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“I will cripple you,” said International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) chief negotiator Harold Daggett.
He wasn’t wrong. A strike would have shut down large swaths of the U.S. economy and put the nation’s supply chain at a dead stop.
Had the strike continued, thousands of South Carolina jobs would have been affected. All told, South Carolina’s ports have an $87 billion annual impact. South Carolina ports support one out of every nine jobs, with wages around 23 percent higher than the average labor wages in the state.
Take a look also at the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers strike at Boeing in Washington State. Over 30,000 workers on the west coast have been striking for nearly a month, with no resolution in sight.
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These strikes can be severely damaging to the economy. And they are often not in the best interest of the workers. Last year’s strike by the United Auto Workers (UAW) in Michigan, for example, resulted in a half-billion dollars in lost and unrecoverable wages. And since that strike, the Big Three automakers have announced 18,000 layoffs.
Now the UAW is targeting South Carolina’s autoworkers – hoping to ensnare the 75,000 employees in South Carolina’s bustling auto manufacturing industry. Workers should keep in mind that Mercedes-Benz workers in Vance, Alabama recently rejected the union because they believed they could do a better job representing themselves without the “help” of the UAW. And in New Jersey, workers at a Nissan facility took the unusual step of voting to decertify the UAW because they felt it was doing a poor job negotiating on their behalf.
Let’s hope South Carolina workers demonstrate a similar level of skepticism when the UAW comes knocking.
Among the more troubling features of a union organizing campaign – and a tactic the UAW will almost certainly try to deploy here in South Carolina – is to pressure employers into accepting so-called neutrality agreements. These agreements require employers to maintain a neutral posture during an organizing campaign. They would also prevent auto manufacturers from doing the kinds of education sessions that The (Charleston, S.C.) Post and Courier recently highlighted Boeing has been doing.
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RELATED | STRIKE ENDS, AUTOMATION DEBATE CONTINUES
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As a result, workers are denied the right to offer their fully informed consent – never learning about excessive union executive compensation or past union scandals.
Speaking of which, current UAW President Shawn Fain is currently under investigation by a federal watchdog for allegedly retaliating against other union officials because they refused to take actions they say would have financially benefited Fain’s fiancé and her sister. This calls into question the value of union dues that are automatically deducted from union members’ paychecks.
What are employees actually getting for these dues?
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As it turns out, the union is under no obligation to use these funds to help the workers themselves. The most likely scenario is that money from South Carolina workers’ paychecks would be wired out of state and used for non-advocacy union spending.
A host of liberal politicians in Washington – including Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders from Vermont – have already written a letter to international automakers’ executives pressuring them to abide by neutrality agreements, falsely suggesting they are a condition of securing Inflation Reduction Act investments in EV manufacturing.
It’s very clear that the UAW is wrong for South Carolina workers and the tactics by Big Labor bosses would be detrimental to our state economy.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
Matt Leber represents District 116 in the South Carolina House of Representatives.
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5 comments
More anti-union lies by the bought and paid-for SCGOP. Anything to convince gullible SC wage earners that they should trust their employers to look out for them. That they don’t need to stand up for themselves; and they don’t need better wages and better benefits, because that could lower company profits and which is bad for them.
I grew up in rural SC, in an unusual situation. My dad worked in a unionized factory. My uncles, my grandfather, and many of my cousins worked in the non-unionized textile industry. Despite similar working hours, my father made about 25% more than my other family members working for non-union facilities. My father had a significant retirement pension plan and my other family members did not. My father had 4 weeks of vacation a year, while my other family members had 2 to 3, one of which had to be taken over the 4th of July. If my father did not take all of his vacation each year he could roll it over or get paid; not so with my family working in the textile industry. My father had a better, less expensive, health care plan. My father had appeal rights if the factory wanted to fire him. All this was attributable to his union and the union contract.
So did this put my father’s factory out of business? No. In fact when the textile industry shut down and moved to China, with the blessings of the SCGOP, my father’s factory remained in business. He retired from that factory, long after the death of the SC textile industry. Without a college degree, he was even able to move into management before he retired. After working for the same factory for 35 years, my father never once regretted being in a union.
Unions are good for middle-class Americans, especially in states like SC where the middle class is poorer, less educated, and less healthy than in most of the rest of our nation. Americans have minimum wages, 40-hour work weeks, overtime pay, employer health plans, reasonable vacations, etc. etc, all thanks to unions.
So when bought and paid for politicians, try to tell you, that you don’t need Unions; that you get nothing for your money, and that your employer can be trusted to take care of you; just know that is BS and they are telling you that because they is what they have been paid to tell you.
Working-class union households hold nearly four times as much median wealth ($201,240) as the typical working-class nonunion household ($52,221), suggesting that membership vastly increases wealth for working-class families.
Greedy bastards who won’t pay their workers are threatening workers’ livelihoods. Strikes aren’t necessary if workers are allowed to work with dignity, keep the value of their labor, have their needs met, and have their safety prioritized.
Solidarity to fellow laborers.
Unions have their time and place. Some good, some bad. I have worked both sides of the fence. My personal experience was with a union that protected the jobs of those who could barely do the job. The irony is this op ed, it is written by a politician who hasn’t had much more experience than military and govt work…..
Unionized workers almost always have higher wages and benefits, along with better working conditions and job security. SC ranks near the bottom in percentage of its workforce that is unionized, as well as near the bottom in per capita wages. There is a correlation here. Voters in the lowcountry should reject Leber for lots of reasons and anti-worker is just one of those.