Autoworkers, the Fight for $15 campaign and teachers’ activism are proving organized labour can still make a difference Fifty thousand teachers dressed in red closed down Phoenix, Arizona, on Friday – the latest in a series of strikes by educators across America.
The media is abuzz with the strikes, finally waking up to the giant forces that seem to be reshaping the labour landscape in America.
Media attention was also unusually high when I covered the 110-mile March for Education by striking teachers across Oklahoma earlier this month. Local news helicopters buzzed overhead and CNN – fresh off covering the West Virginia teachers’ strike – covered the story in depth.
But where were they last year during the historic March on Mississippi against Nissan, led by Senator Bernie Sanders and Danny Glover?
Last March, as more than 5,000 union supporters marched down the highway singing, “We are ready, we are ready, Nissan”, a young civil rights lawyer from Memphis noticed my tattered yellow-and-white mesh “Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild” hat and asked if I was the only member of the national press there that day. I didn’t encounter any other.
Indeed, from 2015 to 2017, when I lived in Chattanooga and then Louisville, and journeyed more than 20,000 miles around the south in a rusted-out 2003 Dodge Neon, I was the only full-time labor reporter in the south working for my labor news co-op, Payday Report, which I founded with a settlement I received after being fired from Politico, where I had led a union drive.
Since I moved back to my hometown of Pittsburgh, there hasn’t been a single full-time labour reporter in the south, the country’s fastest-growing economic region and the site of many new auto plants with many workers making poverty wages.
Perhaps that explains why so much of the media has initially seemed shocked by the strikes in southern states such as Oklahoma, Kentucky, and West Virginia.
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