Framing the Debate from a Worker’s View

By Ken Johnson

Vol. 10, No. 2, 1988, pp. 24-25

For more than two decades, Southern governments, Chambers of Commerce, business supporters and others, when measuring the South’s economic well-being and quality of life, have framed the debate on economic development and prosperity in the most restrictive terms.

These debates have focused almost entirely on the number of new jobs created. Obviously, when measured along these lines, the South of cheap land, low wages and low taxes has done exceedingly well. For the ten-year period 1975-1984, for example, Texas, Florida, and Georgia were among the top five in the U.S. in new job growth, and North Carolina and Virginia were among the top ten. But absent from these measures has been any discussion of the impact of these new jobs on the workers themselves and of the question of whether these new jobs raised the standard of

---

Page 25

living for the average workers of the region.

The Climate for Workers in the U. S., the report released last year by the Southern Labor Institute, sought to broaden the discussion on economic development and job creation policy. The report challenges the notion that economic development depends on cheap land, unreasonable tax concessions through industry, and an unorganized, untrained and uneducated work force willing to work for less than workers elsewhere. The document, sharply different from the usual business climate report, illustrates that despite nation-leading numerical gains in job growth and recent improvements in state financing of education, the Southern region has failed to meet national standards in almost every other way. The South exhibits the smallest gain in wages and per-capita personal income, the largest proportion of the working poor, and the highest incidences of poverty.

To quote directly from the report, “The challenge and the task that face the South today and in the future is to create jobs with the incomes and benefits needed to bring the region’s workers above the poverty level. Not just new jobs as in the past, but jobs that will significantly improve the standards of living for people who work full time year round.”

The picture has changed. Local economic developers can no longer rely on the South’s usual selling points: low-cost of production and an abundant labor supply to attract traditional manufacturing jobs. Government and private sectors alike have been torn by import pressures and technological advances which have significantly reduced the job-creating potential.

Increasingly the potential for job growth is in service industries, indigenous small businesses, and information based industries which have less demand for low production costs and more need for a well-educated work force, high quality of life, rapid transfer of goods and information, and access to financial capital.

In short, our competitive future rests on the quality of our work force and on the investments we’re willing to make in the men and women who produce the goods and services that bring economic gains.

Southeastern states have banked their future on job growth while neglecting the rewards and the protection of their workers. Southern states fill the bottom rung of nearly all of the more than two dozen indicators considered in this study of the nation’s labor climate. The South’s extraordinary job growth in jobs during the past ten years has been accompanied by the least change in personal income of any U.S. region.

Working people are more likely to be poor in the South than any other U.S. region. Southeastern states have the lowest per-capita income in the nation. Nine Southern states are among the bottom thirteen in manufacturing wages, averaging less than $8 per hour. In eight southeastern states, more than 40 percent of the manufacturing jobs pay less than $8 an hour.

Treated as a percent of all the manufacturing jobs in each state, the results show why the southeastern states can rank high in job growth and yet rank low in wages and income. A significant finding of the report reveals the poor standings of the southeastern states with regard to statutory protection of workers, governing the workplace, protecting workers’ rights and safety and providing compensation for disability and unemployment, the South falls considerably lower than all the other U.S. regions.

The report examines the states to see how many of fourteen common statutes protecting workers were in effect and whether or not their provision made them meaningful. The eight states with the least worker protection are in the southeast. In Alabama and Mississippi, not one of the fourteen laws had been enacted. In South Carolina, only one. In Virginia and Louisiana only two; in Tennessee, Florida and North Carolina, only three. Six of the nine states in the nation with no state minimum wages are in the Southeast. At the bottom of the benefit scale, five of the six states that pay the least for permanent disability, under $200 per week, are in the Southeast. In the nation’s twelve worst states, the weekly unemployment benefits is $100 or less, and eight of the twelve are in the Southeast, with Mississippi on the bottom.

Until recently, blacks and women had been excluded from traditional white male occupations; officials, administrators, professionals, technicians and craft-workers. Southern states ranked on the bottom in the percent of working women and minorities employed in these jobs.

The report also considers several indicators of the states’ general quality of life. Among the findings are some historically familiar refrains. The Northeastern states report the lowest rates of poverty, from 8 percent in Connecticut to 13 percent in New York. The Southeastern states remain the poorest region. Mississippi, with 24 percent of its population in poverty, ranks worst. Blacks are more likely to be poor in the Southeast. The nine states with the highest proportion of black poor are in the Southeast. Rates of poverty for blacks in the southeast range from Virginia’s 25 percent to Mississippi’s 44 percent, again, the highest in the nation.

A telling indicator of the quality of health care in the state is its infant mortality rate. Sadly, a baby is not likely to survive its first year of life in the Southeast. The two states with the worst infant mortality rates, over fifteen deaths for every thousand births, are Mississippi and South Carolina. The eleven worst states, all with death rates of thirteen or higher, include West Virginia, Alabama, North Carolina, Florida, Louisiana and Georgia.

We have heard and will continue to hear about the Sunbelt, but job growth in the Southeast has occurred in large part at the bottom end of the wage scale and has not improved significantly the conditions or prospects for wage earners in the region. As the Southeast economy follows the national trend of fewer manufacturing and more service sector jobs, the region’s employed and unemployed workers are less likely to see much change in their personal conditions. Reversing these trends, of course, will depend largely on our ability and willingness to increase worker participation in both public policy and the workplace decision making process.

Ken Johnson is director of the Southern Labor Institute and co-author of The Climate for Workers in the United States.

Winning the South

By Ken Johnson

Vol. 11, No. 2, 1989, pp. 1, 3-4

For Democrats, the Solid South is history. This, having been true for the national party for some time now, is becoming the case for Democrats at the state and local level as well. Yet, despite the arguments that are being made with renewed vigor by many Southern white officeholders and party leaders about the need for a change of direction, close examination of the 1988 election results from one thousand racially segregated voting precincts from seventeen major Southern cities suggests that the Democrats can win in 1992.

Democrats can actually win a majority of the Southern states in the next presidential election with only a modest increase in Southern white support if–and it’s a big if–black and Hispanic registration and turnout equals that of whites in 1992.

That surprising conclusion emerges from a recent study by the Southern Regional Council of the 1988 presidential returns and county and statewide data. The evidence suggests that a coalition victory of the Democratic Party in the South may be much closer than many Democrats believe if the region can remove the barriers of race and national origin from the political process. With equal levels of registration and voting and continued strong minority support, Democrats need only a 5 percent increase of white support–little more than their 1988 gains–to win six Southern states, a majority of the region’s votes, and the next Electoral College.

In such a scenario, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas would move to the Democratic column.

In the eleven states of the Old South, black and Hispanic registration and voter turnout have generally been between 10 and 12 percent below white levels in

---

Page 3

recent years. No exact data is available because registration and turnout information is notoriously unreliable in some Southern states and is not broken down by race in others. Moreover, surveys such as the one taken every two years by the Census Bureau probably overstate black registration and voting.

How can such predictions be made in the face of recent arguments by many white Southern Democrats that the party must adapt itself to the conservative nature of white voters if it ever wants to win the presidency again?

The answer is that Democrats in the South actually did better in 1988 in gaining new white voters than they did in turning out black voters. Our study of one thousand Southern voting precincts shows that Democrats increased their white vote by almost 4 percent over 1984, but lost more than 20 percent of black voters.

The analysis shows that Democratic gains in predominantly white precincts were canceled out by a sharp decline in votes since 1984 in the majority black precincts. In fact, in all but eight of 458 precincts with 90 percent or more black voters, Michael Dukakis got fewer black votes in 1988 than Walter Mondale did in 1984.

The point is tricky, so listen carefully.

Data from the SRC study agrees with the exit polls that there was no significant decline in the percentage of blacks voting Democratic from 1984 to 1988. In fact, a precinct-by-precinct analysis shows an amazing sameness in the percentages of Democratic support over the four years. In Little Rock, for instance, the percentage of Democratic votes cast in black precincts was 86.96 percent in 1988, compared to 85.77 percent in 1984. In Birmingham, nineteen majority black precincts showed a level of Democratic support of 96.85 percent in 1988 and 96.17 percent in 1984. See Table 1.

Table 1: Percent of Democratic Voting in Black Precincts in Presidential Elections

City	Percent Democratic	Voting
	1984	1988
Birmingham	96.17	96.85
Huntsville	93.66	92.12
Montgomery	98.10	96.71
Little Rock	85.77	86.96
Miami	95.24	94.35
Atlanta	95.10	94.65
Augusta	97.11	95.99
New Orleans	94.59	95.82
Jackson	95.38	96.80
Charlotte	95.70	95.34
Greensboro	96.29	96.49
Columbia	86.52	97.51
Chattanooga	83.55	83.90
Memphis	96.47	96.40
Houston	96.90	97.19
Norfolk	90.88	89.45
17 City Total	95.10	95.30

Black Registration Fell

What changed? The answer is that fewer blacks registered and fewer blacks went to the polls.

In eleven of seventeen major cities surveyed, black registration has declined since 1984, and in sixteen of seventeen cities, black voter turnout also fell sharply. At the same time, white registration in some Southern cities increased, with a smaller drop–about 5 percent–than blacks in actual voting.

Democratic gains among white urban voters in 1988 in the South were nullified, by and large, by the party’s failure to increase the actual number of black votes. In Houston, for example, an increase of about 5,000 Democratic votes in predominantly white precincts was allowed up by a loss of about 24,000 black votes.

Although the Democrats carried no Southern state, their ticket made actual gains among white voters in Southern cities between 1984 and 1988. In fifteen of the seventeen surveyed cities, the percentage of white votes for Dukakis was higher than the percentage for Mondale. In Miami, the Democratic vote in predominantly white precincts increased from 21.65 percent in 1984 to more than 27 percent in 1988. In New Orleans, the increase was from 19 percent to 25.45 percent. Even in Houston, George Bush’s hometown, the Democrats increased their percentages of white voters from 22 percent in 1984 to 28 percent in 1988, and in all 95 white precincts, Dukakis got a larger percentage than did Mondale. In Greensboro, N.C., all fourteen white precincts enlarged their Democratic support and three of the white precincts were carried by Dukakis.

Suburban Registration Gains

However, countywide data also reveals that registration in predominantly white suburban counties of the South–where Republicans show strength–increased at a much faster rate since 1984 than the rates in urban and rural counties–where Democrats do well. These trends indicate that suburban counties which vote heavily Republican will become the most substantial voting influence in statewide elections in the South in the near future because their registration rates are increasing even faster than their population, in comparison with urban and rural areas.

Steve Suitts, the executive director of the SRC, suggests that “Republicans appear to understand the politics of Southern numbers better nowadays than do Democrats. Not only have the Republicans sponsored more aggressive registration efforts in areas of their voting strength, but they seem to understand the critical importance of minority voting in the South’s future presidential elections.”

South Carolinian Lee Atwater, the new Republican National Chairman, has said that his first priority is to win blacks to the GOP.

“Our analysis suggests that this interest in black votes is probably not the result of a political party’s soul-searching decision to seek a kinder, gentler, and more integrated constituency as much as it is a realistic political strategy to win future presidential elections in the South,” said Suitts.

The SRC analysis finds that if Republicans increase their minority support in the South by 6 percent, Democrats would have to increase their Southern white support by 11 percent–at current levels of minority voter participation–to win most of the Southern states. Obviously, such gains

---

Page 4

by Democrats in the South seem unrealistic.

New Democratic National Chairman Ron Brown understands these issues, because he was chairman of the party’s task force on voting rights and voter participation in 1987. The task force report called for substantial improvements in voter participation among minority groups. However, Brown has been so far a lightning rod for white Southern Democrats who claim that he is a symbol of the reasons why white Democrats are defecting to the GOP.

Democrats must take a hard look at the bushwhacking they got on Super Tuesday. The nation’s only regional primary did not prompt especially high levels of participation by Southern voters. Instead, it allowed “the illusion of a mandate for its candidates, while whites who stayed home on March 8 were far more willing to turn out on November 8,” said Suitts.

In some Southern cities, white voting in the general election was three times larger than on Super Tuesday. In thirteen of seventeen cities the turnout in white precincts in November was more than double the turnout on Super Tuesday. Meanwhile, in only one city did the black turnout increase by 100 percent or more. “Quite clearly,” says Suitts, “Super Tuesday did not coalesce white voters for any candidate in the Democratic Party.”

Black Votes Can’t Be Taken for Granted

It seems just as clear that Democrats cannot take black votes for granted; even if blacks continue to lean toward Democratic policies, the Democratic Party cannot assume an actual increase in support. As in the past, Democrats must address the issues of registration and turnout of their most loyal voters if they are to depend on them, in part, for victory at the polls.

At a time when the Republican Party has made black support a priority, the party of George Bush must realize that it begins that effort with more of a disadvantage than did Ronald Reagan, whose unpopularity among blacks now works against Bush.

The Republican voting strength in the South has been established solidly in suburban areas, and voter registration in the South has accelerated over the past four years. In fact, at current rates of registration growth, the suburban influence in Southern states will only increase.

The Democratic Party’s future in the South in presidential politics hangs on urban and rural areas, on the party’s ability to increase minority political participation to a level equal to that of white voters, and on attracting a small percentage of additional whites.

It is a future which the party has not yet fully recognized despite current Republican efforts to foil such a strategy before it takes root. It is a future that is entirely possible for the Democrats in 1992, though their past performance suggests they will have great difficulty in realizing it.

The complete report, “Winning the South in 1992: A New Analysis of the 1988 Presidential Election,” with all tables, charts and notes, is available for $35 from the Southern Regional Council, 60 Walton St., NW, Atlanta, GA 30303. (404) 522-8764. The report is by SRC staff members Ken Johnson, Steve Suitts, Betty McKibben, and Dorothy Dix.

Ken Johnson is program director of the Southern Regional Council and the co-author of “Winning the South in 1992: A New Analysis of the 1988 Presidential Election.” His article is adapted from that report.