By Erica Iheme
Recently, we had the pleasure of hosting Acting Deputy Secretary of Labor Julie Su in Alabama as part of her Good Jobs Summer Tour. The visit came after workers at New Flyer’s Anniston, AL plant unionized with IUE-CWA and ratified its first contract.
Julie Su has long been a champion of our community benefits agreements, like our CBA with New Flyer signed in 2022 that paved the way for the workers’ successful unionization. From an Alabama Political Reporter article about Su’s visit: “One of the pillars of the Department of Labor’s Good Jobs Initiative, which the Good Jobs Summer Tour is meant to promote, is community benefits agreements like the one that helped New Flyer workers unionize. In fact, New Flyer is specifically used as an example of a successful community benefits agreement on the Department of Labor’s website.”
In another article, Su said, “I am here because Alabama matters. I am here because Birmingham matters. We know that these kinds of jobs can be the jobs and must be the jobs of the future if we do our work together, and if we do it right.”
Clearly, word is spreading about what we’re doing. As United Steelworkers organizer Alex Perkins once said: “The South got something to say.”
Another recent article in The Nation that talks about our long-game approach to organizing shows that centering worker engagement and education is clearly shifting the anti-union tide in the South:
[New Flyer worker Ryan] Masters didn’t want to sign a union card, at first. Growing up in Alabama, he had always heard that unions were “greedy.” But after a couple of weeks of talking to organizers and his pro-union co-workers, “I figured out that a union is not an outside organization,” he said. “It’s just a coalition of the workers sticking together.” Once he decided to support the campaign, Masters became an active organizer himself, answering his co-workers’ questions about the union. “That’s how I was able to get educated,” he told me. “By talking to organizers and finding out.” He told them what he heard that made him change his mind. “The union is a sense of community in my mind. It’s a lot of brothers and sisters together, helping one another.”
It’s hard not to get depressed about the state of our country at times, and we still have so much work to do to undo the harms of worker repression and institutional racism. But slowly, the word is catching on that workers in this country deserve better—and if things are changing in the region known for the “Southern discount” on labor costs, you better believe they’re going to change for workers in the rest of the country.