasts sharply with successful interracial union drives among southern coal miners and steelworkers, especially in Alabama. Counterfactual examples of potentially durable civil rights unionism illustrate how the labor movement could have affected the civil rights movement and transformed politics had the South been unionized.

The Centrality of the Workplace and Class Consciousness in the US South: The New Orleans Community Studies

“…Many scholars have explained this regional variation in workers' wages, benefits, protections, and general economic development by emphasizing the historic and contemporary lack of a labor movement in the South (Melcher & Goldfield 2019;Goldfield 2020). Some have argued, though, that the lack of a southern labor movement, in turn, is due to a cultural aversion to working-class politics in the region.…”

“…Given the composition of the workforce in the South, a southern labor movement would, by necessity, need to be interracial. By purging the labor movement of its anti-racist left-wing-by requiring union officials to sign anti-communist affidavits, resulting in perjury convictions and/or expulsion from the union-the leadership that remained in the South was largely unwilling to organize Black workers on an equitable basis (Melcher & Goldfield 2019). The labor movement died a death of attrition in the South because it refused to organize new workers on an interracial basis.…”

Unionization and Convergence in the United States

“…Although Alabama's rate of unionization in the manufacturing sector is slightly below average (in the past 15 years or so) the historical size of the sector pushes Alabama as a whole into the middle-density clubs. This has a historical background as Melcher and Goldfield (2019) note that union density was relatively high near Birmingham due to high levels of union organization by coal miners in the region. Organized shipbuilders and longshoremen in Mobile also contributed to Alabama's (relatively) high union density.…”