Southern Workers Prepare For An Uphill Battle Under Trump

But the incoming Trump administration raises an even more serious challenge. 

It poses possible threats to workers’ and unions’ recent gains, and ultimately to organized labor’s precarious footing, unions and labor advocates say, citing Trump’s past record and his support from anti-union hard-liners like Elon Musk.

At stake, they explain, are U.S. Department of Labor rulings, like the one that expanded overtime pay to 4.3 million workers and which has been challenged in the courts by businesses, and a recent National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decision that barred companies from holding mandatory anti-union meetings.

From immigrant workers to child laborers to gig workers, the fear is that the Trump administration will weaken protections or bar new ones for them. Plus, there’s concern that Trump will fill the NLRB board with anti-union activists and stack the federal courts with judges hostile to workers.

“The AFL-CIO will work with anyone who wants to do right by workers, but we will reject and defeat any attempt to roll back the rights and protections that working people have won with decades of blood, sweat, and tears,” AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler said in a recent statement.

The last time labor tried an organizing effort like the one Harris belongs to was Operation Dixie in 1946.

At the end of WWII, organized labor was full of hope when the Congress of the Industrial Organizations (CIO), which was built by organizing industrial workers, created Operation Dixie. There were some initial gains. 

But the effort was flawed, experts say. Though it was largely focused on Black workers, it didn’t directly confront the South’s racism, fearing it would alienate white workers. Nor was it able to enlist the support of major unions or develop a strategy geared to the South.

Southern businesses, right-wing politicians and groups and the Ku Klux Klan saw it as a drive to elevate Black workers and reacted fiercely. Black workers and organizers were attacked. Cities passed anti-union laws. Amid growing red-baiting, union organizers were labeled communists. 

It lingered for several years and collapsed in 1953, signing up few workers. No other major regional effort was attempted again until recently. The result: The South has remained largely union free. 

Today five Southern states, including South Carolina, have no minimum wages, and 10 had the nation’s lowest unemployment rates. Unions provide coverage for less than 10% of the workers across the South, and South Carolina had the nation’s lowest rate of union density, 2.3% in 2023.

Amid such statistics, Harris is a fervent supporter of a campaign by the Union of Southern Service Workers, or USSW, a start-up union created by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) with ambitious goals. The union is scratching for a foothold among often-ignored, low-wage workers, many of whom are Black or Latino, in the South — long in the grip of right-wing anti-union politics.

Two months after the Waffle House strike, Harris was still buzzed about what she had done and what the union meant to her. Several workers had joined the USSW. She had talked at union rallies and gotten news media attention. She was making a difference.

“I don’t just think, I know I have hope because the union is not going to stop. We are demanding that OSHA does their job, and we are holding South Carolina accountable to get their attention,” she said.

The union had made part of its campaign a challenge to South Carolina’s OSHA in April 2023 when it accused the agency of racial discrimination by way of failing to monitor and investigate disproportionately Black workplaces. It called on the U.S. Justice Department to investigate alleged civil rights abuses and on the federal OSHA to bring the state OSHA agency in line with federal requirements.

Pointing to the failures of state plans is not new. 

For more than a decade, Arizona was OSHA’s problem child, a state that didn’t cooperate despite the government’s pleas. 

A 2021 OSHA report, for example, listed numerous old and new problems with the state program. Among them, the agency was criticized for failing to carry out half of its planned inspections, understaffing key positions and failing to file citations against two companies where workers died because the agency had not acted in time.

Finally in April 2022, OSHA announced that it would begin the process of taking over the state plan. In a powerful critique of the state’s effort, the government agency said:

“OSHA has grown increasingly concerned that actions by the Arizona state OSHA plan suggest the state is either unable or unwilling to maintain its commitment to provide a program for worker safety and health protection.”

The government announcement cited maximum penalty levels well below the national requirement, the state’s failure to set up occupational safety and health standards and its refusal to comply with the government’s Covid-19 Healthcare Emergency Temporary Standard, mandating that workplaces with 100 employees or more require workers to be vaccinated or wear masks on the job.

Among its resistance to the agency’s rules, Arizona has vowed to stand its ground and fight the Covid workplace rule. South Carolina and Utah had also delayed implementing the Covid rule. But ultimately, they relented.

“The lack of a public process in the issuing of these regulations is not that different from taxation without representation,” then Arizona governor Doug Ducey, an outspoken conservative Republican, had declared in 2021, explaining the state’s resistance to the Covid rule. Likewise, former Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich sued the federal government to block the enforcement of the standard and declared at the time that ​“the government doesn’t get to be your nanny, and it’s certainly not your doctor.”

That made South Carolina the number one place where OSHA’s rules weren’t being followed.

But South Carolina went beyond other uncooperative states and sued the federal government, saying it didn’t have to follow all of the rules.

It launched a legal battle in August 2022, seeking to block the government from forcing it to increase penalties against businesses in its state OSHA plan. A federal court judge tossed out the suit, but the state filed a similar suit in 2023 that’s still in the courts.

The average penalty for a South Carolina firm with 26 to 100 workers from 2017 to 2022 was $1,843 which is 52% lower than the federal average, according to OSHA, even though state plans are required to be at least as effective as federal regulations. 

Labor experts have long complained that low penalties incentivize firms to pay fines while allowing unsafe conditions to persist. They’re considered slaps on the wrists when workers suffer serious injuries.

In December 2023, the union upped its challenge and asked the government to revoke South Carolina’s plan and let federal OSHA take over. The USSW argued that South Carolina fails to protect its workers, citing government reports about the state’s continued inability to meet OSHA regulations. But the government has never revoked a state plan, though it has long had problems getting some to abide by federal OSHA regulations. Nor has there ever been a complaint, until recently, alleging that a state OSHA plan violates U.S. civil rights laws by discriminating against workers, says Daniel Rosenthal, an attorney for SEIU.

Whether state plans live up to federal OSHA regulations is not just a paperwork issue. When state plans don’t live up to their responsibilities, workers’ health and safety are at stake, experts explain.

And as federal OSHA officials conceded in response to questions from In These Times, out of 29 state plans — seven of which exclude private sector workers — several have ignored the federal law that they need to meet the minimum standards set by federal OSHA. 

For example, seven states have not changed the maximum and minimum penalties as required by law. And 19 states have not met the government’s benchmark for the number of health and safety officers, according to federal OSHA.

Because states’ health and safety programs had failed, the federal government stepped in and set up OSHA more than 50 years ago, said Eric Frumin, a longtime public health expert and former safety director for the Strategic Organizing Center, a group of three unions that work on labor organizing campaigns. 

But OSHA’s leverage ​“is very limited,” despite failed political efforts to give it more power, he adds. OSHA doesn’t have an easy route, he explains, to ​“force a state plan to change. That’s what’s missing.” That was a key complaint in a 2013 report by the Government Accountability Office. OSHA’s inability to step in promptly to help fix trouble state plans, can allow ​“problems to continue for years,” the agency said.

Citing the USSW’s lawsuit against South Carolina OSHA, Jordan Barab, a former deputy assistant secretary for OSHA, and a prolific advocate for workers’ safety, said last year that the agency’s failure to crack down on the state plan, ​“has allowed the disparities in enforcement to grow increasingly wide.” 

“The main tool OSHA has is the death penalty — taking away the state’s approval to run a state program,” Barab wrote in an email to In These Times recently. ​“But not only is that process lengthy and complicated, it would saddle an under-resourced federal agency with even more obligations,” he added. 

“In addition, if the feds take over a state plan, public employees — who are required to be covered by state plans — would lose their right to a safe workplace in those states.”

Replying to a request from In These Times to describe what action federal OSHA will take against South Carolina, an OSHA official said nobody was available to talk but sent an e-mail that read: 

“In circumstances where OSHA has identified deficiencies in the South Carolina State Plan program, OSHA has and/​or will continue to use the mechanism(s) the agency deems most appropriate to address the particular deficiency.”

In a 2024 update to its reporting on South Carolina, federal OSHA said that most of the state’s previous complaints weren’t adequately addressed and that it was reviewing the union’s appeal to revoke the state program. 

Replying to the federal update, South Carolina OSHA showed little compromise. It ripped apart the government report line by line, saying the findings were ​“misleading and devoid of meaningful information.”

Asked about the USSW’s complaints, an official from South Carolina’s Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation replied in an email that ​“South Carolina OSHA is a proud state plan that has worked diligently for over 50 years to serve the employees and employers” of the state. 

But the official declined to comment on the issues raised regarding South Carolina’s OSHA, nor its lawsuit against the government, saying the issues involve ongoing litigation.

During President Trump’s first term in office, government worker safety efforts suffered from shrunken staffs, a failure to set protective rules in the midst of the Covid crisis and repeated attempts to cut funding for key worker-safety and health programs, according to unions, labor advocates and safety experts.

He annually sought to slash the budgets for coal mine enforcement, and NIOSH — the research arm for the nation’s worker safety and health efforts. He also tried to eliminate the workers’ safety and health training program for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Chemical Safety Board. Congress, however, blocked these efforts.

In April 2019, for example, the number of inspectors for OSHA fell to 870, the lowest for the agency since its beginning in 1970.

As the Covid virus began to sweep the nation, hitting many factories and offices, OSHA ​“was largely absent from workplaces where it has the authority and responsibility to enforce workplace safety laws,” said the AFL-CIO. Unions had called for OSHA to issue enforceable rules as the pandemic raged, but the agency only issued recommendations for action.

A stinging criticism of the OSHA’s failure to protect workers during the Covid crisis came from the agency’s Office of Inspector General (OIG). It suggested that the government’s failure to issue required steps for companies, and the drop in on-site inspections may have led to workers’ deaths and illnesses.

“We are concerned that since most OSHA inspections were done remotely during the pandemic, hazards may go unidentified and unabated longer, with employees being more vulnerable to hazardous risk exposure while working,” said the agency’s inspector general report.

Indeed, in a region, where unions have been treated as a disease that must be dealt with by right-to-work laws and other anti-union obstacles, the two-year-old USSW effort comes just as Southern leaders seem more determined than ever to stay union-free.

In April, the governors of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, jointly declared their opposition to ​“special interests looking to come into our state and threaten our jobs and the values we live by.”

They were replying to vows by the UAW to organize across the South after its April victory at Volkswagen’s Tennessee plant, its first at a Southern auto plant.

Some Southern states have also passed new laws to back up their anti-union defenses.

In May, Alabama governor Kay Ivey signed a law blocking companies from receiving economic support from the state if they allow workers to hold a card check election, rather than a secret ballot, where they vote on forming a union by signing a card in public. Anti-union groups often believe that unions wield greater power in card check elections: They claim workers can be coerced by colleagues if they vote in the open. Labor advocates, however, say companies can suppress union drives by intimidating voters and holding company meetings before a secret ballot.

Georgia and Tennessee have recently passed similar laws, which resemble a sample law floated by ALEC, a right-wing think tank. The strategy is new, and some legal experts question its legality.

In South Carolina, which has benefitted from a wave of newly opened foreign plants, making it the state with the highest concentration of foreign-owned enterprises in 2023. Gov. Henry McMaster has made clear his hope that unions stay away.

In his annual State of the State speech this year, the governor bragged about a business boom and criticized labor unions.

“One thing we do not need is more labor unions. We have gotten where we are without them, and we do not need them now. We are a right-to-work state. We have had the lowest union membership in the country in recent years.” Only 2.3 percent of the state’s workers belonged to a union in 2023.

The right-to-work movement was born in the South in the late 1940s and spread to Southern states amid the organizing drive of Operation Dixie, and fears of Black workers rising up. It was anti-union drive meant to weaken unions by allowing workers at union workplaces to not pay dues. The goal was to deprive unions of the money needed to fund their operations. Today 26 states have right-to-work laws. Still, Ben Carroll, organizing director for the Southern Workers Assembly (SWA), a small grassroots organization, is hopeful for organized labor’s ability to increase its presence in the South. But that depends on several conditions, says Carroll who lives in Durham, N.C.

One is whether organized labor backs the drive. ​“The labor movement has not made a commitment to the region,” he says. ​“Nor have they been willing to confront the racism that is woven in so many parts of the South and used by companies to keep workers divided.” 

And it also depends on whether groups like the Southern Workers Assembly, and the USSW can ​“educate and motivate” and build networks of workers willing to join a union, he says. These efforts wouldn’t directly bargain for workers but would open the doors for unions to ultimately do so.

But building such networks takes time, he adds. Organized labor must confront a heap of obstacles, the simplest of which is a belief among some workers that unions are illegal in the South.

What makes the USSW’s struggle especially difficult is that it is going after the vast underbelly of the Southern economy. 

Its goal is to improve conditions for service workers, most of them Black and Latino, working in low-wage, high-turnover jobs — workers who say they have long lacked fair treatment on the job because of the absence of union protections. 

The core of the union’s civil rights complaint against South Carolina OSHA, for example, is that the state has largely ignored the places where Black workers are concentrated.

Black workers make up 41% of the employees in state’s food or beverage, general merchandise, food services and warehouse and storage jobs but 27% of the state’s workforce, according to the union. 

And while the state completed only two planned inspections over four years at these workplaces, the union pointed out that Georgia did 105, North Carolina, 62 and Tennessee, 34.

The union’s drive also seeks to change the reality for low-wage workers who have suffered from years of inequality.

Statistics about Black people in South Carolina confirm Harris’ dismay about her job prospects. It is a state where the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and among the 20 most common occupations, 70% were paid less than $20 per hour in 2021. 

For Harris, workplace inequities in the South have been a harsh reality.

At the Waffle House, Harris only earned $3 an hour in wages before tips yet the tips were often small. In South Carolina, the minimum for tipped wages is $2.13 an hour.

She needed to earn more, so the 21-year-old worker subbed at a nearby high school whenever they needed her. (She had one year of college, allowing her to do that job.)

She also served dinners at an assisted living home. And to save money, she lived with her mother, splitting costs with her mom

That’s the way things are if you are poor and Black in South Carolina, she thought.

But Harris finally got fed up and quit working at the Waffle House in August last year. 

“I had to quit that job to take care of my mental and physical being,” she explained recently. She had talked with an OSHA inspector about her complaint but never heard back from him again, she added. An OSHA investigation led to no action against the company.

A Georgia official for Waffle House, which employs 40,000 workers in 25 states at its iconic 24-hour restaurants, told In These Times in an email that the company would not discuss the situation at the restaurant in Columbia, S.C., that triggered Harris’ complaint. 

Daniel Rosenthal, an attorney for the union, said that it had filed several complaints with South Carolina OSHA about workers exposed to similar high-heat conditions at other companies. But ​“South Carolina didn’t seem to take the complaints as serious,” he said.

Nowadays Harris’ work has changed but not much for the better. Money still doesn’t come easy.

She works as a dishwasher at the assisted living facility where she previously was a server, and she helps a friend clean and restore houses. The local high school no longer needs her.

Her job hunting for low-income fast-food positions has been difficult since she gained notoriety for speaking up so publicly for the USSW. ​“Most jobs I go to, they say, ​‘I recognize you for doing that union stuff.’ So, they either are too scared to hire me, or they tell me I’m too qualified,” she says.

At times, she has gotten down over her own hard luck in finding a job and the situation faced by those she has worked with. She thinks about the cook at the Waffle House, where she worked, who had to put in 70 hours per week to earn enough to feed his family and pay rent. 

“We are still working off the laws of the Jim Crow South,” Harris said. ​“We’ve come far but not far enough.”

She recently studied phlebotomy, or blood testing, and hopes to get her license soon and find a good-paying job.

And she clings to her hopes, recalling especially the day over a year ago when she decided to strike, and several other workers joined her. 

It felt, she says, ​“kind of magical.”