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Globalization Drives Persistent Inequality The Climate for Workers in the U.S. 1997

By Preston Quesenberry

Vol. 19, No. 3-4, 1997 pp. 3-20

As we go to press with our fourth edition of the Southern Regional Council’s Climate for Workers survey, recent reports tell us the nation’s economy couldn’t be better. Unemployment is at generational lows. The stock market is still near record highs, despite recent volatility. Inflation is in check, and profits are rising. This, a business climate report might say, is as good as the “free market” gets.

But low unemployment rates have not given workers enough bargaining power to make any significant in-crease in wages–or even to fend off their real decline. The record numbers in the Dow have little relevance for the 71 percent of the population who own no stock or less than $2,000 worth (even in pension and mutual funds). And while most people like low inflation, the top one percent of the income scale (who make 40 percent of their income off investments) benefits far more than those at the middle and bottom.

Assessing the current U. S. economy from the perspective of a business climate report, high marks go to low inflation, stagnant (or falling) wages, low benefit costs, low union densities, strategies that maximize temporary and part-time work, “deregulatory” legislation, and regressive tax policies. The Climate for Workers, however, looks for states with stable employment, ad-equate pay checks, fair and safe workplaces, good places to live, and solid worker protections.

So far in the 1990s, state legislatures continue to erode statutory protection for workers, particularly unemployment and workers compensation. In 1996, the U.S. Congress passed and President Clinton signed a welfare “reform” act that will push millions of workers (often paid sub-minimum wages) into the low-wage labor market and put a downward pressure on wages for the bottom 30 percent of the income scale. The “balanced budget” agreement of 1997 gave about 50 percent of the plan’s tax cuts to the top 5 percent of the income scale.

Meanwhile, the much-advertised economic recovery of the 1990s has done nothing to lessen the country’s historically high rate of poverty and has brought the inequality of income and wealth to record highs. The real income of the median household–the household exactly in the middle of the income scale–has increased modestly over the last three years, but it still has not recovered from sharp declines in the early 1990s and remains almost $1,000 below its 1989 level. Even worse, the real median hourly wage has actually declined from $6.96 in 1989 to $6.37 in 1995 (in 1995 dollars) and declined another .9 percent between 1995 and 1996. During these years, the bottom 80 percent of men and 60 percent of women experienced some deterioration in wages. Workers have compensated for the decline in wages by working more hours, holding more jobs, or sending more household members into the workforce.

Part of the reason for falling wages has been trade agreements like GATT and NAFTA, which have increased the ease of international investment flows at the expense of domestic investment in manufacturing; helped exacerbate chronic trade deficits; enabled the outsourcing of intermediate production work to low-wage countries; and increased the leverage of employers with both workers and governments.

“Almost everybody agrees international trade has had a negative impact on the wages of low and middle income people,” says Ray Marshall, former Secretary of Labor and now professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. “To change this trend, we need to get international economic policy right, and that means having international labor standards as part of the trade agreements with all countries. We know that as global economies become integrated, there will be a convergence of wages between the U.S. and other countries. The real question is, Which way do you want the convergence to take place? My view is, we’d be a lot better off if we raise their wages rather than lower ours. But we’re going in the opposite direction with NAFTA.”

The “right direction” for the U.S. and the rest of the world, Marshall says, is to “stop competing with wages, and start competing with rising productivity and quality.” But if the U.S. is ever to begin pushing policies that raise the world’s living standards rather than corporate profits, it will need to put an end to the destructive “race to the bottom” that exists within our own borders–between the states.

States currently compete with each other for business investment by offering the lowest wages, the least protective labor laws, the lowest taxes, and the slackest

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environmental regulation. Currently, the states with the by the winter of 1997, it had fallen to below 5 percent. At best labor climates–mostly in New England, the Mid- the same time, employment has grown, but sluggishly. Atlantic, the Great Lakes, and the Far West regions–are Indeed, no post-war upturn in the economic cycle has often handicapped rather than rewarded for their higher seen slower job growth. The 11.6 million net new jobs standards. As the Climate for Workers shows, the states with the highest incomes, the best protection for workers, the strongest unions, and the best public provisions have not been among the high growth states. Indeed, many of them had fewer jobs in 1996 than they did in 1989.

As a result, even moderate legislators in these states and elsewhere are calling for “business-friendly” provisions to make their states more “competitive”–tax breaks for businesses, dramatic reductions in workers compensation and unemployment insurance benefits, “right-to-work” laws and other anti-union measures, the weakening of overtime and prevailing wage provisions, public spending cuts, and privatization.

The push to end this absurd “race to the bottom” must begin by setting national standards at least at the level of those states with the best climate for workers. This report highlights those states by looking at five general categories, each of which is composed of five to eleven indicators: labor market opportunity, earnings and income, workplace conditions, state protection of workers, and quality of life.

Labor Market Opportunity

Combining job-growth and unemployment statistics, “labor market opportunity” includes measures commonly used by business climate reports to gauge the health of a state’s economy. However, the business press and the financial community begin to worry when unemployment rates get too low and labor “shortages” begin to emerge, because this gives workers a better bargaining position and, theoretically, drives wages up. The Climate for Workers, how-ever, celebrates a tight labor market for these very reasons. If the overwhelming majority of people must be sellers on the labor market, better to have the advantage with the seller than the buyer. And the closer a society comes to gainfully employing all of its members in productive activity, the better.

Nationally, unemployment is lower than it has been in decades. The average annual unemployment rate for 1996 was 5.4 percent and by the winter of 1997, it had fallen to below 5 percent. At the same time, employment has grown, but sluggishly. Indeed, no post-war upturn in the economic cycle has seen slower job growth. The 11.6 million net new jobs

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added to the economy between 1989 and 1996 represent a growth rate of just 1.5 percent a year, compared to 2.6 percent a year between 1967-79 and 1.9 percent between 1979-89.

“Unemployment could and should have been lower sooner,” argues Jared Bernstein, a labor economist with the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). “But those who control macropolicy have consistently favored anti-inflationary policy over low-unemployment policy. That’s created a climate of slow employment growth where it’s difficult for workers to seek wage gains.”

Labor Market Opportunity

State Region Net Long-term Change in Employment (thousands) Rank Net Intermediate Change in Employment (thousands) Rank % Long-term Change in Employment 1979-1996 (thousands) Rank % Intermed Term Change in Employment Rank % Short-term Change in Employment 1995-1996 Rank Unemployment Rate 1996 Rank Youth Unemployment Rate 1994 Rank Employed as % of Civilian Labor Force 1996 Rank Age Rank State Rank
Alabama Se 462.5 23 223.3 23 34 25 13.9 29 1.2 40 5.1 23 22.7 49 60.30 42 31.9 40
Alaska Pac 96.3 44 36.2 39 57.7 6 15.9 24 0.5 47 7.8 49 17 29 68.31 12 31.1 39
Arizona SW 915.7 7 441.1 8 93.4 2 30.3 4 5.6 2 5.5 35 19.1 36 62.78 36 20.1 16
Arkansas SE 336.2 29 192.2 24 44.9 16 21.5 10 1.5 33 5.4 33 17.9 33 61.25 40 29.1 32
California Far W 3110.4 1 536.5 4 32.2 27 4.4 42 2.8 11 7.2 47 22.6 47 60.81 41 30.8 36
Colorado Rockies 678.9 14 414.6 10 55.7 7 28 5 3.4 7 4.2 10 14.6 17 69.29 7 9.4 2
Connecticut New Eng 184.8 37 -82.8 50 13.2 45 -5 50 1.4 37 5.7 38 10.6 7 64.30 28 35.8 43
D.C. Mid Atl 10.5 51 -57.6 48 1.7 51 -8.5 51 -3.1 51 8.5 51 35.2 51 58.18 47 49.9 51
Delaware Mid Atl 120.1 42 32.3 40 46.8 14 9.4 36 2.8 11 5.2 27 15.2 24 65.05 23 26.7 29
Florida SE 2801.3 2 921.6 2 82.8 3 17.5 18 3.1 8 5.1 24 20.2 41 58.82 45 21.0 20
Georgia SE 1400.8 4 587.2 3 65.8 5 20 12 3.7 5 4.6 16 20.8 43 64.70 25 15.4 7
Hawaii Pac 135.3 40 23.8 43 34.3 23 4.7 41 -0.7 50 6.4 44 15.7 27 63.93 30 37.2 46
Idaho Rockies 154.3 39 126.5 32 45.7 15 34.6 3 3.1 8 5.2 28 14.6 18 66.70 16 20.0 14
Illinois Grt Lk 796 10 462.1 7 16.3 44 8.9 38 1.5 33 5.3 30 15.4 25 64.91 24 26.5 28
Indiana Grt Lk 576.5 18 333.5 15 25.8 36 13.5 31 0.9 44 4.1 8 14 15 66.33 17 20.9/ 19
Iowa Plains 248.7 34 180.3 26 22 38 15 27 1.6 31 3.8 6 10.1 2 70.79 4 17.8 10
Kansas Plains 281.4 31 164 30 29.7 32 15.4 26 2.5 16 4.5 15 12.3 11 66.89 15 20.6 17
Kentucky SE 425.7 26 238.1 22 34.2 24 16.6 20 1.7 26 5.6 36 17.5 31 58.99 44 30.9 37
Louisiana SE 293.3 30 272.2 16 19.3 41 17.7 17 2.2 19 6.7 46 20.9 44 57.91 48 35.5 42
Maine New Eng 124.1 41 -1.8 45 29.8 31 -0.3 45 0.3 49 5.1 25 14.2 16 65.53 18 30.9 38
Maryland Mid Atl 514.6 20 50.7 37 30.4 29 2.4 44 1.1 41 4.9 19 22.4 46 68.48 10 27.5 30
Massachusetts New Eng 432.9 25 -72.2 49 16.6 43 -2.3 47 2 22 4.3 12 14.7 20 64.58 26 28.2 31
Michigan Grt Lk 707.9 13 422.7 9 19.5 40 10.8 33 1.7 26 4.9 20 15 23 63.09 32 24.6 25
Minnesota Plains 664.7 15 344.9 14 37.6 22 16.5 21 2.2 19 4 7 10.5 6 71.71 3 11.7 3
Mississippi SE 252.1 33 170.9 28 30.1 30 18.6 13 1.5 33 6.1 41 22.6 48 58.52 46 35.8 43
Missouri Plains 553.1 19 249.2 21 27.5 33 10.8 33 1.7 26 4.6 17 13.9 14 68.49 9 19.6 13
Montana Rockies 75.2 46 68 36 26.5 34 23.4 7 2.3 18 5.3 31 16.4 28 63.04 34 29.7 33
Nebraska Plains 203.2 36 126.4 33 32.2 27 17.9 15 2.2 19 2.9 1 7.2 1 71.97 2 13.7 5
Nevada Far W 458.8 24 261.3 20 119.6 1 45 1 7.2 1 5.4 34 17.2 30 65.36 20 18.3 11
New Hampshire New Eng 181.2 38 30.6 41 47.9 12 5.8 39 3.7 5 4.2 11 11.8 9 67.34 14 19.2 12
New Jersey Mid Atl 612.8 17 -49.8 47 20.2 39 -1.3 46 1.1 41 6.2 42 18.4 34 63.05 33 37.4 47
New Mexico SW 233 35 131.8 31 50.5 9 23.4 7 1.7 26 8.1 50 21.7 45 57.87 49 35.1 41
New York Mid Atl 737.7 12 -329.7 51 10.3 48 -4 48 0.6 46 6.2 43 19.8 39 57.80 50 42.8 49
North Carolina SE 1176.8 5 475.9 6 49.6 10 15.5 25 2.6 15 4.3 13 14.9 21 65.49 19 14.4 6
North Dakota Plains 64.7 47 48.5 38 26.5 34 18.6 13 2.4 17 3.1 2 10.3 3 69.81 6 16.8 9
Ohio Grt Lk 811.1 9 478.5 5 18.1 42 9.9 35 1.4 37 4.9 21 14.6 19 63.01 35 25.3 27
Oklahoma SW 266.3 32 190.4 25 24.5 37 16.4 22 2.9 10 4.1 9 12.7 12 61.28 39 23.2 22
Oregon Far w 418.7 27 268.9 17 39.6 20 22.3 9 4 4 5.9 39 12 10 65.18 21 20.7 18
Pennsylvania Mid Atl 502.1 21 169.7 29 10.4 47 3.3 43 1 43 5.3 32 17.5 32 60.19 43 36.0 45
Rhode Island New Eng 41.8 48 -20.1 46 10.5 46 -4.4 49 0.4 48 5.1 26 19.1 37 62.25 37 39.3 48
South Carolina SE 500 22 176.3 27 42.5 19 11.8 32 1.8 24 6 40 15.6 26 61.49 38 30.6 35
South Dakota Plains 107.5 43 72.9 35 44.5 17 26.4 6 1.6 31 3.2 3 10.6 8 69.94 5 15.5 8
Tennessee SE 757.1 11 367.2 11 42.6 18 16.9 19 1.4 37 5.2 29 20 40 63.54 31 25.2 26
Texas SW 2640.3 3 1402.1 1 47.1 13 20.5 11 2.7 14 5.6 37 20.7 42 65.16 22 20.0 14
Utah Rockies 406.2 28 263.5 19 74.1 4 38.1 2 5.2 3 3.5 4 10.3 4 68.86 8 8.3 1
Vermont New Eng 76.9 45 13 44 38.9 21 5 40 1.8 24 4.6 18 13.6 13 68.43 11 24.1 24
Virginia SE 1015.3 6 268.4 18 48 11 9.4 36 2 22 4.4 14 18.9 35 64.30 28 21.2 21
Washington Far W 830.6 8 365 13 52.5 8 17.8 16 2.8 11 6.5 45 19.5 38 64.37 27 23.8 23
West Virginia SE 39.8 49 83.7 34 6 50 13.6 30 1.5 33 7.5 48 24.6 50 51.45 51 44.4 50
Wisconsin Grt Lk 641.4 16 365.2 12 32.7 26 16.3 23 1.7 26 3.5 5 10.4 5 72.07 1 11.8 4
Wyoming Rockies 20.7 50 28.6 42 10.3 48 14.8 28 0.9 44 5 22 14.9 22 67.49 13 30.3 34

Note: Average rank is computed using the individual ranks from each indicator. State rank shows overall ranking for the category.

A Reversal of Fortune

On a regional level, EPI’s most recent edition of The State of Working America (1997) shows that the labor market trends of the 1980s reversed themselves in the 1990s. In the 80s, the states in New England and the Mid-Atlantic had the lowest unemployment in the nation, as “growth accelerated and the service sector expanded.” Correspondingly, the Mid-Atlantic and New England ranked first and third in labor market opportunity in SRC’s 1990 Climate for Workers. California experienced good job growth and low unemployment as well, (it was ranked eighth in labor market opportunity in the 1990 report), but growth was decelerating there as in the rest of the West.

But “the Northeast suffered badly in the recession,” says Neil Upmeyer, the president of the Center for the Analysis of Public Issues in New Jersey. “The recession started earlier here,” argues Upmeyer. “It lasted longer here. And it was deeper here than anywhere else in the country. The job recovery rate was just extremely slow compared to everywhere else.”

By 1996, only five of the twelve states in the Mid-Atlantic and New England had even re-gained the number of jobs they had in 1989, and those five states had among the slowest growth rates in the country. In addition, the unemployment rates in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and D.C. were all well above the national average, not below it as they were in 1989. As a result, New England and the Mid-Atlantic rank seventh and ninth in labor market opportunity this year.

California also experienced a fall from grace, dropping from 8 to 32 in rank, primarily because it had the third worst unemployment rate in the nation in 1996, as well as the ninth slowest job growth rate between 1989 and 1996.

“Over the 1980s, the Northeast and California did pretty well,” Bernstein said. “But those patterns reversed in the 1990s. The coasts pretty

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much got slammed in the most recent recession and early recovery, while the middle of the country did a lot better.”

Rocky Mountain High

Indeed, eight of the top ten states in this year’s labor market opportunity rankings are in what one could call “the middle of the country.” The first and second ranked states–Utah and Colorado–are in the Rocky Mountain region. Both had very strong job growth as well as particularly tight labor markets. Utah added 263,500 jobs to its economy between 1989 and 1996, the second highest growth rate in the country (38.1 percent). At the same time, the state had a 1996 unemployment rate of 3.5 percent (fourth lowest) and a labor force participation rate of nearly 70 percent (eighth highest). By 1997, the unemployment rate was slightly below 3 percent in the urban areas and slightly above 3 percent in the rural.

Colorado had a slightly higher labor force participation rate, but a slightly higher unemployment rate as well (4.2 percent); its growth rate of 28 percent (414,600 jobs) between 1989 and 1996 was the fifth best in the nation. Two other Rocky Mountain states–Idaho and Montana–also had top-seven growth rates between 1989 and 1996, as well as below-average unemployment rates.

“The whole Rocky Mountain region has had relatively high growth,” notes Thayne Robson, professor with the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Utah. “This is largely a function of the low costs of doing business in the region. At least in the early part of the boom, wage rates and land prices were modest–although that’s changing significantly now. A vast array of small manufacturers moved into Utah from places on the west coast like California because they can operate here for 70 cents to a dollar-an-hour cheaper. Business services, bill paying centers, and telemarketing operations located here as well.”

“There’s been tremendous growth in the high tech industries in Colorado and the rest of the Rockies,” adds Nancy McCallin, an economist with the Colorado state legislature. “I would guess this is primarily because of the lower wage rate here than, say, technology centers like Silicon Valley or Massachusetts.” Indeed, the 1995 median hourly wage in California was $11.16, compared with $8.91 in Montana, $9.22 in Idaho, $9.41 in Utah, and $10.91 in Colorado.

Like the rest of the nation, most of the expansion in the Rocky Mountain states has been in the service sector. Nationally, the low-wage service industries (including low-wage retail, health, and temporary services) ac-counted for 83.3 percent of all new jobs between 1989 and 1995. Meanwhile, the U.S. lost more than 1.03 million (11.8 percent) of its goods producing jobs during these years, representing almost as many as it lost during all of the previous decade. By 2000, manufacturing work is expected to employ just 20 percent of the labor force (down from 35.9 percent in 1950), while the service industries now employ more than 70 percent of the over-all labor force, up from only 52 percent in 1950. Jobs in the service sector are disproportionately low-wage, no-benefit, and part-time.

If one ignores the relative tightness of the labor market and looks only at the job growth indicators (which, by themselves, say little about workers’ bargaining power), the Far West, Southwest, and Southeast actually perform better as regions than the Rocky Mountains. However, poor scores on the various unemployment indicators lowered many of these states’ composite scores considerably. Only North Carolina and Georgia remain in the top ten of the labor market opportunity composite, while Nevada, Oregon, Texas, Arizona, and Florida make the top twenty.

Help Wanted?: Labor “Shortages” on the Plains

The Rocky Mountain area’s spectacular job growth and relatively tight labor markets earned the region a second place ranking in the overall labor market opportunity composite. The number one region was the Plains. In general, the Plains states (as well as one Great Lakes state, Wisconsin) had slower job growth rates than the Rockies but even tighter labor markets.

Wisconsin received the number four ranking in labor market opportunity, employing nearly three-quarters of its adult population (the best in the nation) and leaving only 3.5 percent officially unemployed (the fourth lowest). Minnesota ranked third in the labor market category, with the third highest labor force participation rate and a four percent unemployment rate.

“The labor force participation rates are so high that there just can’t be many more people working out in Minnesota and Wisconsin,” says Greg Podczaski, an economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for the North Central East region. “You have some pockets, say in Madison (Wisconsin), where unemployment is basically zero.”

However, as one moves west into the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Iowa, the business press complaints about chronic labor “shortages” grow even more shrill. Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota rank one, two, and three in average annual unemployment with rates of 2.9, 3.1, and 3.2 percent, respectively. By August 1997, all three states had dipped well below 3 percent. In 1996, Iowa and Missouri followed close behind with rates of 3.8 and 4.6 percent–rates that had fallen to 2.7 and 3.5

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percent by August 1997. The Plains states also dominated the other unemployment-related indicators, including youth unemployment and labor force participation rates.

One reason labor markets are so tight in the Plains is that “people are not flocking into Iowa and the Dakotas looking for jobs,” notes Dave McDermott, regional economist with the BLS. “There has been relatively low labor force growth in these states,” McDermott says. “If you have reasonably strong employment growth and modest labor force growth, you’ve got a tight labor market.”

But low unemployment rates say nothing about whether the employment being obtained is paying families what they need to survive. Indeed, very high labor force participation rates and low youth unemployment rates can actually indicate that less-than-sustenance wages are forcing more people into the labor market.

To get at these qualitative issues of job creation and employment, groups in the Plains states and elsewhere are developing their own economic indicators. In Minnesota, for example, the members of JOBS Now–a coalition of sixty religious, labor, and community organizations concerned with the effect of public policy on low and moderate income groups–have developed what they call a “job gap” measure.

“Our members were concerned because they perceived an increase in the working poor that wasn’t really on the public policy screen,” explains JOBS Now Re-search Director Bruce Steuernagel. “We didn’t dispute that there were lots of jobs being created, but nobody was asking if they were paying enough to support families. So, we came up with a living wage for the average family and then went about seeing how many such jobs were available per job seeker.”

In their study of Minnesota’s labor market between 1990 and 1993, the coalition discovered that six job seekers existed for each livable wage job opening and thirty job seekers for each livable wage opening that required a year or less of training.

Another job gap study was done on a regional basis in the Midwest by the Office of Social Policy at the University of Northern Illinois. The study found that for every twenty-two job seekers in the Great Lakes states and Minnesota in 1997, only one job exists that pays at least poverty wages for a family of three. For a job that pays at least 150 percent of the poverty level, the ratio drops to one job for every sixty-four seekers. And for a job that pays what the study defines as a livable wage ($25,907 for a family of three) the ratio was one to ninety-seven.

Despite this apparent surplus of people looking for decent-paying jobs, “employers are begging for skilled people to come out here,” reports Patricia Funk, a consultant working on a job gap study with the Appleseed Center for Law in the Public Interest in Omaha, Nebraska.

Instead of putting resources into training, Paul Kleppner with the University of Northern Illinois reports that employers in Iowa have formed cooperatives and are sending head-hunters out to military bases in Texas to recruit discharged and retiring officers.

“What they’re not doing,” adds Funk, “is saying ‘O.K., we’ve got all of these people who are working real hard and still not making it. Let’s put some resources into training them.”

Supply and Demand Isn’t Enough

In classical economic “demand-supply” models, a tight labor market should mean that wages–or the price of labor–will go up. But between 1989 and 1995 the median hourly wages rose in only three of the seven Plains states–and only very modestly. South Dakota saw its hourly median wage rise from $8.03 to $8.49, while Nebraska saw an increase from $8.82 to $8.95. On the national level, the median hourly wage dropped from $10.61 to $10.13. “It’s only in the last year or so really that we’ve seen any notable wage growth at all, and it’s been pretty tepid,” says Jared Bernstein of EPI. “If you keep unemployment low long enough, you’ll see certain wage pressures, but not enough in my thinking to really shift the balance of power more evenly back to workers. There

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are a number of factors depressing workers’ bargaining power. Supply and demand by itself isn’t enough to return wage growth to where I think it ought to be–so that the fruits of productivity growth are more evenly distributed.

“You have to look beyond macroeconomic indicators and think about underlying power dynamics that have shifted against workers over the last couple of decades,” Bernstein adds. “Part of it is the decline in unions and that is related to the decline in manufacturing jobs and the increase in low-wage service work. Part of that story is related to increased and unbalanced trade. Also, a decline in the real minimum wage lowered pay at the bottom end of the wage scale and has opened the low road for employers to hire more low-wage labor. This, in tandem with policies that have kept unemployment high from a macro-perspective, have combined to create a climate where it is difficult for workers to seek wage gains.”

Income and Earnings

Although extremely tight labor markets may be causing the median wages of some Midwestern and Rocky Mountain residents to rise faster than the national average, the Northeast, at least for now, remains the income and earnings capital of the country–as has been the case in all of SRC’s past Climate for Workers reports. In the composite index for earnings and income, four Mid-Atlanticern States–New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and the District of Columbia–are in the top ten as well as three New England states–Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. New York just missed the top ten with a ranking of fourteen.

Minnesota and Colorado also make the top ten, but the rest of the Plains and Rocky Mountain states had among the nation’s lowest average annual pay, while two of the Great Lakes states with very tight labor markets–Wisconsin and Indiana–had among the nation’s lowest average annual pay in both the retail and service sectors. (Wisconsin and Indiana performed better in manufacturing pay, probably due to the relatively high union densities in this sector in those states.)

New Jersey, New York, Maryland, D.C., Delaware, Connecticut, and Massachusetts appear again and again in the top ten of almost all of the average annual pay and average per capita income indicators. But there are important caveats to make about these high rankings. For one, all of these states have relatively high costs of living, reducing the purchasing power of the higher incomes (see page 8 and 9). (Unfortunately, average incomes in each state can not be accurately deflated because cost of living indexes are not available on a state-by-state basis.) In addition, averages do not tell the whole story.

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Income and earnings

Composite Ranking
State Region Avg. Annual Pay Manufacturing 1996 Rank Avg. Annual Pay Retail 1996 Rank Avg.Annual Pay Service 1996 Rank Avg. Annual Pay 1996 (dollars) Rank Change in Avg. Annual Pay 1995-1996 Rank Per Capita Income 1996 Rank Long-Term Change in Per Capita Income 1980-1996 Rank Intermediate Change in Per Capita Income 1990-1996 Composite Median Income 1995-1996 Rank Income Inequality* Rank % of Persons in Poverty 1995-1996 Rank Avg. Rank State Rank
Alabama SE 28705 46 13663 37 24319 26 25180 32 784 37 20055 40 5067 22 2114 24 28530 46 10.58 43 17.1 45 37.8 42
Alaska Pac 29205 43 18325 2 25128 22 32461 6 -224 51 24558 20 -1175 51 -244 51 51074 1 7.96 14 7.7 2 19.1 15
Arizona SW 37168 14 16075 12 24186 28 26387 27 1063 19 20989 37 3150 42 1494 40 31706 38 10.57 42 18.3 47 33.6 38
Arkansas SE 24811 50 13828 34 20576 46 22294 47 704 42 18928 48 4534 30 2298 16 26850 49 8.3 19 16.1 38 38.8 46
California Far W 39810 8 17276 5 31794 5 31773 7 1057 20 25144 13 2793 47 531 48 38457 12 11.62 49 16.8 42 23.7 24
Colorado Rockies 37080 15 15528 17 27212 11 28520 15 1398 8 25084 14 4560 29 2457 11 41429 6 7.61 6 9.7 11 12.2 6
Connecticut New Eng 47045 3 17806 3 32272 4 36579 3 1452 6 33189 2 9240 2 2676 6 41775 5 9.84 36 10.7 15 9.1 2
D.C. Mid Atl 52970 1 16260 10 41075 1 44458 1 2005 1 34932 1 10240 1 5092 1 31811 36 adjusted 25 23.2 50 12.7 8
Delaware Mid Atl 50692 2 14993 20 25963 17 30711 10 1591 3 27622 6 7301 6 3780 2 37634 16 7.86 12 9.5 7 9.5 3
Florida SE 31946 29 15621 15 24961 23 25640 30 930 26 24104 21 5007 23 1597 38 30632 41 10.43 41 15.2 35 30.6 36
Georgia SE 30595 35 14848 21 26970 13 27488 21 1185 13 22709 27 6278 9 2127 23 33801 31 9.64 34 13.5 34 25.5 27
Hawaii Pac 29884 39 16849 8 26369 16 27363 22 386 50 25159 12 4358 33 274 50 42944 4 8.16 17 11.2 19 21.5 19
Idaho Rockies 32274 27 13783 35 22261 37 23353 43 514 49 19539 44 3272 41 1218 45 34175 29 8.61 22 13.2 32 35.9 40
Illinois Grt Lk 38343 11 15668 14 28447 9 31285 9 1186 12 26598 8 5487 18 2380 14 39375 11 9.87 38 12.3 30 16.9 10
Indiana Grt Lk 36328 17 13394 39 22586 34 26477 26 906 31 22440 30 4561 28 2214 20 34759 26 8.84 28 8.6 5 24.9 26
Iowa Plains 31707 31 12422 46 19988 47 23679 42 804 35 22560 29 4446 31 2465 10 34888 24 7.97 15 10.9 17 28.4 31
Kansas Plains 32967 26 13396 38 22281 36 24609 33 900 32 23281 23 4272 34 2086 25 31911 35 8.65 23 11 18 28.4 32
Kentucky SE 31631 32 13190 40 21881 41 24462 37 972 23 19687 43 4059 37 1949 31 31552 39 10.62 44 15.9 37 37.8 42
Louisiana SE 35137 20 13168 41 22626 33 24528 35 634 45 19824 41 3121 44 2574 9 29518 44 13.89 51 20.1 48 39.4 46
Maine New Eng 30521 36 14126 30 21970 39 23850 40 733 41 20826 38 4804 26 513 49 34777 25 7.73 8 11.2 19 30.1 34
Maryland Mid Atl 38074 12 16365 9 29511 7 30293 11 1160 14 27221 7 6138 11 865 47 43123 3 8.53 21 10.3 13 13.1 9
Massachusetts New Eng 42635 6 16853 7 32613 3 33940 5 1588 4 29439 4 8428 3 2704 5 39604 10 10.06 40 10.6 14 10.9 4
Michigan Grt Lk 46739 4 14560 24 26866 14 31522 8 979 22 24810 17 5102 21 2830 4 38364 13 8.88 29 11.7 25 17.1 11
Minnesota Plains 37250 13 14497 26 25282 21 28869 14 1486 5 25580 10 6093 12 2944 3 40022 8 8.07 16 9.5 7 11.9 5
Mississippi SE 24334 51 12747 44 20978 43 21822 48 702 43 17471 51 4075 36 2285 17 27000 48 11.38 48 22.1 49 45.1 51
Missouri Plains 34315 22 14243 28 24545 24 26608 25 939 25 22864 26 4875 25 1960 30 35059 22 8.22 18 9.5 7 21.9 20
Montana Rockies 26856 47 12383 47 18999 50 21146 50 630 46 19047 47 2322 48 1376 41 28631 45 7.55 5 16.2 39 40.7 47
Nebraska Plains 28857 45 12627 45 21964 40 23291 45 923 27 23047 25 5499 17 2158 22 33958 30 7.82 11 9.9 12 27.6 29
Nevada Far W 31905 30 17574 4 25647 20 27788 18 1141 15 25451 11 3280 40 1239 44 37845 15 7.76 9 9.6 10 17.4 12
New Hampshire New Eng 36378 16 15535 16 25911 18 27691 20 1089 17 26520 9 7250 7 2236 19 39868 9 7.88 13 5.9 1 12.3 7
New Jersey Mid Atl 44126 5 18366 1 33082 2 35928 4 1394 9 31053 3 8199 4 2083 26 46345 2 9.52 33 8.5 4 8.7 1
New Mexico SW 29630 41 13884 33 23907 29 23716 41 756 38 18770 49 3065 46 1693 35 25922 50 11.12 47 25.9 51 43.6 49
New York Mid Atl 41843 7 16890 6 31555 6 36831 2 1893 2 28782 5 7411 5 2030 27 34707 27 13.01 50 16.6 41 18.9 14
North Carolina SE 29110 44 14353 27 23743 30 25408 31 1006 21 22010 33 6249 10 2407 13 34262 28 9.18 31 12.4 31 28.3 30
North Dakota Plains 26569 48 11859 51 19357 48 21242 49 750 39 20710 39 5685 16 2257 18 30709 40 7.03 2 11.5 22 32.8 37
Ohio Grt Lk 38356 10 14126 30 24238 27 27775 19 908 30 23537 22 4660 27 2419 12 35022 23 8.81 27 12.1 27 23.3 23
Oklahoma SW 29740 40 13012 42 20838 45 23329 44 658 44 19350 45 1605 49 1243 43 27263 47 9.86 37 16.9 43 43.4 48
Oregon Far W 34870 21 15857 13 23608 31 27027 24 1194 11 22668 28 3660 39 2009 28 36470 20 7.78 10 11.5 22 21.9 21
Pennsylvania Mid Atl 36328 17 14515 25 27083 12 28973 12 1069 18 24668 19 5368 20 2006 29 35221 21 9.06 30 11.9 26 21.1 18
Rhode Island New Eng 31250 33 14665 23 25661 19 27194 23 819 34 24765 18 6049 13 1934 32 36695 18 9.45 32 10.8 16 23.0 22
South Carolina SE 30085 38 13725 36 21811 42 24039 39 747 40 19775 42 4981 24 1642 37 32297 34 9.91 39 16.5 40 37.8 44
South Dakota Plains 24882 49 11942 50 19303 49 20724 51 793 36 21516 35 6313 8 2654 7 29989 43 8.75 24 13.2 32 35.6 39
Tennessee SE 30790 34 15018 19 24489 25 25963 29 917 29 21764 34 6009 14 2582 8 30331 42 9.68 35 15.7 36 30.1 34
Texas SW 36163 19 15341 18 26662 15 28129 16 1229 10 22045 32 3135 43 1929 33 33029 33 11.11 46 17 44 30.0 33
Utah Rockies 30196 37 14237 29 23091 32 24572 34 946 24 19156 46 3764 38 2207 21 37298 17 6.78 1 8.1 3 23.9 25
Vermont New Eng 33019 25 13998 32 22225 38 24480 36 897 33 22124 31 5418 19 1254 42 33591 32 7.11 3 11.5 22 27.3 28
Virginia SE 31999 28 14746 22 28602 8 28001 17 1107 16 24925 15 5713 15 1535 39 38252 14 8.42 20 11.3 21 18.9 13
Washington Far W 39086 9 16083 11 28057 10 28881 13 1428 7 24838 16 4166 35 1749 34 36647 19 8.79 26 12.2 29 19.5 16
West Virginia SE 33678 23 12295 49 20907 44 24075 38 586 47 18444 50 3069 45 1663 36 25431 51 10.84 45 17.6 46 44.0 50
Wisconsin Grt Lk 33464 24 12916 43 22558 35 26021 28 922 28 23269 24 4360 32 2338 15 41082 7 7.26 4 8.7 6 19.7 17
Wyoming Rockies 29486 42 12372 48 18048 51 22870 46 519 48 21245 36 -181 50 1039 46 31707 37 7.69 7 12.1 27 36.9 41

Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics; U. S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census; Employee Benefits Research Institute; Bureau of National Affairs; Center for Budget and Policy Priorities; U. S. Department of Labor; Citizens for Tax Justice; Institute on Taxation and

* Income ratio of top 20 percent to bottom 20 percent. A lower number indicates less disparity.

Page 10

“Average income and pay isn’t a great way to measure because it doesn’t deal with distribution,” notes Frank Mauro with the Fiscal Policy Institute in New York. “New York, for example, is very high and going up in average per capita income, but when you look at median household income, we have been going way down. What that means is that distribution is getting worse here. We’ve found we’re the worst in the nation in income inequality. We’re also one of the few states that is in the top ten in per capita income as well as poverty.”

The Southern Regional Council’s Climate for Workers has long included median household income in its composite earnings and income index, and New York has, indeed, fallen sharply since our 1990 report: from number ten in1988 to number 27 in 1996. To better gauge the extent of income distribution to those at the bottom of the wage scale, this edition of the Climate for Workers has added an income inequality measure (the ratio of the top 20 percent to bottom 20 percent) and poverty rates to its income and earnings composite. New York ranks 50th in income inequality and 41st in poverty rates.

D.C. falls even more precipitously when one looks at median household income and poverty rates. While it ranks number one in all of the average pay and income indicators except for retail, it drops to 36 in median household income (which is more than $3,000 below the national average) and 50 in poverty rates. (Based on figures from past years, D.C. would probably have the worst income inequality, as well, if recent measures were available.) The other Northeastern states with high average incomes and pay fare better in median household income and poverty rates, however. In particular, New Jersey (ranked number one in income and earnings overall) has the second highest median household income ($46,345) and the fourth lowest poverty rate (8.5 percent) in the nation.

“These numbers reflect the complete conversion of the state’s economy from a manufacturing base to a service economy,” argues Neil Upmeyer of the Center for Analysis of Public Issues in New Jersey. “We’ve got the worst part of that conversion out of our system, and our service economy, which is oriented toward telecommunications and the computer industry, has been doing quite well.”

“But the job and income growth has not been spread equally,” Upmeyer adds. “Most of it has occurred in suburban areas–particularly in the Northeastern counties around New York. With the exception of Jersey City, which has become a `back-office’ site for Wall Street, job growth has been non-existent in the old industrial cities with high minority populations, as well as in the three rural counties in the south of the state. Poverty and unemployment are still major issues in these areas and are much higher than the state average.”

Upmeyer further points out that New Jersey’s low poverty rates might understate actual poverty in the state because the Census Bureau uses only one poverty threshold to compute the rates ($7,995 for a single person and $12,516 for a family of three). The Census Bureau does not take differences in cost of living into account, and New Jersey, like most of the Northeastern states, is one of the most expensive places to live in the country (see pages 8 and 9).

As a result of its uneven growth, New Jersey does not rank high (33) in income inequality. Nor do many of the other Northeastern states in the top ten of the “income and earnings” category. Connecticut and Massachusetts rank 36th and 40th in income inequality. Delaware performs the best with a ranking of twelve, perhaps because the state has the most progressive state tax system in the nation, a very low tax burden for households, and very high state expenditures per person.

New Hampshire follows Delaware with a ranking of thirteen in income inequality. Ranked number seven in income and earnings overall, the state also has the lowest poverty rate in the nation and a median household income of about $40,000. But this is not the result of progressive public policy. “It’s difficult to be poor and live in New Hampshire,” argues Richard Mills, an economist with the University of New Hampshire. “If you’re on the low-income end, it’s much easier to live in Massachusetts. New Hampshire is basically suburbia without the urbia–unless you count Boston, which is the biggest labor market. Transportation is difficult. The state doesn’t put a lot of money into social services. And with no state sales or income taxes, property taxes are high, which makes renting or owning housing quite expensive.”

If one looks only at median household income, income inequality, and poverty rates, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Colorado, Utah, Minnesota, Alaska, and Nevada perform relatively well in all three categories (see chart on pages 8 and 9) . Wisconsin ranks seven in median household income ($41,082), four in income inequality, and six in poverty rates (8.7 percent). Alaska has the highest median wage ($51,074) and the lowest poverty rate (7.7 percent) in the nation. The state also has the second highest annual retail pay in the nation ($18,325). The maintenance of relatively high total union densities in Alaska, as well as in Nevada and Minnesota, probably contribute to the more equal distribution of income there.

Utah’s high labor force participation rate results in a median household income that is almost $2,000 higher than the national average, despite a median hourly wage that is about ten percent below average. The state also

Page 11

has the third lowest poverty rate and the least amount of income inequality in the nation. According to University of Utah economist Peter Phillips, one of the most important reasons for this lack of poverty and income inequality is the state’s relative racial homogeneity.

“This is a society that is overwhelmingly white, so the type of inequality that is associated with racial and ethnic differences is diminished here,” Phillips said. “The effects of racism are not as prevalent. We do not have a history of industries developing around a racial minority and taking advantage of the disadvantages that minority has.”

Nationally, the poverty rate is about three times higher for African-Americans and Hispanics than it is for non-Hispanic whites. In addition, the median household income for African-Americans and Hispanics is about a third lower. Not surprisingly, then, four of the five and six of ten states with the best income equality have African-American population densities of less than one percent; all of the top-ten states have African-American population densities that are well below average. Five of the eight states with the best income equality have similarly small populations of Hispanics (all less than 2.2 percent).

One section of the U.S. that does have a history of building industries around minorities–the South–ranks last in income inequality and poverty, as well as almost every other income and earnings indicator. In a composite of poverty rates, income inequality, and median household income, all four Southwestern states (Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma) rank in the bottom ten; another five of the bottom ten are Southeastern states (see chart on page 9). Even worse, Southeastern and Southwestern states represent fifteen of the bottom nineteen in a composite of the three distributional indicators. (Virginia is the only Southern state not in the bottom half.)

The correlation between severe income inequality and minority populations in the South is striking. Every Southeastern state except Kentucky and West Virginia has an above-average African-American population density. In Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, about a quarter to a third of the population is black. Three Southwestern states, on the other hand, have larger-than-average Hispanic populations–ranging from 20 percent in Arizona to 39 percent in New Mexico. Furthermore, many of the non-Southern states with the worst income inequality–New York, California, D.C., Illinois, New Jersey–have either African-American or Hispanic populations (or both) that are well above the national average.

While the Southeastern and Southwestern states do have the worst income inequality, the highest poverty rates, and the lowest incomes in the nation, they also have some of the lowest cost of living indexes in the nation (see page 9). In addition, the Census Bureau recently reported that only the South (which includes both the Southeastern and Southwestern states) experienced a significant change in real median household income between 1995 and 1996 ($31,422 to $32,422).

Workplace Conditions

Adding to the difficulties of working families in the Southeast and Southwest are the low percentages of the population insured by employers. Nationally, 63.8 percent of the non-elderly population is insured by employers, but no Southern state except Virginia and North Carolina reached or exceeded this national average. Only 45.6 percent of New Mexico’s population was insured by employers in 1995, while Louisiana ranked second to last with 50.2 percent. Other Southwestern and Southeastern states like Oklahoma, Mississippi, Florida, Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas all ranked in the bottom eleven, with percentages ranging from 55.3 to 60.3 percent. These low percentages in the South represent significant decreases from the late 1980s. Nationally, the percentage has decreased 5.4 percent since 1987, but the Southeastern and Southwestern states are decreasing even faster. New Mexico and Louisiana, for example, decreased 12.8 and 10.5 percent between 989 and 1995.

In contrast to the South, the percentage of the population with employer-based health insurance in the Great Lakes states ranges from 75.6 percent in Wisconsin to 70.4 percent in Ohio. Three New England states (New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Massachusetts) as well as Pennsylvania and New Jersey also have percentages greater than 70 percent and as high as 74.9. In the Great Lakes, the still-relatively-prevalent manufacturing sector doubtless contributes to the higher percentage of people with employer-based health insurance; 73.3 percent of workers in this sector receive insurance compared with only 52 percent in the service sector.

Safe Workplaces or Poor Enforcement?

Manufacturing jobs do have a downside, however: much higher incidences of occupational illness and injury. Workers in the “motor vehicles and car bodies” industry, for example, suffer almost four times the rate of injuries and illness as the average for private industry, ranking second only to workers in meat packing plants. As a result, Wisconsin and Michigan have the highest injury and illness incidence rates in the country, with 11.5 incidences per 100 workers in 1994. The only other Great Lakes state for which there is data, Indiana, has the second highest rate in the country (11.3).

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Workplace Conditions

Composite Ranking
State Region %with Employer Health Insurance Rank Fatality rate 1996 per 100000 workers Rank Nonfatal injury illness rate per 100 fulltime workers Rank %of Manufacturing Workers Unionized Rank %Change Manu. Workers Unionized Rank %of Total Workers Union Members Rank %Change Total Unionized 1983-1995 Rank African Americans* Rank Women* Rank Avg. Rank State Rank
Alabama SE 63.1 33 7.72 42 9.2 31 19.5 17 -6.4 18 13.6 25 -3.3 17 25.5 45 31 49 28.8 34
Alaska Pac 63.7 30 21.65 51 8.8 26 3.8 49 -19.5 49 23.1 4 -1.8 2 30.1 18 39.1 6 26.8 28
Arizona SW 56.6 43 3.34 8 8.3 16 4.9 47 -2.9 5 8 41 -3.4 19 38.6 4 35.1 19 26.5 26
Arkansas SE 60.3 41 7.53 40 9.4 35 14 28 -4.7 11 7.8 42 -3.2 14 22.4 51 32.2 38 33.6 44
California Far W 55.5 47 4.14 15 8.1 15 12.1 31 -8.9 28 17.7 15 -4.2 26 38.9 3 37.2 12 21.7 15
Colorado Rockies 68.9 14 4.47 16 adjusted 9.2 38 -3.9 7 9.9 33 -3.7 23 24.6 48 38 10 25.9 24
Connecticut New Eng 74.8 3 2.16 4 8.5 18 14.4 26 -13.7 42 20.2 8 -2.5 8 29 21 38.5 7 16.3 7
D.C. Mid Atl 54.8 49 49 7.63 41 adjusted 10.8 35 -6.8 19 15.1 22 -4.4 27 40.6 1 52.2 1 25.2 21
Delaware Mid Atl 70.2 13 4.96 23 6.9 4 18.7 19 -8.6 27 13 26 -7.1 47 33.3 10 33.3 30 22.6 17
Florida SE 56.1 45 5.06 25 8 14 5.8 46 -5.5 14 7.3 44 -2.9 12 30.8 15 34.2 24 30.4 38
Georgia SE 63.3 31 5.95 34 8.6 20 8.7 41 -8.2 25 6.8 46 -5.1 35 27.9 23 34.3 23 34.0 46
Hawaii Pac 66.3 23 4.88 22 8.7 23 11 34 -24.6 51 24.6 2 -4.6 30 27.5 adjusted 32.7 34 25.5 23
Idaho Rockies 63.2 32 10.56 48 adjusted 11.6 32 -7.4 21 8.1 40 -4.4 27 27.5 adjusted 32.1 41 34.8 48
Illinois Grt Lk 70.5 10 4.53 17 adjusted 23.5 8 -8.9 28 20.2 8 -4 25 33.5 8 35.3 17 14.0 3
Indiana Grt Lk 72.3 5 4.86 21 11.3 49 29.9 3 -18.8 48 16.5 17 -8.4 49 25 47 31 49 27.9 31
Iowa Plains 67.3 20 4.55 18 10.8 48 20.1 15 -20.2 50 12.1 29 -5.1 35 27.5 adjusted 33.4 28 28.7 33
Kansas Plains 64.5 27 6.65 38 9.8 39 17.7 20 -7.8 22 10.2 31 -3.5 21 30.5 16 35.4 16 26.1 25
Kentucky SE 62.4 36 8 43 10.6 46 22 10 -15.4 44 12.6 27 -5.3 37 25.5 45 31.6 43 33.3 43
Louisiana SE 50.2 50 5.53 29 6.2 2 16.8 21 -8.1 24 7 45 -6.8 46 26.7 42 34.6 21 31.1 41
Maine New Eng 67.5 19 3.62 10 10.5 45 21.9 11 -2.9 5 15.6 21 -5.4 38 27.5 adjusted 35.7 15 19.6 11
Maryland Mid Atl 68.2 17 3.09 7 6.8 3 20.1 15 -9.1 30 14.9 23 -3.6 22 39 2 43.9 2 14.5 5
Massachusetts New Eng 71.5 7 2.03 3 7.2 8 11.3 33 -15.4 44 16.2 19 -7.5 48 31.1 13 40.5 4 21.5 14
Michigan Grt Lk 74.5 4 3.39 9 11.5 51 33.9 1 -12.3 38 23.7 3 -6.7 45 29.2 20 33.3 30 19.4 10
Minnesota Plains 71.1 8 3.67 11 8.7 23 16.8 21 -5.5 14 20.3 7 -2.9 12 32.4 11 33.2 32 15.6 6
Mississippi SE 55.9 46 8.69 46 9.8 39 9.8 36 -9.1 30 5.2 49 -4.7 31 22.6 50 30.4 51 42.1 51
Missouri Plains 65.9 24 5.06 25 10.2 41 23.9 7 -12.7 39 14.6 24 -6.2 42 33.5 8 32.8 33 25.2 20
Montana Rockies 56.7 42 11.82 50 9 29 15.6 24 -17.4 47 15.8 20 -2.5 8 27.5 adjusted 31.4 45 30.9 40
Nebraska Plains 68.8 15 6.32 35 10.2 41 14.4 26 -4.7 11 9.1 38 -4.5 29 26 44 32.4 37 30.6 39
Nevada Far W 66.8 22 6.52 36 9.3 33 8.5 42 -2.3 2 20.2 8 -2.2 4 23.1 49 31.1 48 26.6 27
New Hampshire New Eng 74.9 2 1.84 2 adjusted 6.5 45 -4.1 9 12.6 27 1.1 1 27.5 adjusted 39.5 5 18.1 8
New Jersey Mid Atl 70.5 10 2.56 6 6.9 4 20.5 14 -10.9 35 21.9 5 -5 33 37 5 38.1 9 12.8 1
New Mexico SW 45.6 51 8.16 44 7.9 13 9.6 37 -2.3 2 9.4 35 -2.4 7 27.5 adjusted 36.5 14 27.5 30
New York Mid Atl 62.8 34 3.91 14 5.5 1 22.5 9 -8.5 26 27.7 1 -4.8 32 32.3 12 36.9 13 14.3 4
North Carolina SE 64 29 5.26 28 7.8 11 2.9 51 -4 8 4.2 50 -3.4 19 27.2 41 32.2 38 33.8 45
North Dakota Plains 62.5 35 6.91 39 adjusted 19.5 17 -7.9 23 10 32 -3.2 14 27.5 adjusted 31.6 43 28.0 32
Ohio Grt Lk 70.4 12 3.75 12 adjusted 28.9 5 -12 37 18.5 14 -6.6 44 30 19 32.5 36 20.5 12
Oklahoma SW 55.3 48 5.75 31 8.8 26 14 28 -11.2 36 9.3 36 -2.2 4 28.6 22 33.6 26 30.0 36
Oregon Far W 67.1 21 5.25 27 8.7 23 15.1 25 -13.6 41 20.1 11 -2.2 4 27.5 adjusted 33.9 25 21.3 13
Pennsylvania Mid Atl 71 9 5.04 24 9.1 30 26.7 6 -15.6 46 18.9 13 -8.6 50 31 14 33.6 26 22.0 16
Rhode Island New Eng 68.5 16 1.28 1 8.5 18 12.6 30 -4.3 10 19.4 12 -2.1 3 36.1 6 38.5 7 13.4 2
South Carolina SE 61.7 37 5.81 32 6.9 4 2.9 51 -2.6 4 3.3 51 -2.6 10 26.5 43 31.3 47 34.4 47
South Dakota Plains 64.3 28 8.49 45 adjusted 9.1 39 -9.9 32 7.7 43 -3.8 24 27.5 adjusted 31.4 45 37.6 50
Tennessee SE 60.9 38 5.83 33 9.4 35 16.6 23 -4.8 13 9.5 34 -5.6 39 30.5 16 32.2 38 30.2 37
Texas SW 56.4 44 5.59 30 7.1 8 8.9 40 -7.2 20 6.5 48 -3.2 14 27.7 24 35.3 17 31.2 42
Utah Rockies 71.7 6 6.64 37 9.5 38 4.1 48 -10.8 33 9 39 -6.2 42 27.5 adjusted 34.9 20 35.0 49
Vermont New Eng 68.1 18 2.26 5 9.3 33 7.2 44 -6.3 17 9.3 36 -3.3 17 27.5 adjusted 40.9 3 25.3 22
Virginia SE 64.7 26 4.72 19 7.3 10 8.3 43 -12.9 40 6.7 47 -5 33 34.7 7 37.6 11 29.8 35
Washington Far W 65 25 4.74 20 10.3 44 29.3 4 -6.2 16 21 6 -6.1 40 27.5 adjusted 34.6 21 18.6 9
West Virginia SE 60.8 39 8.84 47 adjusted 30.5 2 -10.8 33 16.3 18 -9 51 27.5 adjusted 32.7 34 27.1 29
Wisconsin Grt Lk 75.6 1 3.84 13 11.5 51 21.3 13 -14.7 43 17.7 15 -6.1 40 27.7 24 33.4 28 24.2 18
Wyoming Rockies 60.8 39 11.43 49 8.6 20 21.9 11 7.3 1 11.2 30 -2.7 11 27.5 adjusted 31.7 42 24.4 19

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While the Southeast and Southwest have their share of dangerous industries–particularly in agricultural production and food processing (with rates of 9.9 and 13.0)–the regions, as a whole, actually ranked better on this indicator than almost any other. They were helped by particularly low incidence rates in Louisiana (6.2), South Carolina (6.9), Texas (7.1), and Virginia (7.3), all of which ranked in the top ten. North Carolina ranked eleventh with 7.8 and Florida ranked fourteenth with a rate of 8.

There are more than a few reasons to be cautious of the data collected by the Occupation Safety and Health Association (OSHA) and the BLS, however. These statistics are “notoriously incomplete,” says Howard Frumkin, chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at Emory University in Atlanta. In fact, states with particularly poor OSHA enforcement may actually score better on this indicator simply because employees do not report their injuries for a variety of reasons: because their protection from being fired for reporting the injury or safety violation is inadequate; because their chances of acquiring decent compensation are so low; or because they have not been sufficiently informed about the possible links between their work and various illnesses and injuries.

Until just a few years ago Florida agricultural workers were not given the right to know about the links between the pesticides they were using and health problems. Elaine Roberts with Florida Impact worked on a successful campaign to secure this “right to know” for agricultural workers.

“I think the reason for Florida’s relatively low incidence rate is poor enforcement,” Roberts said. “As we were working on that ‘right-to-know’ campaign trying to get hard numbers, we found that they are not really even monitoring occupational health in agriculture in this state.”

Agriculture is the number two industry in Florida. Tourism is number one–an industry that does have relatively low occupational injuries and illnesses.

Most Southeastern states have federal OSHA programs, which nationally have reduced the number of inspections from 43,377 to 24,024 over the last two years. In part, this reduction stems from a large push to get companies to police themselves through voluntary programs, a trend which is particularly pronounced in the Southern states, says Tom O’Conner with the North Carolina OSHA.

“The Southern federal OSHA region has really been giving companies a lot of leeway in governing them-selves,” O’Conner said. “It’s all a part of this `reinventing government idea’–creating partnerships between business and government. They somehow expect the employers to monitor themselves.”

With its present staffing, federal OSHA would take 167 years to inspect every workplace under its jurisdiction. In Southern states such as Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, the lower number of federal 1 OSHA inspectors means compliance inspections would take even longer.

Underreporting occupational fatalities is not as easy as underreporting injuries and illnesses, although “it can be done,” says Jim Ellenberger with the AFL-CIO’s Occupational Safety and Health Department. In the category of workplace deaths, the Southeastern states perform much more poorly. Only Virginia has a fatality rate that is better than the national average of 4.82 per 100,000 workers. Ten of twelve Southeastern states rank in the bottom half, and five–West Virginia, Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, and Arkansas–rank in the bottom twelve.

The Rocky Mountain region performs even worse, however, due to Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana, which had three of the worst fatality rates in the nation in 1996. Averages run between 11.82 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers in Montana to 10.56 in Idaho. Wyoming AFL-CIO State President John Faunce and Montana AFL-CIO Executive Secretary Don Judge cited transportation incidents as the main source of fatalities in their respective states. Indeed, 41 percent of all occupational fatalities occur because of transportation incidents. Faunce and Judge surmised that worse road conditions and longer average drives in their states account for more transportation fatalities. Miners and loggers in these states are also at a higher risk of fatalities. In Alaska, which has a phenomenally high fatality rate of 21.65, state AFL-CIO vice-president Mike Gallagher cited transportation incidents and the fishing industry.

Alaska is also near the bottom (49) in the percent of its manufacturing workforce that is unionized; since 1983 the union density of the state’s manufacturing workforce has declined from 23.3 to 3.8 percent. But now the manufacturing sector is all but nonexistent, Gallagher said, and if one looks at the percent of the total workforce that is unionized (a new indicator in this edition of the Climate for Workers, Alaska now ranks number four at 23.1 percent.

As this example attests, manufacturing is no longer the bedrock of unionism. Nationally, union membership in manufacturing has fallen from 38.9 percent in 1973 to 27.8 percent in 1983 to 17.6 percent in 1995. In the private sector, both transportation and public utility workers (now at 27 percent) and construction workers (19 percent) now have higher union densities.

Page 14

With 37.7 percent of workers organized, the public sector has the highest proportion of union members by far. Indeed the explosion of unionism in the public sector in the 1960s and 70s (from 5 percent to 40 percent) and its maintenance during the 1980s, has at least somewhat cushioned unionized labor’s fall from a third of the workforce in 1955 to 14.5 percent in 1996. Only 10.2 percent of workers in private industry were unionized in 1996, about what it was in 1930.

All of the states in the top ten in total union membership had a highly organized public sector. The number one state, New York, had a union density of 73.0 percent among its government workers in 1996 (up from 66.5 percent in 1986). New Jersey (number five) and Connecticut (number eight) have also increased their public sector union densities since the 80s, and now have 61.1 and 62.2 percent unionized, respectively.

On a regional basis, the Pacific (Hawaii and Alaska) and Far West slates performed the best in total union membership. The state of Washington was the only Far West state to have high densities in both manufacturing (29.3 percent) and the total workforce (21 percent). Nevada, on the other hand, has a manufacturing union density of only 8.5 percent but a total union density of 20.2 percent, the eighth highest in the nation. What’s more, the state experienced only a 2.2 percent decline in total union membership between 1983 and 1995, the fourth lowest decrease in the nation.

Almost all of the unionization in Nevada has occurred in the metropolitan Las Vegas area. In that city, unions are strong not only in the public sector and the construction industry, but also in the service sector. Other cities in Nevada, such as Reno, are mostly non-union. As a result, kitchen workers in a union hotel earn $9.37 an hour and union bartenders earn $11.88 an hour in Las Vegas, while their non-union colleagues in Reno earn only $6.72 and $6.63, respectively, says Jeff Waddoups, associate professor of economics at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. The percent of hotel workers in Las Vegas that Waddoups classifies as working poor is about 25 percent less than in Reno. As a state, Nevada has the ninth lowest poverty rate and the tenth best income equality in the nation.

Las Vegas is one of about 100 cities in the nation that the AFL-CIO has designated a “Union City.” In early 1997, the AFL-CIO launched its Union Cities campaign, with the aim of “organizing for change, changing to organize, mobilizing against anti-union employers, building community and community coalitions . . . generating support for the right to organize, [and] making sure that union leadership mirrors the face of the membership.” The key agents of the Union Cities movement are the Central Labor Councils (CLCs), the federation of AFL-CIO unions at the local level. So far, the Las Vegas Central Labor Council is already serving as a model for other Union Cities because of its multi-union, multi-employer organizing drives that have successfully organized hotel and casino workers, hospital workers, and construction workers.

In addition to an increased focus on organization, the Union Cities program also emphasizes “mobilization” and “diversity,” says the head of another model CLC. “Organizing is how you build power, but mobilization is how you exercise power,” Atlanta Labor Council President Stewart Acuff says. “By mobilizing, I mean `street heat’–putting working people on the street in political campaigns, in militant demonstrations, and in rallies. The other point of Union Cities is diversity. The Atlanta Labor Council is one of the few on which white men are not a majority.”

Kirk Adams, the director of the AFL-CIO for the Southern region, also emphasized the growing importance of diversity. “Organizing is more diverse now in the South–it’s no longer just black and white” Adams said. “Historically, labor has seen immigration as a detriment because immigrants can be used to hurt wage rates. But there are also opportunities. If we reach out to the strong Hispanic and Asian communities, who now make up a significant portion of many industries in many parts of the South, we have the opportunity to build coalitions and critical masses. I would guess the poultry industry in the South, which stretches from Florida to Arkansas, is about 50 percent Hispanic.”

While the labor movement in the South may be trying to encourage diversity, the region’s professional specialty, managerial/administrative, technical, and craft jobs remain relatively closed to women and minorities. While some regional differences may be accounted for by fewer such jobs in the region, in most of the Southeast, a lower percentage of the African-American and female labor force possess jobs in these traditional white male occupations than in any other.

State Protection of Workers

Almost all of the Southeastern and Southwestern states are “right-to-work” states and almost none extend collective bargaining rights to state and local public employees. As a result, all but three of these states have union densities that are less than ten percent. North and South Carolina continue to spar for the lowest union membership in the nation (4.2 and 3.3 percent, respectively). This lack of union strength in the South not only hurts workers directly by leading to lower earnings (in 1996, the average union worker made 33 percent more

Page 15

State Protection of Workers

Composite Ranking
State Region Insured Unemployed as % of Total Unemp* Rank Avg. Unemployment Benefit per Recipient 1996 in dollars** Rank State Minimum Wage of 10/1/97 in dollars Rank Max. Weekly Benefit for Permanent Total Disability in dollars Rank Statutory Protection of Workers+ Rank Avg Rank State Rank
Alabama SE 31.9 32 1450 51 0.00 51 458 28 3.5 50 43.7 47
Alaska Pac 57.1 2 2528 20 5.65 4 700 5 15.0 22 12.5 12
Arizona SW 19.1 50 2142 32 0.00 51 323 48 6.0 47 45.8 48
Arkansas SE 44.3 10 1942 40 5.15 9 348 46 11.5 32 28.2 32
California Far W 40.5 19 2491 24 5.75 3 490 25 21.5 1 12.2 10
Colorado Rockies 26.8 39 2498 23 5.15 9 468 27 14.0 25 24.7 27
Connecticut New Eng 43.0 15 3343 11 5.18 8 678 6 21.0 2 7.3 2
D.C. Mid Atl 39.6 20 4339 2 6.15 1 749 4 11.0 37 16.8 15
Delaware Mid Atl 41.6 16 3625 8 5.15 9 372 43 16.5 15 17.7 18
Florida SE 25.6 42 2514 21 0.00 51 479 26 11.0 37 35.7 42
Georgia SE 23.3 45 1524 49 3.25 42 300 49 7.0 45 45.8 48
Hawaii Pac 41.5 17 4634 1 5.25 5 501 20 16.0 19 13.5 13
Idaho Rockies 44.4 9 2037 37 5.15 9 390 39 10.0 39 28.7 33
Illinois Grt Lk 41.3 18 3654 7 5.15 9 781 2 18.5 10 9.9 3
Indiana Grt Lk 27.2 38 2054 34 3.35 40 428 34 8.5 43 38.7 44
Iowa Plains 34.0 26 2379 27 5.15 9 873 1 11.5 32 21.2 21
Kansas Plains 26.2 40 2719 15 2.65 43 338 47 9.5 40 37.5 43
Kentucky SE 30.2 35 1958 38 4.25 36 447 31 14.5 24 31.3 35
Louisiana SE 20.2 48 1868 42 0.00 51 349 45 6.0 47 46.7 51
Maine New Eng 44.3 10 2269 29 5.15 9 441 33 18.0 13 17.8 19
Maryland Mid Atl 32.9 30 3067 13 5.15 9 553 11 16.5 15 15.5 14
Massachusetts New Eng 52.1 5 4040 4 5.25 5 631 8 20.5 3 4.7 1
Michigan Grt Lk 44.0 12 2484 26 5.15 9 553 11 19.0 6 11.7 9
Minnesota Plains 36.4 23 3199 12 5.15 9 615 10 19.5 4 10.3 6
Mississippi SE 30.6 34 1885 41 0.00 51 271 51 0.0 51 46.5 50
Missouri Plains 33.4 28 1947 39 5.15 9 513 16 14.0 25 23.7 26
Montana Rockies 43.9 13 2051 35 5.15 9 384 41 16.5 15 21.3 22
Nebraska Plains 28.7 36 1801 44 5.15 9 427 35 12.5 29 30.3 34
Nevada Far W 36.3 24 2629 18 5.15 9 492 23 12.0 30 22.3 25
New Hampshire New Eng 22.1 46 1480 50 5.15 9 756 3 19.0 6 20.0 20
New Jersey Mid Atl 43.2 14 4287 3 5.05 34 496 21 13.5 28 21.3 22
New Mexico SW 19.0 51 2553 19 4.25 36 364 44 16.0 19 31.3 35
New York Mid Atl 39.6 20 3669 5 4.25 36 400 37 16.5 15 21.3 22
North Carolina SE 33.7 27 1721 46 5.15 9 512 17 12.0 30 26.5 30
North Dakota Plains 38.8 22 2140 33 5.15 9 387 40 14.0 25 25.7 28
Ohio Grt Lk 31.4 33 2712 16 4.25 36 521 14 11.5 32 27.2 31
Oklahoma SW 23.4 44 2164 30 5.15 9 426 36 16.0 19 26.2 29
Oregon Far W 44.8 8 2679 17 6.00 2 519 15 18.5 10 10.3 6
Pennsylvania Mid Atl 55.6 3 3483 9 5.15 9 542 13 17.5 14 10.3 6
Rhode Island New Eng 73.6 1 3439 10 5.15 9 503 19 18.5 10 9.8 5
South Carolina SE 27.7 37 1756 45 0.00 51 451 30 5.0 49 43.5 46
South Dakota Plains 19.7 49 1593 48 5.15 9 375 42 11.5 32 35.3 40
Tennessee SE 34.4 25 1824 43 0.00 51 453 29 11.5 32 35.3 40
Texas SW 23.6 43 2851 14 3.35 40 491 24 7.5 44 34.8 39
Utah Rockies 25.7 41 2051 35 5.15 9 397 38 9.0 41 34.2 37
Vermont New Eng 48.9 6 2309 28 5.25 5 674 7 19.0 6 9.7 4
Virginia SE 20.3 47 1711 47 5.15 9 496 21 9.0 41 34.3 38
Washington Far W 45.6 7 3659 6 4.90 35 627 9 15.0 22 16.8 15
West Virginia SE 32.8 31 2500 22 5.15 9 445 32 19.5 5 17.0 17
Wisconsin Grt Lk 54.5 4 2143 31 5.15 9 509 18 19.0 6 12.3 11
Wyoming Rockies 33.3 29 2486 25 1.60 44 289 50 6.5 46 40.0 45

Page 16

than a non-union worker), but also diminishes the ability of workers to secure adequate legislative protection for themselves–and to avert the erosion of already-existing protection that’s occurring nationwide in state legislatures.

One protection that has seen significant deterioration is unemployment insurance (UI). In most state systems, prior earnings simultaneously determine whether employees are eligible for UI, how long they can receive it, and how much they can get in benefits. So, as the decline in worker’s earnings began in the 1970s and accelerated in the 80s, employees became increasingly less likely to be eligible for UI or to get their maximum benefits for the full 26 weeks.

To make matters worse, when benefit outlays increased during the recession of the early 1980s because of a prolonged period of high unemployment, a number of states, and most Southern states, reacted by making the ireligibility rules more restrictive. At the same time, the federal government enacted restrictive legislation. When unemployment insurance trust funds swelled in the 1990s, however, labor needed significant bargaining power to get benefits raised and eligibility restrictions loosened. “Instead of letting people back in the UI system, sixteen states, primarily in the South, had trust fund giveaways,” says Mark Baldwin, assistant director of public policy at the AFL-CIO. “Instead of giving more benefits to the unemployed, they gave the money to employers through tax breaks or moratoriums. In states where the labor movement and its allies had some sway, they worked to make sure at least some of the money went to the workers as benefit increases. In states where we didn’t have any strength, it was just a flat-out giveaway. That general story plays out particularly strongly in the Southern states, but, of course, this has dampened benefit increases in all states due to interstate competition. Nobody wants to be known in the business community as the state with the best UI system.”

If former employees leave a job for certain reasons or fail a drug test (which are being used more and more in UI systems, Baldwin says), states deny UI benefits for a certain number of weeks–a number that has been increasing. “Now in most of your Southern states, you have various durational penalties–penalties in which former employees are not eligible for the entire period of unemployment,” Baldwin said. “In states like Texas, all the penalties are durational, which is why people don’t get benefits there.”

Indeed, less than a quarter of the unemployed in Texas receive UI benefits, but several states in the Southwest and Southeast rank even lower. New Mexico and Arizona only had 19.0 and 19.1 percent of their unemployed insured in 1996. Louisiana, Virginia, and Georgia had between 20.2 and 23.3 percent.

What’s more, these low numbers measure only the percentage of the unemployed eligible for unemployment insurance in the average week, not the percentage that actually gets benefits. As a result, these numbers overestimate the actual number of people covered by anywhere from 10 to 15 percent–and probably more in states with severe penalties.

By contrast, 73.5 percent of the unemployed in Rhode Island received benefits in 1996. While this number is much higher than any other state (the second highest was 57.1 percent in Alaska), all but one state in both New England and the Far West have percentages greater than 40 percent, as do better than half the states in the Mid-Atlantic and the Great Lakes region. Nationally, only about one in three unemployed workers received unemployment insurance in 1996, down from three-quarters of workers in 1975 and half of them in 1992.

But even in those states where more of the unemployed are receiving UI, the benefits are not being evenly distributed among all workers, notes Maurice Emsellem, staff attorney with the National Employment Law Project in New York.

“The unemployment compensation system tends to leave out women and low-wage workers, so we have a big push to change laws in that area,” Emsellum explains. “Of course, lower wages increase the likelihood of being ineligible for UI, but low-wage and women workers are also disproportionately part-time workers, who are likewise more likely to be ineligible. Laws that exclude people who get fired when they miss work because of various family crises–say, a sick child–disproportionately affect women, too. “But now is a good time to change this,” Emsellem argues. “The trust funds are in good shape and the employers are trying to raid them. At the same time, a lot of women are being forced into the low-wage labor market due to welfare reform. It’s a good time to bring up the issue of fairness.”

Injured on the Job? Tough Luck

While workers in at least a few states appears to be on the offensive with unemployment compensation, it is on the defensive almost everywhere when it comes to compensation for workers injured on the job. Since the mid-1980s, state legislatures in twenty-eight states have reduced the amount of benefits injured workers can collect, while benefits have remained about the same in sixteen other states and D.C.–though not without vigilant battles on the part of the labor movement. Only six states have increased benefits.

As a result, between 1991 and 1994, workers compensation benefits paid to workers declined almost 25 percent nationally, representing the first time workers compensation benefit payments declined for three successive years since the 1930s.

“The downward trend of cutting back on workers’ compensation coverage began here in Texas a number of years ago, and it has now become a competing annual cycle where other states try to project themselves as business friendly by cutting benefits,” says Kirk Adams of the Southern regional office of the AFL-CIO. “Of course, it’s portrayed as `we’re trying to attract jobs,’ and this attracts moderates who are usually our allies against more explicitly anti-worker measures. The AFL-CIO has been paralyzed in most Southern states because we just don’t have the density across the legislative spectrum, and we can’t really form a coalition with moderates.”

North Carolina has the highest maximum weekly benefit for total permanent disability in the South (due in part to “Governor (Jim) Hunt saving us several times,” Adams said), but even its $512 weekly benefit is barely above the national average of $503.49. Every other Southern state is below this average, most well below. Mississippi’s $270-a-week benefits is the lowest in the country.

The workers’ compensation-cutting epidemic has infected not only the low-benefit states in the Southeast and Southwest. In New England, where four states are in the top ten, cuts are also rampant. New Hampshire, with the third-highest weekly benefits in the country ($756) has seen its workers compensation benefit outlays decrease 40 percent over the last four years. In Massachusetts, ranked eighth with maximum disability benefits of $631, a series of subtle and not-so-subtle provisions reduced the average size of a sum settlement down from $27,040 in 1991 to $18,860 in 1992.

Movements are stirring, however, to reverse this trend. In Massachusetts, several bills have been introduced in the state legislature to bring workers compensation benefits back to their pre-cut levels. In Ohio, unions and community activists blocked the implementation of a worker’s compensation bill that would have effectively gutted the state’s current system. By collecting more than 400,000 signatures and forcing a November referendum–the state’s first referendum in more than half a century–this coalition defeated the bill. In South Carolina, labor organizations succeeded in getting legislation passed to make employer participation in the state’s workers’ compensation system mandatory. (Previously, South Carolina was one of three states–including Texas and New Jersey–in which employer participation was voluntary.)

The Carolina Alliance for Fair Employment (CAFE)has been less successful in its fight to secure workers’ choice of doctor in South Carolina, an issue which state coordinator Charles Taylor says is “the real key to controlling the system.” Currently, workers in South Carolina must go to a doctor selected by the employer, and this doctor makes all of the decisions that affect compensation payments

Nationally, only twenty-four states ostensibly guarantee employees the right to choose their own doctor. But Jim Ellenberger, assistant director of the OSH department at the AFL-CIO, says the recent rush of most states into managed care renders this statutory protection practically irrelevant.

“If you mandate managed care for workers’ compensation, the worker has to go to the managed care organization chosen by the insurance company and employer anyway,” Ellenberger points out. “And the majority of employee-choice states are now also managed care states.”

Minimum Wage: Still Mighty Low

More positive developments have occurred on the minimum wage front. Before the U.S. Congress voted to increase the minimum wage to $5.15 an hour in 1997, the real value of the minimum wage was $4.12, compared with $5.97 in 1979 and about $6.50 in the late 1960s (all in 1995 dollars). Even though the purchasing power of the minimum wage is still far less than what it was twenty or thirty years ago, close to ten million workers are now enjoying the ninety-cent raise–an increase that has so far not caused the “disemployment effects” that its opponents predicted. The vast majority of beneficiaries are not middle class teenagers, but adults from families in the bottom two-fifths of the income scale. About three-fifths of the beneficiaries are women.

Still, the federal minimum wage does not cover all employees. There is a complicated list of exceptions that includes employees at certain amusement and recreational establishments, certain retail establishment employees, certain agricultural employees, and certain domestic workers, to name only a few. However, almost two-thirds of the states have passed their own minimum wage laws that meet or exceed the federal level. Eight states–D.C., Oregon, California, Alaska, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Connecticut–have passed minimum wages anywhere from three cents to a dollar higher than the federal minimum.

The remaining one-third of states, however, have either lower state minimum wages (ranging from $5.05 to $1.60) or no minimum wage at all. All of the states with no minimum wage are in the Southeast and Southwest.

No one would contend, though, that a person could support her or his family working full-time at even the

Page 18

Quality of Life

Composite Ranking
State Region Infant Mortality 1995 Rank E/J ratio 1995* Rank Per Capita Expenditure 1995 Rank Tax Burden on Middle 20% 1995** Rank Progessivity of State Tax 1995*** Rank Revenue per Student 1993-1994 Rank % of 18 to 25 year olds graduating high school 1994 Rank Physicians per 10,000 1995 Rank % without Health Insurance 1996 Rank Crime Rate per 100,000 1995 Rank Cost of Living 1997* Rank Avg. Rank State Rank
Alabama SE 9.8 48 227.1 47 976.02 47 9.1 18 2.4 42 3617.85 49 84.0 40 17 41 12.9 23 4848 25 100.1 21 37.21 49
Alaska Pac 7.7 29 127.0 41 4258.28 1 2.8 1 3.0 45 8819.53 4 90.5 17 14.2 48 13.5 26 5754 37 123.6 44 25.14 22
Arizona SW 7.5 25 173.7 44 1048.08 36 8.7 14 1.6 31 4966.11 37 84.0 40 18.2 30 24.1 50 8214 50 101.8 26 35.36 48
Arkansas SW 7.5 25 173.7 44 1049.08 36 8.7 14 1.6 31 4966.11 37 84.0 40 18.2 30 24.1 50 8214 50 101.8 26 35.36 48
California Far W 6.3 11 14.8 3 1328.34 18 8.9 17 1.0 6 5118.4 35 78.9 51 21.7 12 20.1 46 5831 38 116.7 41 26.43 30
Colorado Rockies 6.5 12 16.7 5 1044.57 38 8.8 16 1.5 25 5289.68 29 88.4 24 20.6 16 16.6 38 5396 32 103.8 28 24.43 20
Connecticut New Eng 7.2 19 25.7 9 2564.58 4 10.7 44 1.7 34 8227.71 5 94.7 2 29.5 5 11 11 4503 18 125.4 45 16.5 6
D.C. Mid-Atl. 16.2 51 2.3 1 1189.7 adjusted 10.2 35 1.1 10 9314.55 2 87.7 29 53.6 1 14.8 30 12174 51 125.7 46 26.08 26
Delaware Mid-Atl. 7.5 25 45.5 17 2149.23 5 6.7 5 0.8 1 6371.42 14 93.3 7 19.7 22 13.4 25 5159 28 108.9 39 18 10
Florida SE 7.5 25 105.1 38 1005.79 40 7.7 8 3.9 48 5634.93 26 80.7 47 20.3 17 18.9 45 7702 49 108.6 38 34.07 44
Georgia SE 9.4 44 62.1 21 1322.18 19 9.6 23 1.4 24 5206.19 31 80.3 49 18 32 17.8 43 6004 39 99.5 20 33.07 43
Hawaii Pac 5.8 5 23.4 8 2669.76 2 10.1 33 1.2 13 6025.23 22 92.0 12 22.8 10 8.6 2 7199 48 182.8 adjusted 14.15 1
Idaho Rockies 6.1 8 37.0 12 1090.28 32 9.3 19 1.0 2 3830.24 48 86.4 36 13.1 50 16.5 37 4402 15 100.5 24 26.86 33
Illinois Grt Lk 9.4 44 69.7 25 1454.02 13 9.8 27 2.2 40 6031.18 21 86.7 35 22.1 11 11.3 13 5456 33 107.2 adjusted 26.15 27
Indiana Grt Lk 8.4 38 91.6 35 1091.16 31 9.7 24 1.9 38 6040.91 19 88.5 23 16.6 42 10.6 10 4632 22 96.6 12 25.79 24
Iowa Plains 8.2 35 76.7 28 1272.34 23 10.5 41 1.5 26 5192.02 32 93.2 9 15.1 45 11.6 18 4102 11 99.1 18 26.5 31
Kansas Plains 7 17 76.0 27 1290.45 22 9.5 21 1.4 22 6032.54 20 90.9 15 18 32 11.4 14 4887 26 94.5 7 19.57 11
Kentucky SE 7.6 28 89.2 34 1296.89 21 10.4 38 1.3 16 4911.2 38 83.4 44 18 32 15.4 34 3352 6 94.5 7 28.43 36
Louisiana SE 9.8 48 636.9 50 1089.13 34 10.4 38 2.2 40 4197.73 44 80.5 48 20.3 17 20.9 47 6676 47 93.7 5 39.79 51
Maine New Eng 6.5 12 63.3 23 1359.39 16 10.1 33 1.2 11 6198.01 16 92.9 10 18.2 30 12.1 20 3285 5 120 adjusted 17.23 7
Maryland Mid-Atl. 8.9 41 57.4 20 1388.34 15 11.1 49 1.3 18 6862.24 11 93.6 5 29.9 4 11.4 14 6295 43 98.7 17 21.64 16
Massachusetts New Eng. 5.2 1 15.6 4 2585.61 3 10.5 41 1.3 18 7132.73 7 92.5 11 33.2 2 12.4 21 4342 14 145.2 48 14.21 2
Michigan Grt Lk 8.3 36 55.5 18 842.08 49 10.6 43 1.9 37 6923.34 9 88.7 22 19 27 8.9 3 5183 29 108.1 37 25.57 23
Minnesota Plains 6.7 16 39.4 14 1866.59 7 10.9 46 1.0 5 6248.15 15 93.3 7 21.5 13 10.2 9 4497 17 100.4 23 15.14 3
Mississippi SE 10.5 50 148.0 42 991.84 41 9.7 24 1.7 35 3190.15 51 83.9 42 13 51 18.5 44 4515 19 93.9 6 39.29 50
Missouri Plains 7.4 23 94.6 36 988.17 43 9.8 27 1.5 27 5190.58 23 90.3 18 19.7 22 13.2 24 5121 27 98.4 16 26.86 33
Montana Rockies 7 17 1852.8 51 1089.66 33 6.8 6 1.0 3 5159.27 34 89.8 19 17.1 40 13.6 29 5305 30 101.2 25 26.21 28
Nebraska Plains 7.4 23 65.2 24 1028.1 39 9.9 30 1.2 13 5468.51 27 94.5 3 18.3 29 11.4 14 4545 20 91.5 2 20.57 14
Nevada Far W 5.7 4 85.8 32 720.92 51 4.8 2 4.9 51 5344.44 28 81.9 46 14.6 47 15.6 35 6579 46 105.9 32 31.5 39
New Hampshire New Eng 5.5 3 18.0 6 845.82 48 6.1 4 2.5 43 5884.21 23 86.9 33 19.8 21 9.5 4 2655 2 105.7 31 17.71 9
New Jersey Mid-Atl. 6.6 15 21.8 7 1881.31 6 10.2 35 1.8 36 9830.14 1 91.8 13 24.9 7 16.7 39 4704 24 170.8 49 20.5 13
New Mexico SW 6.2 10 397.1 48 1610.68 10 11 47 1.6 33 4309.12 43 82.4 44 18 32 22.3 49 6428 44 101.9 27 34.93 47
New York Mid-Atl. 7.7 29 27.1 10 1841.59 8 14.3 51 1.3 17 9178.64 3 87.1 31 31.6 3 17 40 4560 21 233.1 51 24 18
North Carolina SE 9.2 42 80.3 30 1394.58 14 9.3 19 1.1 9 4642.32 41 85.5 38 19.4 26 16 36 5640 35 100.1 21 30.72 38
North Dakota Plains 7.2 19 56.3 19 981.28 46 7.9 9 1.6 32 4172.62 46 96.6 1 18.9 28 9.8 7 2866 3 98.2 15 21.21 15
Ohio Grt Lk 8.7 39 85.5 31 1343.29 17 9.8 27 1.3 15 5840.18 24 88.4 24 20 20 11.5 17 4405 16 105 29 24.21 19
Oklahoma SW 8.3 36 75.7 26 1048.2 37 9.5 21 1.4 23 4737 39 87.0 32 14.7 46 17 40 5597 34 91.6 3 32.29 40
Oregon Far W 6.1 8 77.8 29 1061.13 35 9.9 30 1.1 8 6071.42 18 82.7 43 19.5 25 15.3 33 6564 45 107.1 34 26.21 28
Pennsylvania Mid-Atl. 7.8 32 42.9 16 1303.18 20 10.2 35 2.2 39 7229.98 6 89.5 20 24.6 8 9.5 4 3365 7 127.1 47 19.71 12
Rhode Island New Eng 7.2 19 30.1 11 1657.58 9 10.4 38 1.2 12 7047.65 8 89.4 21 26.7 6 9.9 8 4245 12 106.7 33 15.14 3
South Carolina SE 9.6 47 116.9 40 1102.91 29 7.9 9 1.0 6 4714.63 40 88.0 28 17.6 37 17.1 42 6064 40 97.4 13 32.86 41
South Dakota Plains 9.5 46 38.2 13 807.96 50 7.9 9 4.0 49 4382.34 42 91.5 14 15.7 44 9.5 4 3061 4 95.9 11 27 35
Tennessee SE 9.3 43 163.0 43 984.4 45 7.6 7 3.4 47 3831.09 47 84.6 39 20.8 14 15.2 32 5363 31 94.8 9 34.21 45
Texas SW 6.5 12 182.8 45 1102.33 30 8.6 12 3.1 46 5055.91 36 79.5 50 17.3 39 24.3 51 5684 36 93 4 32.86 41
Utah Rockies 5.4 2 553.4 49 1199.9 25 11 47 1.5 29 3555.15 50 93.6 5 17.6 37 12 19 6091 41 105.1 30 28.93 37
Vermont New Eng 6 7 11.4 2 1179.49 27 10 32 1.0 3 6699.04 12 88.1 27 24.2 9 11.1 12 3434 8 116.8 42 15.14 3
Virginia SE 7.8 32 97.6 37 1131.76 28 8.7 14 1.4 21 5227.14 30 87.7 29 20.8 14 12.5 22 3989 10 97.5 14 23.93 17
Washington Far W 5.9 6 63.1 22 1562.14 11 10.7 44 4.4 50 6126.79 17 85.7 37 20.2 19 13.5 26 6270 42 113.5 40 25.93 25
West Virginia SE 7.9 34 193.4 46 1208.97 24 8.6 12 1.3 20 5838.35 25 86.8 34 17.9 36 14.9 31 2458 1 99.4 19 26.57 32
Wisconsin Grt Lk 7.3 22 40.4 15 1527.82 12 12.6 50 1.6 30 6884.05 10 93.7 4 19.6 24 8.4 1 3886 9 107.6 36 17.57 8
Wyoming Rockies 7.7 29 111.0 39 991.67 42 5.8 3 2.9 44 6597.88 13 90.8 16 13.9 49 13.5 26 4320 13 94.8 9 25.07 21

Page 19

Climate for Workers Overall Ranking

Minnesota 1
Massachusetts 2
Connecticut 3
New Hampshire 4
Delaware 5
Wisconsin 6
Maryland 7
New Jersey 8
Colorado 9
Illinois 10
Michigan 11
Rhode Island 12
Washington 13
Oregon 14
Vermont 15
Pennsylvania 16
Hawaii 17
New York 18
California 19
Nevada 20
Missouri 21
Alaska 22
Ohio 23
Maine 24
Virginia 25
Nebraska 26
Kansas 27
Iowa 28
D.C. 29
North Dakota 30
Utah 31
Indiana 32
North Carolina 33
Georgia 34
Texas 35
Idaho 36
Florida 37
South Dakota 38
Tennessee 39
Montana 40
Wyoming 41
Arizona 42
Kentucky 43
Oklahoma 44
West Virginia 45
Arkansas 46
South Carolina 47
Alabama 48
New Mexico 49
Louisiana 50
Mississippi 51

highest state minimum wage in the nation–$6.15 an hour in D.C. In response, the labor movement, in coalition with community and religious organizations, has been launching “living wage” campaigns in cities throughout the country, including Baltimore, Jersey City, New York, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Setting minimums in the $7 to $8 range, the living wage ordinances in existence usually apply only to the employees of the city and to city contractors, but the higher wages have been putting upward pressure on the entire low-wage market.

“With such a tight labor market, it’s a good time for these campaigns,” says Kirk Adams, who has seen a campaign in Houston fail, but is currently assisting another one in New Orleans. “People are willing to take chances because they know they can get a low wage job anywhere.”

The labor movement is also involved in the perennial fights against attempts to pass “right-to-work” laws–particularly heated this year in Colorado, Montana, and New Hampshire. The “Statutory Protection for Workers” indicator includes “Right-to-Work” as well as a host of other labor laws, including Anti-Discrimination, Equal Pay, Whistleblower Protection, Right-to-Know, Overtime, and Sexual Harassment laws. (See the appendix for details). The results: New England has the best statutory protection in the country by far. The region’s states make up four of the top six and five of the top ten states. Three Great Lakes states were also in the top ten, as well as Minnesota. Tow Far West states were in the top ten, and one, California, scored the highest of all the states, having sixteen of the seventeen laws on the books (and no “right-to work” law).

Eight Southeastern and Southwestern state are in the bottom eleven in the statutory protection indicator. Alabama had only three of the seventeen laws and Mississippi has no such laws; both have right-to-work laws.

Raising the Standards

Recently, the labor movement has grown increasingly interested in moving beyond the annual battles over legislative protections, wages, and benefits. Under the leadership of president John Sweeney, the central headquarters of the AFL-CIO has been telling its affiliates to actively defy the appellation of “special interest group” by mobilizing around a wider array of community issues that affect all working families. Central Labor Councils in the Union Cities are being encouraged to form a more extensive net work of coalitions with community and religious organizations working for a cleaner environment, a less regressive state and local tax system, higher quality education, more inclusive and comprehensive health care.

Page 20

This new direction for the labor movement, makes the “quality of life” category particularly appropriate. This category attempts to rank the quality of life in the states through a variety of indicators related to the environment, education, taxes, public spending, health care, crime rates, and the cost of living. Combining all of the indicators, New England does the best by far as a region: all six of the region’s states are in the top nine.

Similarly, New England ranks number one as a region in overall labor climate. Other states in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest with high quality of life scores–Wisconsin, Minnesota, Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland–also score well in overall labor climate.

The Southeast and Southwest, on the other hand, rank last and second-to-last as regions in quality of life, as they do in the overall rankings. Indeed, the bottom twelve in the quality of life composite and bottom ten in the overall labor climate composite are all Southeastern and Southwestern states. Another fast-growing region–the Rockies–ranks sixth (out of nine regions) in quality of life and seventh overall.

As it stands, however, the fast-growing states in the Southeast, Southwest, and Rockies are serving as the maximum thresholds to which the rest of the nation must fall. The results of this race to the bottom: between 1989 and 1995, the median family income in the high-wage Northeast decreased by almost three times the national average, so that by 1995 the median income was $4,618 dollars below its 1989 peak, when controlling for inflation. States in New England and the Mid-Atlantic, as well as those in the Far West and Pacific regions, also experienced some of the greatest increases in poverty rates between 1989 and 1994–increases of 2.5, 3 and 4 percent, respectively, compared to 1.7 percent nationally.

Instead of pressuring policy makers in the states of the Northeast, the Midwest, the Far West, and the Pacific to lower their relatively higher wage and benefits, weaken their stronger protections for workers, diminish the greater power of their employees to bargain with employers, and eliminate the social provisions that make for their higher quality of life, a society that truly worked in the interest of its members would hold these states up as minimum thresholds.

Preston Quesenberry, former editorial assistant for Southern Changes, is now a media analyst at McKinney McDowell Associates in Washington, tracking media cover-age of affirmative action. Kenneth Rose assisted with this research while a community development work fellow at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Notes

*. * Income ratio of top 20 percent to bottom 20 percent. A lower number indicates less disparity.

*. *Indicates percent of African Americans or women in traditional white male jobs classified as Executive, Administrative and management; Professional Speciality; Technicians and Related Support and Precision Production, Craft and Repair. Note: Adjusted refers to missing data for a state; ranks are adjusted according to most recent available figures where possible.

*. * Percent of unemployed who are eligible for insurance and applied for benefits in a typical week.

**. ** Average weekly benefit multiplied by average benefit duration.

. + This measure scores states for their worker protection legislation including anti-discrimination, drug tests, family leave, anti-AIDS discrimination, sexual harrassment, right to work, time off to voe, minimum wage, pay for overtime, equal pay, maximum hours, right to know, whistleblower protection, and anti-smoking.

. * Environmental Protection Agency Toxic Release Inventory emissions per manufacturing job.

. ** Percent of income paid for state and local taxes by families in the middle 20 percent income bracket.

. *** Ratio of percent of income paid for state and local taxes by families in the bottom 20 percent income bracket compared to families in the top 20 percent.

. * Relative cost of consumer goods for each state’s largest city

]]> The New Factories in the Fields: Florida Mushroom Workers /sc19-3-4_001/sc19-3-4_004/ Mon, 01 Sep 1997 04:00:02 +0000 /1997/09/01/sc19-3-4_004/ Continue readingThe New Factories in the Fields: Florida Mushroom Workers

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The New Factories in the Fields: Florida Mushroom Workers

By Alissa Mathison with Barry E. Lee

Vol. 19, No. 3-4, 1997 pp. 21-22

“This event is a watershed.” Frank Curiel, lead organizer for the United Farm Worker’s campaign in Quincy, Florida, sat across from me, his face alive with anticipation for a Saturday march and rally. The campaign to bring union representation to the workers of Quincy Farms, a mushroom plant in northern Florida, was coming to a head. A labor and civil rights march including African American and Latino workers in the South was indeed significant. Over the last decade, the South has witnessed the influx of large numbers of Latino workers, particularly at the bottom of the wage scale where they must interact and sometimes compete with African American workers. This shift in the demographics of the workforce has complicated an already complex scenario of political, social, and economic tension. The organizing effort in Quincy has been instructive about how to organize workers in the South across racial and ethnic lines. And it has created a partnership between organized labor and the civil rights community.

Quincy Farms, a subsidiary of Sylvan, Incorporated, based in Sarver, Pennsylvania, has been accused of using racial antagonism in order to thwart unionization efforts among its Latino and African American workforce. “They have used the divide and conquer approach, keeping workers racially separated by hiring only Latinos for picking jobs and only African Americans for packing jobs,” says Elsa Curiel, a United Farm Worker staffer and long-time organizer. Ms. Curiel adds that this racial segregation is further reinforced by maintaining “separate work facilities, bathrooms, and breakrooms for pickers and packers with the strict understanding that Latinos and African Americans are not to use each other’s facilities.” The June march and rally gave “evidence that the workers have broken down the racial barriers created by management.”

It was only the previous year that the company had fired and arrested twenty-five of its employees while they were peacefully demonstrating on their lunch break. That action resulted in a boycott of the farm’s products, Prime label mushrooms, sold throughout the Southeast. Workers led the annual Martin Luther King march in Atlanta last winter and traveled frequently to Birmingham to picket the Bruno’s supermarket chain (one of the largest purchasers of Prime mushrooms).

Workers’ longstanding grievances of low pay, frequent accidents, the failure of company to treat them with dignity and respect, and no voice to remedy problems in the workplace led to unionization efforts at Quincy Farms beginning in 1995. During the summer of that year workers from Quincy Farms approached the United Farm Workers looking for help to organize. Almost immediately, according to Frank Curiel, it was apparent that before any organizing could take place, the workers had to overcome the racial and ethnic barriers built into their workplace. Besides the separate facilities for pickers and packers, “they also have separate start times so that the two departments never run into each other at work, not even in the parking lot. It’s institutional apartheid. A lot of Southern companies split their workforce like this,” says Curiel.

To break down the barriers, the union held mixed meetings with Latino and African American workers sitting next to each other rather than segregated from each other. “This strategy forced the workers to learn each others’ first names,” says Curiel. “Now the workers are calling for classes to teach English to the Latinos and Spanish to the African Americans. This will be a lasting change that can be left behind when the organizers are gone. We need to break down the cultural stereotypes.”

But the most important lesson learned by the United Farm Workers in the Quincy campaign has been how to organize in the South. “We had to integrate the civil rights style of organizing, getting the local ministers involved and reaching out to the community,” says Curiel. “Other unions will not succeed [in the South] unless they unite with the civil rights community. The only way we can do it is hand-in-hand.”

Although the workers are fighting cultural barriers, they have in common the low pay, as evidenced by the fact that many live in public housing and substandard housing conditions. The workers average between $9,000-14,000 annually, against the insistence of company president Richard Lazzarini that workers make a decent income. The work can also be treacherous; workers straddle boxes stacked up to fifteen feet high as they pick the mushrooms. While accidents are common, many work-

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ers go without coverage because the medical plan is too expensive. And perhaps just important to many workers as issues of pay, benefits, and safety on the job is the question of respect. According to Bert Perry, southeastern director of the National Council of Farm Workers Ministry, “Quincy’s management forces the workers to sign out in order to go to the restroom, as if they’re children.” Elsa Curiel concurs, noting that “some supervisors use profanity and generally talk to employees like they’re animals.”

The workers have had some success. They won cases in the local courts (the charges against the twenty-five arrested for “trespassing” were dropped and the workers received unemployment compensation). And they have also garnered national support from the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, SCLC, the NAACP, and the Rainbow Coalition.

Although 70 per cent of the workforce signed cards authorizing UFW representation, legally the company did not have to recognize the union. In fact, Quincy Farms management refuses to acknowledge that its employees want union representation. Ms. Curiel points out that “when questioned about sponsoring a vote on union representation, Mr. Lazzarini says there is no reason to vote since the workers have told him that they do not want a union.” Farm workers are not covered under the National Labor Relations Act which grants all other workers, except domestic workers, the right to organize.

While the law is an obvious hindrance, farm workers have successfully won union representation through boycotts in the past. The workers at Quincy Farms, separated at work and in their neighborhoods, in their churches and by the different languages they speak, are united in fighting the poverty that plagues both communities. “It is the soul of America that is in peril by the ruthless greed of the corporate community,” the Rev. Joseph Lowery, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, proclaimed at the march. In the fight to organize, both the workers and the union realize that new coalitions are essential. Other agri-businesses await the outcome in Quincy. “What we’re doing in Quincy could be a model for organizing other farm workers in the South”‘ says Frank Curiel. “What we hope for out of this fight is for legal recognition of the right for farm workers to organize like other workers.” It remains to be seen whether or not Quincy Farms recognizes the workers’ demand for a union. So far at Quincy, both sides are unyielding. Lazzarini contends that “we’re going to continue to maintain the position we have. It might last three day, three weeks or three years–it doesn’t matter.” Frank Curiel is no less committed to his position. “We’ll be there in their face until we win.”

From her home in Birmingham, Alabama, Alissa Mathison traveled to Quincy, Florida, to support the United Farm Workers’ boycott of Prime mushrooms. Barry Lee is a graduate student in history at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

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The New Factories in the Fields: Georgia Poultry Workers

By Greg Guthey

Vol. 19, No. 3-4, 1997 pp. 23-25

Author’s note: While Atlanta promotes itself, somewhat legitimately, as an “international city” due in part to the non-U. S. origins of an increasing number of its population, there are similar changes occurring in more rural sections of the state of Georgia, and the South. These changes are occurring not only in field agriculture, but in rural industry–such as poultry processing. Some Mexican workers, arriving to work in Georgia poultry, have begun to settle in their new-found homes. My interviews, conducted over the past couple of years, with a number of Georgia poultry industry sources and employees point to increasing job tenure among immigrant Latino employees. Due to the sensitivity of immigration issues and the varying legal status of some of the workers, I offered sources anonymity in order to get the interviews upon which the following essay is based.

“I have Hispanic employees who have on average one-and-a-half to two years’ seniority,” explained one personnel manager at a large poultry processing facility near Gainesville. “Two years ago, [Hispanic employee tenure] was less than a year. That deal of going back and forth [to Mexico] is not necessarily true.” He noted that in southern and eastern Hall County, there are increasing numbers of Hispanic people purchasing houses. The reasons for this apparent settlement have more to do with issues related to globalization and Mexican government policy than with individuals’ desires to become Americans. Indeed, many Mexican workers said they would prefer to live and work in Mexico save for the country’s economic dislocations in recent years and the family obligations and network of social contacts they have developed in Georgia.

“I think I am going to save money and go back to Mexico,” explained one poultry worker who has been living in Gainesville and working at a plant for seven years. “[But] my kids are in school now. I think I will go back to Mexico, but you never know.”

Other factors influencing this stablization include changes in some companies’ policies, which discourage rapid turnover and encourage long-term employment with vacation incentives to accommodate immigrant workers’ needs to visit family in Mexico. And some workers attributed their longer stays to a government that does not serve their interests. In response to a question about his intent to go back to Mexico, the industrial engineer said, “Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe if the government changes. They only do what the biggest, richest Mexicans want.”

Such changes may occur under the direction of a potentially new independent congress in Mexico, which is currently beginning a new term and is ostensibly more concerned with ensuring economic well-being for average Mexican citizens. In the meantime, as Mexican immigrants continue to live and work in Georgia, they are becoming an important portion of the state’s poultry processing workforce. Indeed, they are so important to poultry production that one supervisor quipped during a factory tour, “If there weren’t Hispanic workers, nobody in America would be eating chicken.”

Historically, the migration of workers from Latin America to the poultry processors in Georgia has been in part industry-led. As the industry developed over the past fifty years into a transnational food production system, it needed to find more workers to meet rising demand for poultry products and to replace workers who moved on to better and better paying jobs in Georgia’s growing economy. Poultry processing is hard work. The national injury and illness rate in the industry is 22.7 per 100 workers and the average national poultry production wage has declined about 8.5 percent in real terms between 1972 and 1996, according to statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“At the beginning, we had only white folks, “another manager explained. “Then blacks. Then Vietnamese people. They are [mostly] gone now. They realized they can do something else and now we have Hispanics.”

In the 1980s, some plants recruited employees through immigrant social networks, sometimes offering employees bonuses for bringing in new job applicants. But workers indicated that the industries no longer offer such incentives as they are not necessary. Once immigrant networks are established, they continue to draw more immigrants as stories of the successes of some lead to further attempts by neighbors and relatives. Whether or not the stories are true does not matter. As a result, many new poultry workers are still recruited for work by family members already working in the plants

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without any financial incentives from companies. Among Mexicans, such network recruitment continues due to the serious economic crisis in their home country.

Some of the longer-term immigrant workers whom I interviewed said they arrived in the 1980’s during the economic restructuring stemming from the 1982 debt crisis. Others arrived following the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the devaluation of the peso in 1995. Although some experts debate the connection between NAFTA and the peso crisis, many Mexicans believe that NAFTA is the cause of their economic hardships. Some Mexican congressional leaders, such as Federal Deputy Porfirio Munoz Ledo, feel former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari maintained an overvalued peso during and immediately following the NAFTA debate in order to garner support for the agreement in the U.S. This strategy had high costs for Mexican citizens who had to endure perhaps the worst recession of the century once the currency was devalued. Inflation rates increased rapidly in 1995, while incomes fell. Today Mexican wages continue to have a purchasing power roughly equivalent to that of two decades ago.

The period following the peso devaluation is when a twenty-four-year-old hotel receptionist left Acapulco for Georgia. In her apartment across the street from a Kroger supermarket, which she shares with five cousins, she said, “They tell me the situation is the same as before I left. The salaries are minimal. Things [prices] rise every month.” Rather than stay at her job in Acapulco, she decided to come directly to North Georgia to work in the chicken plants. “I wanted a better life for my brothers and my father.”

Like many immigrant workers, this young woman had the help of a relative in planning her migration. In her case, an uncle, who had also lived in North Georgia for two years, helped her get established. Later, she helped other relatives migrate to North Georgia as well, in a clear example of chain migration. Each of the six people living in her apartment worked at the same plant.

But the more recent migration is not simply related to the fact that people can earn a better wage in the U.S. More importantly, there is a lack of adequately paying employment in Mexico due to the 1990s recession. Many of those interviewed claimed to have had adequate salaries prior to the peso crisis and chose to migrate only after they could no longer find sufficient work in their hometowns. Additionally, government policies in Mexico hold down wages in order to attract foreign investment. A twenty-nine year-old father from Durango explained, “In Mexico, they make like 150 pesos a week. That’s like $20 a week. People that know how to work in construction and that know how to build houses make a little more. They make about 250 pesos a week … But to eat meat in Mexico on Sunday, you have to save money and buy nothing else but beans and soup. It’s expensive. To buy clothes for one person, pants cost 100 pesos. With one person with children and a wife, it’s difficult.”

When asked what the economic crisis means to him, one immigrant worker in Gainesville said, “For me, it means never having everything you want. It means if you have a job, you will never be able to get the things to live comfortably . . . In Mexico, there is no way to have a new house or a new car. There is no way, unless you hit the lottery.” This worker said he had a degree in industrial engineering. His comments reflect those of a person with middle-class aspirations in a country with vastly skewed economic growth.

Migrating to potential jobs in the U. S. is no guarantee of employment. Another worker sitting in a restaurant in Gainesville had not had a job in three months. As to his reasons for coming to the poultry capital of the world, he explained as he showed me a family photograph, “I have six children, OK. I am here because they don’t have anything to eat.”

And for those who do find poultry processing work, the jobs do not appear to offer people much long-term satisfaction. A twenty-five-year-old woman complained that she does not like living in the United States simply because all there is for her is either work, or waiting for work in her sister’s apartment where a satellite dish received Mexican television and provided a constant though inadequate means of distraction. In each place, she explained, she was bored.

“There are a lot of people that go to a chicken plant, but after a while, they get fed up and they look for other work. I really get bored because sometimes I don’t have anything to do,” explained another worker, who is married to a U.S. citizen and is studying for his General Education Diploma so that he can find work outside the plant.

Nevertheless, the southern border has in a sense moved north into Georgia as the ethnic change inside the plants is increasingly mirrored in a larger transition in the service industries, trailer parks, and apartments around them. In places where before there was little evidence of Spanish-speaking residents or businesses, there are now numerous examples. In Athens, there are three grocery stores geared solely towards Spanish-speaking residents. In Gainesville, there are bilingual restaurants, churches, insurance agencies, lawyers, grocery stores, radio stations and music shops. There are Latin American soccer leagues and there is a bus service from Gainesville to the Mexican border with connections to

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Jalisco, Michoacan and other regions in Mexico.

Immigrants started many of these new businesses. “There are a lot of people like me,” commented the restaurant owner who worked in the processing plants for five years before starting his own business. His Mexican restaurant includes a lunch truck that makes rounds to the poultry plants during breaks and lunchtime. “We’re making our lives here.” Their lives are transnational, spanning both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. On the one hand, they work in the U.S. to provide opportunities for their children, and to support family in Mexico. Financial support in the form of remittances are estimated at between $2.5 and $3.9 billion a year, according to a recent joint U.S.-Mexican government migration study. On the other hand, they would prefer to live in Mexico. “It’s a better life there [in Mexico],” the restaurant owner explained. “Not in an economic way, but the people live more happily there. They live more slowly. You’re not in a rush. People have time to go to the street and talk. Somebody in the U. S., you don’t even have time to know who your neighbor is.”

As a result of these cultural and economic differences, the transnational character of Mexican life in rural Georgia results in a frustration among some. One thirty-two year-old woman with two children explained, “In Mexico, there is nothing. There is nothing to eat. There is nothing to live on … I want to return to Mexico. But we don’t have anything in Mexico. Here at least there is work.” ^

Greg Guthey recently completed his masters degree at the University of Georgia. He is now a graduate student in the Department of Geography at the University of California-Berkeley.

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Southern Workers and the Movement for Social Justice: Thirty Years Since Memphis

By Michael Honey

Vol. 19, No. 3-4, 1997 pp. 26-29

The labor climate of the present, particularly in the South, is largely negative as far as most workers are concerned, and results from calculated decisions made by the owners of capital in the last thirty years. The possibility of changing that climate, however, depends on what poor people, workers, and their allies do. Social movements of the past teach the idea that people, when organized, can change the prevailing equations of power. As we approach the thirty-year anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that idea is one well worth remembering.

As Dan Carter pointed out in the last issue of Southern Changes, it is not the immutable forces of the “free market” that have nearly eliminated family waged working-class employment, and that have created a huge economic chasm between underemployed and ill-paid workers on one hand, and investors, bankers, and corporate owners on the other. It is primarily the decisions made by those who own capital that have led us to this new era of growing economic inequality.

The broad outlines of what has happened are well known. As part of the division of labor markets across the globe, multi-national corporations based in the U.S. have shipped mass production jobs abroad and shifted to service and information labor markets at home. The attention of investors at the same time has focused on making money on the stock market through mergers and buy-outs, during which the assets of many profitable and productive industries have been “upstreamed” into corporations which make their money from paper transactions. Billions have poured into the pockets of stockholders in the process of destroying millions of unionized factory jobs, and corporate incomes have soared to almost unimaginable levels.

The chaotic destruction of older, unionized forms of employment has been accompanied by the creation of millions of new jobs, it is true: jobs that are low-waged, pay few benefits, are often part-time, and by themselves cannot sustain a family. Lack of employment or temporary employment, insecurity, high stress, overwork, low pay, and lack of enforcement of occupational health and safety standards are becoming the hallmarks of American capitalism once again. As the percentage of workers belonging to unions has fallen to its lowest point since the1920’s, the real incomes of young families with children have dropped by over thirty percent in the last generation. Real wages on average have dropped twenty percent in the last twenty years. Meantime, American culture is marked by gross individualism, ostentatious displays of wealth, and a political system that shelters the rich and ignores or punishes the poor.

The mass production economy of American corporations, remember, still exists, but it has been increasingly moved to Mexico, Thailand, and other low-waged labor markets with repressive governments and weak unions.

De-unionization through globalization has been supported at every step by government, through the North American Free Trade Agreement and other such mechanisms. Interestingly, the massive expansion of corporate wealth, though aided by tax breaks and government support, has been accompanied by the claims of business people, Republicans, and Christian (supposedly) conservatives that the government should no longer intervene in the economy and can’t afford to fund social programs. Taxes on the rich are the lowest since the early twentieth century, and among the lowest in the industrial world. Still we are told we cannot afford to pay for schools, public hospitals, job training, bridges, mass transportation, or the kinds of government services that cushion the effects of capitalism in other parts of the world.

Lack of money is not the problem. Many of the statistics on the social welfare of the average person show us sliding toward third world conditions, yet in terms of absolute wealth ours is still perhaps the richest nation in the world. Corporations are more profitable and the labor force is more productive than ever before. The problem is that the nation’s wealth is in the hands of a few. Today, the top one percent of the population controls more wealth than the bottom ninety percent of us combined. And wealthy interests have used federal and state governments to enact laws that benefit them to the disadvantage of the rest of us. They call this the “free market.”

All of these developments have had particularly devastating effects on African American communities and on black workers, especially in the South, where large numbers of them still reside. There should be no mystery about the increase in perpetual joblessness, increased alcoholism, violence, drug use, teen pregnancies, and family dissolution in inner cities in the last twenty years. De-unionization and de-industrialization, along with lack of support for low-income housing, employment programs, affirmative action, equal employment initiatives, and other social programs have knocked the props out from under communities historically held down by racism and job market discrimination.

For generations, segregation excluded black workers from higher education and white collar and skilled blue collar employment. Only through decades of labor and civil rights struggles did a segment of black workers finally obtain access to decent paying, unionized, industrial jobs. But just as the unionized industrial segment of the black working class obtained a foothold on prosperity, employers began to close the factories down. This plunged not only black factory workers but many of their communities into a literal depression.

To change these conditions, it should be obvious that black workers need work. But they also need unions. In the second half of the twentieth century, African Americans have unionized in higher proportions than white workers, and when they have the opportunity, they continue to do so today. The reason is simple: despite their own history of racism and exclusion, unions provide one of the very few vehicles available for blue collar and service workers, who are disproportionately Black, Latino, Asian, and female, to improve their conditions.

When workers have unions, statistics show that they raise wages at the workplace by about one-fourth to one-third. When unions have power, they can also provide a voice for disenfranchised working people and the poor in government. Their lack of power and vision in the last thirty years is part of the problem we are living with today. The gaping inequalities of the present have resulted not just from the decisions made by capitalists, but from the decline of mass social movements, and particularly from the American labor movement’s weakness.

Martin Luther King, Jr. clearly recognized these realities. He called over and over for a socially progressive union movement linked to movements by the poor and people of color. Rather than the advocate of a “color blind” capitalism that neo-conservatives have recently

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made him out to be, in his last years and months Dr. King preached social democracy, coalition building, mass movements, and militant demands on both governments and employers. He preached not the equality of the “free market,” but the social gospel of do onto others as you would have them do unto you. The implications of that simple Christian notion, if taken as seriously as Dr. King took it, could upend many of our structures of power and wealth production.

What can we do to bring about change today? If Dr. King were alive, I believe that reorganizing the American working class would beat the top of his agenda. Throughout his lifetime, he spoke in favor of unions. He built coalitions with them, sought their advice and support, and in the end died struggling for the right of the working poor to organize them.

Freedom, King understood, was not an abstraction. It meant not only full civil and political rights, but the right to a decent standard of living. Just as slavery and segregation had denied these rights to millions of African-Americans, he felt the nation’s continuing failure to provide an economic base for the working class and poor still denied a meaningful freedom to millions, especially people of color, in the modern era. King also warned that a right-wing alliance of big business, the military, industry, Republicans and conservative Democrats, if not checked by a broad people’s movement, would “seek to drive labor into impotency” and drive down living standards for working people.

Yet he remained optimistic that people, once organized, could change this. He constantly referred to past labor and civil rights struggles in his last speeches, and sought to build an ever-widening coalition to end both class and racial injustice. In his last year, King tried desperately to organize movements that might redirect the nation’s priorities. In 1968, he launched the Poor People’s Campaign, a multi-racial freedom movement to bring poor people and their allies from all over the U.S. to Washington, D.C. Rather than ask participants to redeem themselves from their own failures, as some recent marches have done, his movement demanded what King called “a radical redistribution” of wealth and power and an end to America’s pursuit of militarism and war in favor of jobs and income for the poor and working poor.

King also became involved in a strike of black sanitation workers in Memphis who, like many of the working poor then and now, lacked the basic employment benefits which make jobs worthwhile. Like many of the working poor today, they sought union recognition, the right to decent wages and health care benefits, rest breaks, safety precautions, vacations, and to be treated with dignity. King believed that these and other humble working people could help change America though organization.

James Robinson and Taylor Rogers joined the strike because they had few alternatives. In the case of Robinson, a former sharecropper, mechanization of the cotton economy had forced him to leave home, but with few urban labor skills and little formal education he could not make it into higher-waged employment. Mechanization of unskilled factory jobs also eliminated the relatively secure, unionized work once available to black urban workers like Rodgers, and poor education in segregated schools meant that jobs in the growing white collar sector remained closed to both of them. Even as many of them worked two or more jobs, forty percent of the sanitation workers still qualified for welfare, without benefits, vacations, or health and safety protections. Such conditions suggest why 57 percent of the black population in 1960’s Memphis lived below the poverty line, as compared to 13.8 percent of the whites. Whites treated black men carrying garbage tubs over their heads as servants, giving them cast off clothing and holding their wages to little more than a dollar an hour.

When they walked out on February 12, 1968, few suspected the strike would escalate into one of the climactic struggles of the 1960’s. The city refused to bargain with their union, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), or to grant them union dues check off, even as most employers do in most organizing drives today. Mayor Henry Loeb, a Republican fiscal conservative, along with most of the city’s white residents, refused to spend money to improve conditions or take issues of racial equity involved in the strike seriously. The macing and clubbing of strike supporters by police, and the intolerance of the commercial media turned the strike into a three-month ordeal that finally took on tragic proportions.

Guided by T. O. Jones, a sanitation worker fired for his union activities, sanitation workers held daily picketing and mass meetings. The entire African American community joined in, also boycotting Memphis businesses and commercial newspapers. These mass mobilizations formed the backdrop for King’s March 18 speech to a crowd of ten to fifteen thousand jubilant Memphians. In that speech, King told Memphis strikers that Selma and the Voting Rights Act brought to an end one phase of the struggle, but only opened up another. “Now our struggle is for genuine equality which means economic equality,” he said. “For we know that it isn’t enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?” King told the workers that “You are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich

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nation and receive starvation wages.”

In King’s view, civil rights gains had been only one down-payment on the fulfillment of the American Dream. Now, he said shortly before his death, “we’re dealing in a sense with class issues, we’re dealing with the problem of the gulf between the haves and the have-nots.” The problem was not just one of gaining rights within the system, but of fundamentally changing the system itself. This transformation required rallying a broad coalition to make the demands of those at the bottom of society the demands of all of us.

The promise of the history of social movements, King understood, hinges on the creation of a sense of unity and solidarity, based on the idea that “we can get more together than we can separately.” In his last speech, on April 3, 1968, King saw this unity as the antidote to the racial, religious, and cultural divisions stirred up by the demagogues of the world, who, like Pharoah, want “to prolong the period of slavery” by keeping the slaves fighting among themselves. Instead of allowing ourselves to be so divided, he called upon us to understand that “either we go up together or we go down together.”

We still need the broad coalition movement for economic justice King sought. The creation of such a movement could be one step toward ending the endemic violence in our society. Without social movements, we see the effects of our economic polarization in the form of individual explosions: people who can’t take it any more take it out on their family members, neighbors, or school-mates. Instead, as we approach the April 4, 1998, thirty-year commemoration of Dr. King’s death, the time seems right to look to group solutions to our problems, and to re-appropriate the social justice message of Dr. King. We can help create economic and social justice in our schools, our churches, through voluntary associations and in our communities. But most assuredly, we also have to pursue it through unions.

The people whose opinions we most often hear in the public domain seem to think that economic growth will solve the persistent and growing class, racial, and gender inequalities of our social system. Growth might temporarily paper over deeper problems of social inequality with low unemployment statistics, but there is no reason to think that real change can come without renewed social movements, including the labor movement. Unionization of the workplaces across the United States, and especially in the South, where poverty and lack of unions still disproportionately characterize the work force, would bring some fundamental changes in the current equations of power. Beyond that, the voices of working class and poor people need to be heard throughout the halls of government.

Rodgers and Robinson recently reminded me of how important the black labor struggle is for the whole society. Without the sanitation workers’ struggle and King’s sacrifice, Rodgers believed, “black folks wouldn’t be in the position they’re in now . . . all the banks have got colored tellers, and [we’ve got black] school principles. City Hall is full of blacks, even to the mayor, from the top all the way through.” AFSCME Local 1733’s success helped galvanize black voters, especially the poor, and even led to integrated fire and police departments, at long last. Since 1968, Robinson told me, “a lot of things changed for the worse,” but at the same time unionization “made a lot of difference to a lot of folks. Not just sanitation workers, all the workers. I think the sanitation strike made a lot of difference for the whole city.”

In Dr. King’s day, the American labor movement had gone to sleep. Many unionists supported the war in Vietnam, Richard Nixon, and even Ronald Reagan. As they dispensed with organizing, unions lost power and became increasingly irrelevant to the problems of the poor. In the last several years, however, the leadership of the union movement to some extent has turned around. Workers today are organizing, particularly women and people of color, and the possibility for significant social movements may be on the horizon again. Only by the stakeholders of our society organizing and confronting the wealth holders will the labor climate, and with it the social and political climate, change. As Clarence Coe, a retiree who took part in many black labor battles in Memphis recently told me, “As it has always been, I think when people are badly enough oppressed, they’ll find a way. And organizing labor is the only way.”

In that context, we need to return to the vision of Dr. King in his last year. It is good to celebrate Dr. King’s birthday, as we do every January 15. But we should also do as the working people do in Memphis: go out and march on the anniversary of Dr. King’s death, demanding the right of poor people and workers to join unions and to obtain economic and social justice.

Michael Honey teaches American history and labor and ethnic studies at the University of Washington Tacoma. His book Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (University of Illinois Press, 1993) won the Southern Historical Association’s prize for southern history and the Organization of American Historians’ prize for race relations history in 1994. His book Black Workers Remember, An Oral History is forthcoming from the University of California Press.

]]> Saints and Villains: An Interview with Denise Giardina /sc19-3-4_001/sc19-3-4_008/ Mon, 01 Sep 1997 04:00:05 +0000 /1997/09/01/sc19-3-4_008/ Continue readingSaints and Villains: An Interview with Denise Giardina

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Saints and Villains: An Interview with Denise Giardina

By Kerry Taylor

Vol. 19, No. 3-4, 1997 pp. 30-32

Though she describes her writing as primarily theological rather than political, Appalachian writer Denise Giardina stands out among contemporary American authors for her ruthless depictions of capitalism and the violence it inflicts on people and the environment. In Storming Heaven (1987), and its sequel, The Unquiet Earth (1992), Giardina traces more than one hundred years in the struggle of West Virginia coal miners to protect their families, land, and unions from hostile coal companies and government indifference. Despite the heavy political content, Giardina’s keen eye for detail, her complex portrayals of her novels’ heroes and her tremendous gift for storytelling ensure that her writing never reads as preachy or polemical.

In the following interview, Giardina locates the roots of her social conscience in her fundamentalist Christian upbringing, her mother’s loving example, and the inequality she encountered growing up in a West Virginia coal mining town. Giardina also reflects on her struggles to feel rooted in an increasingly mobile society and to find support for her interest in activism.

Denise Giardina was born in 1951 and grew up in Black Wolf, a small coal camp near Bluefield, West Virginia. Her father worked as an accountant for the local coal company and her mother was a nurse. It was the experiences of her first thirteen years spent in Black Wolf that Giardina drew upon to write her two coal field novels.

As a child, the enormity of the mines was a source of fear for young Giardina. But the mines also fired her curiosity and made her aware that life could be contradictory and unfair.

“The mines were always a looming presence because they were everywhere, first of all. When I was real small there was a mine connected with my dad’s company that was like a half mile from our house. The miners would walk to it from the houses. You could also hear–they would blow a whistle if there was an accident or something. That was always kind of scary. I thought when I was a little kid that you heard the whistle and it was something bad.”

“That mine closed when I was five or six years old. But there was still every other town, every two miles you would come to another coal camp and most of them had their own mines and some of them were really huge. There was one mine about six miles from my house. At one time it was the biggest mine in the world. It was one of the deepest and the buildings outside were just huge. So, it was like this monstrous thing that you would drive by every time you went to town. There used to be a sign in that town that posted how many hours had been lost to accidents which I always thought was kind of weird. Like I don’t think I would have wanted people to know. But the idea was to encourage people to be careful. But that’s another thing that as a kid I thought was really weird, but also kind of scary. I had several classmates whose parents were killed in the mines. It wasn’t like a protected growing up kind of place like some places would be.”

While always interested in politics, it was not until Giardina’s family moved to Charleston, West Virginia, that she became aware of the class and political dimensions to life in the coal fields.

“I think I’ve always been sort of naturally interested in politics. I just remember when I was a little kid and I was about nine years old when the Kennedy/Nixon campaign was. I remember being real interested in that. It was the first one I really remember. And also history as well. I was really interested in the Civil War at that time, too . . . making the connections. Also kind of following the civil rights a little bit.

“I didn’t really think about it in connection to my own place until we moved when I was 13. It was a real traumatic thing. It was a real traumatic age anyway, hard enough, then having to move. At the same time I read “How Green Was My Valley” and that had a big impact on me. There was some political stuff in there that made me think about why we had to leave, and I drew some

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connections from that. That’s when I first became interested in the coal mining areas that I grew up in, politically.”

Giardina credits her mother and, surprisingly, her upbringing in a conservative fundamentalist church, for shaping her political sensibilities. From her religious experience Giardina drew basic values of charity and fairness that reinforced her mother’s lessons on justice and tolerance.

“My mom, in particular, always raised my brother and me with values that were: `You should be nice to people and not take advantage of people if you had more than they had,’ and that, `You shouldn’t put people down.’ For example, there was a fairly large black population and we were not allowed to use racial epithets and that kind of thing. She made clear she wouldn’t put up with us acting the way a lot of whites in the area acted.

“I think also, I grew up in the church. We went to a little Methodist church and I grew up with Bible stories and that obviously had a big influence. And I think I just felt guilty a lot of time because my dad was management and we had more money than a lot of people did. We weren’t rich by any means, but we were middle class people. We were able to go to the beach every summer and we didn’t have to worry about putting food on the table unlike the neighbors who some of them didn’t have any food at all, literally. Their kids would wear my hand-me-downs. I’d go to school in fourth grade and see first graders wearing my clothes. I think I always could never figure it out. I knew how dangerous the work was that miners were doing. I didn’t think it was fair they weren’t treated better. There was just something fundamentally unjust about it.”

As she matured theologically and politically, Giardina battled to reconcile the gaps between church teaching and church practice. Her constant questioning often put her at odds with members of her family and her church community. Giardina remains perplexed as to why her brother, though he enjoyed most of the same influences and experiences, never struggled with the contradictions of conservative theology.

“I was raised fairly fundamentalist. My mom’s not fundamentalist, but most everybody I grew up with was, and most everybody in the church was. My brother actually still is. I went through a lot of searching periods and there were several periods I never went to church at all, but I eventually came back to it.

“I’ve always had a challenging attitude toward church. I was never one to just accept the things I was told. The world had to have been created in six days and I can remember getting in arguments about that in grade school. I would say, `Like did God have a watch? And the sun wasn’t created until the fourth clay. How would he know what a day was?’ I was arguing stuff like that when I was little.

“My brother, on the other hand, has never questioned any of that. He’s still very fundamentalist. He never even stopped going to church either. He just always went along with it. So I don’t know why one person goes one way. He’s very conservative. He’s maybe a little too independent for the Christian Coalition, but his views are almost there. He’s involved in all this Promise Keepers stuff and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and all that kind of stuff.”

After graduating from college in 1973, Giardina found an Episcopal church in Charleston that aroused her evolving social conscience. She credits the pastor, Jim Lewis, for kindling her interest in social justice, theology and literature. In 1984, Giardina’s commitment to social justice led her to work as the statewide secretary/treasurer for KFTC (Kentuckians for the Commonwealth), a community-based organization fighting coal company claims to land rights. Giardina later joined the United Mine Worker’s 1989 campaign against the Pittston Coal Company, writing editorials in favor of the workers and participating in organized acts of civil disobedience.

“I knew the Episcopal Church had a reputation for being not fundamentalist. It just happened that there was a new priest in town who I really hit it off with. He’s still one of my best friends and probably he’s, other than my mother, the person who has been the most influential in my life and in my writing. His name is Jim Lewis. He’s a very powerful preacher. He reads constantly and he was always giving me books to read. I’d never read a lot of good contemporary fiction. He was giving me Flannery O’Connor and I’d never heard of Flannery O’Connor. My education was not that great, I guess. He was really exposing me to people like that. He gave me Dietrich Bonhoeffer–several of his books. He opened up this whole world. He was also very involved with social issues. He started a soup kitchen while and several programs that are still going on like twenty years later.

“I was kind of influenced by him to go to seminary. He really got me turned on to theology. And I thought it was a call to ministry, but I found out later that wasn’t true. But I think it was definitely a call to study theology. Theology has probably been more important to my fiction than politics. A lot of people look at my books and say they’re political. They are to an extent, but even more they are theological novels”

Attempting to join her politics with her search for community, Giardina briefly joined the Sojourners community, a Washington-based ecumenical project that works on peace and racial justice concerns. For similar

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reasons, Giardina moved to the Kentucky coal fields in the 1980s where she wrote Storming Heaven while working for KFTC. Since returning to Charleston to teach writing at West Virginia State College, Giardina has found it difficult to remain politically involved without the support of an activist culture. She divides her time these days between writing, teaching, and working with a local theater group.

“Seems like I always have to have some kind of community. I’m not doing so much right now. KFTC [Kentuckians for the Commonwealth] was really a community effort. I lived in North Carolina for awhile. I worked in a bookstore and that kind of became a community for me. But one reason I left was because I wasn’t part of the region and it was going to take too long to establish the kind of community I need. So I came back to West Virginia.

“I’ve got several communities, three, I guess. One’s the church, I’m going back to the one I was going to earlier. One is the school I teach at. I’m also on the board of a community theater group and have done several plays. I’ve been real active in that group and that’s like a whole community of people. In some cases these all overlap. One of my friends from church is also with the theater group and one of the teachers is in the theater group. It’s a small city. But really those things are taking up my time now. I don’t have much time for political stuff.

“The big hospital in town is building a medical waste incinerator right in the middle of town and they got a permit without telling anyone. There’s a group trying to stop them. So I stood outside with a sign as cars were driving by. That’s the first time I’ve done that in a long time, but I haven’t been really active with that.”

Giardina recently completed work on Saints and Villains: A Novel, a fictional account of the life of German theologian and activist Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was killed by the Nazi’s just days before the Allies defeated Germany during World War II. Though the book’s setting is a long way from the coal fields of Appalachia, Giardina sees continuity in her work. “I’m interested in how people respond to evil and injustice and the theological aspects of that. Early in the book I have Bonhoeffer go to the South. I bring him to West Virginia, but he did actually travel in the South on his way up from Mexico to New York where he was a student. He was very interested in racism in the U.S.”

The book is due out in February 1998.

From an October 31, 1996 telephone interview with Denise Giardina by Kerry Taylor, who lives in San Francisco and works as a research assistant at the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project at Stanford University.

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South Carolina Denies “UPRISING”

By Reginald Stuart

Vol. 19, No. 3-4, 1997 pp. 33-35

For years, public television stations across the country have been expanding our grasp of the past by airing countless documentaries that trace our rich and complex history.

In South Carolina, operators of the state’s public television system have unintentionally succeeded in developing a new way to stir public interest in our history–don’t air a documentary.

Case in point: “Uprising of ’34,” a well crafted oral history about the campaign to organize Southern textile workers, a movement spurred by the promises of Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal.’ (See Southern Changes, Fall 1994) .

The organizing effort culminated in a three-week strike that swept the South in 1934. It involved nearly 400,000 workers (most in the Carolinas, Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia), commonly referred to as “lint heads” because of their work in cotton mills. Most were white, poor, lived in company housing and shopped at company stores. The strike essentially ended with the shooting deaths by mill guards of six striking workers in the tiny mill town of Honea Path, South Carolina.

Release of the documentary in 1995 marked the first time since the 1930’s that much of the history of the strike was explored in detail for the general public. Most history books in the region say little if anything about the strike and the people who participated in it say even less.

Since South Carolina ETV’s decision nearly three years ago not to air “Uprising,” supporters and opponents of its airing acknowledge the program has probably received more attention in South Carolina and across the South than it would have had the 90-minute documentary been aired in the late hours of the night when even fewer channels are set on public television.

“It continues to be a very hot topic,” said Kathy Gardner-Jones, spokeswomen for South Carolina ETV, acknowledging that public response to the decision not to air the program was decidedly against the station’s position.

Many public stations outside South Carolina, except WTVI, the public station in Charlotte, North Carolina, have aired the program to widespread public acceptance. There have been a number of community viewings on college campuses, at local theaters, at the state museum. One group even raised money to air the film on a commercial station in Charlotte, after the public station refused.

Equally as important, “Uprising” is being embraced by labor and social studies teachers to jump start other projects that examine the history of the labor movement in the South.

“This (the decision not to air “Uprising”) actually pushed the ticket,” said Judith Helfand, a young documentary producer who assisted veteran George Stoney in making the documentary. “People are saying, ‘I don’t understand.”‘

With no narrator to steer the story line, “Uprising” successfully uses film from the National Archives, letters gleaned from the Library of Congress and several dozen fresh interviews with actual strikers, their children, mill owners, and labor organizers to offer a vivid picture of the battle between the workers and mill operators.

The film also offers new insight into the failure of the federal government’s labor protection apparatus under President Franklin Roosevelt, the people’s president, to intervene in the labor disruption in a meaningful way. That near-deaf ear, workers say in retrospect, left them at the mercy of the state police and mill operators. Strikers who were not killed or injured during the strike were blacklisted by mill operators, evicted from their company-owned homes, and forced to look for work outside the industry.

The story behind the story is an intriguing one that also sheds new light on the politics of programming in public television.

Stoney, a North Carolina native and Emmy Award winner, said he knew from the start the film would touch sensitive nerves in the historically conservative and strongly anti-union Carolinas. He laid groundwork to address that.

‘We’d had support from the North Carolina Humanities Council since 1989,” Stoney explained. “When we were producing, we knew we wanted it on PBS. We were very careful about getting labor support. And we knew we’d better have a southern station sponsor. Close to the end, around the spring of 1994, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was very enthusiastic about it and let us use their name as we solicited money to complete it. Just as we were about to launch, their top man said ‘no, we won’t air it.”‘

The film was eventually completed and picked up by “Point of View,” a New York-based service that packages documentaries that oft times visit controversial subjects.

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Most public television networks, like South Carolina ETV, purchase rights to air “Point of View.” With the purchase, they have the option to air or not air any or all selections for the season.

Before “Uprising” came along, South Carolina ETV had taken passes on several “Point of View” installments, determining the offerings did not meet South Carolina standards of taste. The censor meter had run so often on “Point of View” that it was hard to justify the financial commitment, programming officials concluded.

By the time, “Uprising” was in the “Point of View” lineup, South Carolina ETV had canceled its “Point of View” contract. South Carolina ETV was offered an opportunity to take “Uprising” program separately, but after heated internal debate, refused that offer citing its decision not to take “Point of View” programming.

“It was a very controversial decision and there was a difference of opinion within the station,’ Gardner-Jones said. “The argument was that we don’t air the series and we aren’t going to pull “Uprising” out and put it in. If we start cherry-picking then you get other groups mad be-cause we didn’t air their particular program.

“It’s just an editorial decision,” she said. “It was their belief (the program department), that this film didn’t represent overall community wishes of what they wanted to see. There was a lot of soul searching here and there still is. This was not a unaminous decision at all.”

The station’s decision had the effect of barring the film from being shown on any of the state’s four regional public television stations.

Public reaction was decidedly against the station, Gardner-Jones said, even from the state’s major daily papers, which themselves take a generally dim view of organized labor. The state’s five largest daily newspapers wrote editorials highly critical of the decision. In North Carolina, The Charlotte Observer took its local public station to task. Talk show hosts in the two states had a field day dressing down the decisions. Columnists weighed in.

“I basically blasted ’em for it,” said Doug Nye, television critic for The State, South Carolina’s largest daily. “It’s educational TV, has something to do with South Carolina. Why not air it instead of stir up so much grief? It presented both sides and I could not see anything they could object to. I can understand some things they have passed on it the past, but this one they created a lot of grief for themselves,” said the native South Carolinian.

Gardner-Jones does admit the station has mud on its face. But she is adamant in her insistence that supporters of the film are wrong if they think the station was pressured by the state’s very powerful textile mill operators not to air the program. Critics have trumpeted the fact that Henry Cauthen, SC-ETV’s president and general manager since 1964, has close ties to the state’s textile industry. His father is a very powerful textile industry lobbyist in the state and served as president of the state’s textile manufacturers association.

“We did not have any outside influence at all,” Garnder-Jones said.

Indeed the SC-ETV knew what might happen if it aired “Uprising.” Several years earlier, it aired “Before Stonewall,” a documentary about the start of the gay movement in New York City. The day after the program aired, a state senator was quoted on the front pages of her local paper saying the system was using state funds to promote homosexuality. When the SC-ETV responded that the program was aired at night, when programming is paid for by viewer contributions as opposed to day when educational programs paid for by the state for schools are aired, the senator countered the next day that the studio, staff and equipment were paid for by the state. Discussion ended.

The station did not try to equate a story about local labor history with gays in New York, but Gardner-Jones suggested the same fears always haunt programmers at the station. “It’s a very thorny dilemma,” she said.

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Despite refusing to air “Uprising,” SC-ETV did agree to allow other stations in its coverage area to air it. Under standard PBS procedures, stations have the exclusive right to air a program four times in four years.

Outrage in Columbia and the Greenville-Spartanburg area generated enough donations for a group in favor of airing to purchase an 11:30 p.m., Sunday slot on the NBC-TV affiliate in Spartanburg. Public TV in Chapel Hill eventually ran the program as part of the “Point of View” series. It aired late on a Saturday night before Labor Day weekend in 1995. The program fared better on public television in Georgia.

Meanwhile, WTVI, the Charlotte public station that refused to air “Uprising,” did obtain a $150,000 grant from the textile industry to produce “Spinning Through Time,” a much less biting history of the textile industry. It aired twice in prime time in Charlotte.

While controversy swirls around the politics of airing “Uprising,” those who were the focus of the documentary say they are glad someone has finally began to talk about what happened in Honea Path, after years of silence. Indeed, before the documentary was made, people there say their parents, neighbors, friends, hardly anybody, would talk about the strike or the shootings.

The documentary has been especially touching for New York writer Frank Beacham, a 49-year-old Honea Path native. His grandfather, Dan Beacham, was mayor of Honea Path in 1934, supervisor at Chiquola Mills and the man who organized the gunmen who did the shooting into the crowd of strikers from factory windows. The strike soon ended. No one was ever convicted in the seven killings.

“This was a virtual secret for nearly sixty years,” said Beacham. “My mother was a history teacher and she didn’t even know the story. Through intimidation after the shooting, the mill managers were able to silence this for a long time. I’m a third generation. I knew vaguely, as most of the people in the town, there was a shooting there. But it was never discussed in my family.

“That kind of intimidation is still around,” said Beacham, who returned to Honea Path after the documentary was aired to participate in the dedication of a mill workers memorial. “But I don’t see this documentary as pro-union. To me it’s the history of an area. Whether it’s pro union or not, it tells a story. This thing cuts hard both ways.”

Reginald Stuart is a contributing editor to Emerge magazine and a newspaper consultant. His article ‘News and Blues: Minorities in the South, Twenty-Five Years Later,” appeared in the Summer 1997 Southern Changes.

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BOOKS:
What’s A Union For?: New Perspectives on Textile Unionism in the Post-World War II South
By Mary Frederickson

Vol. 19, No. 3-4, 1997 pp. 36-39

Daniel J. Clark, Like Night and Day: Unionization in a Southern Mill Town, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Timothy J. Minchin, What Do We Need a Union For?: The TWUA in the South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

On August 13, 1997, workers in Kannapolis, Concord, and Salisbury, North Carolina plants owned by Fieldcrest Cannon, Inc., voted by a narrow margin (2,194 for and 2,563 against) to decline representation by UNITE, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees. The past breathes heavily down the backs of those who live and work in southern textile communities and North Carolina textile workers know well that they have inherited a particularly burdensome history.

That history is the subject of two books published just a few months before the Fieldcrest Cannon campaign. Daniel J. Clark’s Like Night and Day cogently analyzes the successful unionization of the textile mills in Henderson, North Carolina in the years between 1943 and 1958. Clark offers a detailed explication of the ways in which the union transformed the worklives of Henderson employees, and then provides a graphic narrative of the deconstruction of the union and the ways in which the very fabric of work and community was torn apart by an intransigent management determined, for reasons that had little to do with economic pragmatism, to regain the power they had wielded in the days before unionization. Timothy J. Minchin’s What Do We Need a Union For? views the Southern textile industry through a lens with a wider angle. Minchin has written a fine history of the TWUA (Textile Workers Union of America) in the South in the decade immediately following World War II. He argues. that the decline in union membership between 1945. 1955, resulted not from the overt hostility of Southern mill workers to unions but from a combination of factors, including strategies used by non-union companies to match union wages and the pragmatic decision reached by many workers to eschew union membership in a decade of relative economic prosperity marked by rapid increases in pay and a parallel escalation of consumer debt. Minchin takes a close look at the TWUA period in the South and analyzes these years as an aberration, a decade out of sync in a history marked by low pay and continuous exploitation. The TWUA’s travail in the years following World War II has relevance beyond the South, Minchin contends, for the waning influence of this union foreshadowed the decline of the American labor movement as a whole in the years after 1970. Both Clark and Minchin pay close attention to the ways in which issues of gender and race have shaped the history of Southern textiles; neither author, however, places these variables at the center of his analysis.

The history of the Southern textile industry is complicated, richly nuanced, perturbing, and ever ripe for revision. Historians who venture into the field, and the numbers are many, are rewarded for their perseverance; they also risk participating in an exercise that resembles a bunch of blindfolded men and women describing the

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specific part of the elephant which they happen to reach out and touch. The works produced by Clark and Minchin reflect both aspects of the fate that awaits scholars of Southern labor history and the history of Southern textiles in particular.

Daniel Clark’s work on Henderson relies heavily on oral evidence collected from workers employed by the Harriet and Henderson mills in this small North Carolina town in the 1940’s and 1950’s. In addition, he interviewed management officials who in a gracious gesture, so unlike their actions when they provoked the 1958 strike, allowed Clark to “burrow in the dank, steamy basement of one of their mills” (p. 2) . There Clark found the equivalent of an historian’s goldmine: old boxes containing the records from “the union years.” Transcripts of union-management meetings, grievance testimony, and arbitration hearings provide the solid underpinings of Clark’s interpretation of the unionization and deunionization of Henderson. Clark presents a strong argument that contrary to conventional wisdom about “business unionism” in the post-war years, the grievance procedure put in place after the signing of contracts in 1943, “empowered mill workers, who were able for the first time to assert themselves without fear of arbitrary retribution” (p. 203). The implications of this empowerment were extraordinary, so extraordinary that in the end management could not continue to grant workers the right to have a voice, no matter how much it would cost them to restore the pre-union status quo.

As Clark tells us, the clearest conflicts between management and workers developed, as one might predict, around issues of workload: “Union members pitted their subjective evidence, based on job experiences, against management’s claims, based on scientific time studies, that workloads could be measured objectively.” It was “aching joints versus slide-rule calculations” (p. 105). At stake were contrasting views of what work should be. Henderson workers sought to balance work with the rest of their lives, from caring for their children, to food preparation to hunting, fishing, and gardening, and all the rest that goes into shaping a life. They did this by working as much as they needed to but not more. They wanted, among other things, “the right to earn LESS money by taking a day or two off each week” (p. 205). One result of this stance was that absenteeism was high, often averaging 25-30 percent (p. 66). Over several decades, particularly in the high-profit years of the 1940’s, management had accomodated this informal system by hiring extra workers, called “utility help,” or more traditionally, spare hands. Unionization had institutionalized what was actually a longstanding practice by Southern industrial workers. Shop stewards dutifully settled hundreds of disputes over workload with an eye toward protecting workers’ health and endurance. Plant supervisors also faithfully negotiated workload challenges, resolving most before formal grievances were written. Company modernization plans were routinely foiled by workload complaints and by union members’ determination to have some control over the work lives. The strike in 1958 brought this central conflict to the fore and to a terribly bitter and painful conclusion.

What is so interesting about Clark’s analysis is the contemporary relevance of the Henderson workers’ case. They were openly grappling with, and often successfully re-solving, the thorny issues of balancing the demands of work and the call of home. This issue was by no means laid to rest in 1958, although management’s destructive victory certainly marked the direction in which American industry was headed on the question of workload and compensatory time issues. As Juliet B. Schor’s The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (1991) so skillfully documents, U.S. workers have rarely been given the choice of not working, even when they were willing to reduce their take-home pay. Current battles over flextime and family leave policies only reinforce this argument. Henderson workers lost their union and their jobs in the 1958 strike. They also lost the right to control their worklives and the struggle for what, as Clark articulated, “They perceived to be a more humane existence” (D. 205).

Timothy Minchin’s history of the TWUA’s initiatives in the South parallel’s Daniel Clark’s work in the mining of rich new sources. Minchin used documents held in private hands in Danville, Virginia, combed the voluminous and now fully catalogued records of Operation Dixie, and tapped the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) records on the Tarboro, North Carolina strike in 1949, as well as conducting extensive oral histories with over

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sixty textile workers and union officials. Minchin offers a different perspective on the TWUA in the South, arguing that the rapid rise in industrial wages between 1941 and 1951 had an especially dramatic impact on textile communities, changing living standards and making it extremely difficult for the union to “sell its message in the South” (p. 2). As a strategy designed to prevent unionization, companies gave union pay and benefits to all workers, union and non-union alike. Consequently, workers did not have to take the considerable risk involved in joining a union in order to reap the material rewards that came with union membership. In contrast to what many historians of pre-World War II Southern textile history have argued, Minchin contends that “the failure of the TWUA during the 1940s and 1950s had less to do with worker culture and employer hostility than with economic and social changes set in motion by World War II” (p. 2). Those changes included workers using newly acquired disposable income to purchase consumer goods on time. Minchin sees workers in the 1940s and 1950s as having “more to lose” than their predecessors in earlier decades, a situation that made them less willing to strike or even to risk supporting a union (p.3). He also sees the TWUA as a seriously factionalized northern-based union that viewed Southern textile workers as undesirable step-children and consequently designed union strategies and tactics that were primarily tailored to protect northern wage levels.

Minchin’s work is particularly valuable because as he analyzes the TWUA across the Southern region after its formation in 1939, he also closely examines how the political, social, and economic systems of the South operated in local textile communities. He provides nuanced case studies of three communities that have not been studied in much depth before now: workers’ struggles in Danville, Tarboro, and Rockingham in the 1940’s and early 1950’s are added to the familiar triptych of Elizabethton, Marion, and Gastonia in 1929. Minchin also provides a useful examination of the rarely mentioned General Strike of 1951, seeing it as a turning point for the TWUA in the South, the juncture at which the union lost its power to set Southern wage patterns. After 1951, wages in the South were established not by unionized workers, especially those in the mills at Danville, as before, but “by nonunion chains such as Burlington, Cannon, Springs, and J.P. Stevens.” As Munchin tells us “This pattern was maintained in ensuing decades (p. 156). Significantly, What Do We Need a Union For? argues that the failure of the 1951 strike destroyed “the ability of many Southern locals to endure another strike” (p. 166). Without being able to threaten a strike, the union was, Minchin argues, “gravely weakened,”for the strike had been the most effective tool Southern textile workers could wield against corporate resistance. With the power of the strike diminished throughout the South, by increasingly sophisticated company tactics and by the growing unwillingness of workers to risk their own relatively fragile financial well being, the TWUA fell prey to internal splits and feuds. The effects of interunion rivalry are demonstrated vividly in Minchin’s examination of the Aleo union plant in Rockingham, North Carolina. It was at Aleo that Minchin found workers who had lost their union after a short strike in 1955, but who were still ardent unionists in 1994, stressing to Minchin that unionism was “in the heart” and claiming that “once workers crossed the line” and experienced freedom, they “rarely went back” (p. 194) . Even, one might add, after the union was eliminated.

Now, as we consider these well-written studies, it is important to ask whether or not these two historians are describing the same animal. Has Clark grabbed the elephant’s tail, and Minchin the trunk? Each describes a set of discreet realities circumscribed by time and place. But Minchin is arguing that the TWUA could not win strikes in the years between 1945 and 1955 because workers had benefitted from union-set higher wages and consequently stood to lose more if they went on strike. And Clark is arguing that Henderson workers put every-

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thing on the line in their strike in 1958, and that “if solidarity could have produced a union victory, these locals would have survived” (p. 200). The Henderson strike was finally lost not because the workers gave up, or because of TWUA failures, but because of management intransigence and willingness to lose significant amounts of money. Minchin is arguing that Southern textile workers spent their available disposable income, buying cars and other consumer goods on the installment plan. But Henderson workers in the same period, Clark contends, were trying to retain the right to not work as many hours a week as management demanded, harking back to a spare hand system used since at least the late nineteenth century. Were textile workers becoming more like other American industrial worekrs, or even like other Southern workers in steel, rubber, and automobilies, in these post-war years? That is not clear. Based on the Henderson case, Southern textile workers were not buying into the American dream as fully as Minchin argues they were. So there are questions that remain unanswered. And both of these studies, like all good books, raise a host of new, significant, and perplexing issues that need further examination. Clearly though, Clark and Minchin have both made major contributions to the field.

Finally, there is a crucial way in which these two books do fit together: when the workers whose stories Timothy J. Minchin has so carefully documented asked “What do we need a union for?” It is important to recognize that one answer to this question rests in Daniel J. Clark’s text: The difference that a union can make is “like night and day.” Clark and Minchin would no doubt agree that unions reinforce in tangible ways worker dignity and respect, and yes, experience has shown that unions bring better wages and working conditions for those in both union and non-union jobs. “Like night and day”–those North Carolina workers who in August voted for (and against) union representation, and all of us who work, need to acknowledge and remember that distinction, both in the past and also in the present.

Mary Frederickson teaches history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In August 1997, she participated in the Southern School for Union Women in Birmingham, Alabama.

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