[U].S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., traveled to Canton, Mississippi, on Saturday to support autoworkers fighting to unionize at a Nissan plant there.
“The great middle class of this country has been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking,” Sanders said in his speech. “In this state of Mississippi, in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, 30 percent of the beautiful children are living in poverty. In America, half of elder workers have nothing in the bank as they prepare for retirement. In this country, moms and dads can’t afford quality child care for their kids.”
Mississippi is the poorest state in the union, with 22 percent of its residents living below the poverty line. In Canton, poverty levels exceed the state average.
The Canton plant, which opened in 2004, was wooed into the state with $1.3 billion in tax subsidies, and good jobs were promised. More than a decade later, workers say they are routinely mistreated and are looking to unionize in hopes of improving working conditions.
In an op-ed last week in the Clarion Ledger, Nissan worker Robin Moore described the company as having broken promises.
“Back when the plant opened people in Mississippi had high hopes that Nissan would bring good jobs to the impoverished and overwhelmingly black community of Canton,” Moore wrote. “And I for one am grateful for my job. But in the years since, things have gone down. Nissan has driven down pay, eliminated benefits and imposed punishing production schedules while skimping on basic health and safety equipment.”
The Nissan plant has repeatedly been cited for workplace violations. In early February, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration levied more than $20,000 in fines at the plant, including for an incident in which an inadequately trained worker lost three fingers to a conveyor belt.
The company also has been found to have participated in inappropriate anti-union activity.
In 2015, the National Labor Relations Board found that Nissan had unlawfully threatened to shutter the plant if workers unionized.
A 2013 report from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said Nissan routinely engaged in other problematic activity to disband union efforts, including a so-called Big Brother campaign to play anti-union messages on the plant’s television monitors. The report also alleged that union representatives were not allowed to make pitches on company property.
In the NAACP report, workers said managers would often intimidate those trying to unionize, saying, “You are lucky to have this job, and if you don’t like it, there’s the door.”
Workers filed a new complaint Thursday to the labor board alleging Nissan ordered workers to cease union leafleting in a plant parking lot.
According to Sanders’ office, 6.6 percent of Mississippi workers are labor union members, which is roughly half the national rate. The Canton plant workers are hoping to join the United Auto Workers union, which organized the Saturday event.
Speaking to thousands in Canton, Sanders called the workers’ fight “a struggle for dignity,” and he vigorously defended unionization, which often results in higher wages and better benefits for union workers.
“One worker walking into a multibillionaire national corporation has zero power,” Sanders said. “But when workers stand together and they negotiate contracts for decent wages, for decent working conditions, for decent health care, you have power.”
Sanders also said the record profits Nissan had taken in over the past years should trickle down to front-line workers.
“We say to Nissan, ‘It’s great that your CEO makes $9 million, it’s great you made $6 billion in profit. But you know what, share some of that wealth with your workers,’” Sanders said.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union membership has been cut in half since the early 1980s. In 2016, New York was the only state with a union member rate above 20 percent. (In Vermont, 13 percent of workers were represented by unions in 2016.)
When he ran for president, Sanders attracted strong support from rank-and-file union members. And while Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton won more union endorsements in the general election, now-President Donald Trump won more union households.
Sanders’ Saturday speech represented the first public push to win over union members who may have supported Trump. And according to him, unionization in Canton could also goose more union organizing across the country.
“If we can here in Nissan, you will give a tremendous bolt of confidence to working people all over this country,” Sanders said. “Because it is not just the workers here in Canton who are being exploited. And if you can stand up to a powerful multinational company in Canton, Mississippi, workers all over this country are going to say, ‘We can do it too.’”
