A Global Race to the Bottom Puts Progress at Risk

We were educated to leave New Orleans, not to stay there. We were trained to avoid unions, not to join them. We were taught to do both in pursuit of progress.

It was understood in our upbringing in the 1950s through the 1970s that New Orleans held little promise for its black offspring, regardless of education, talent or achievement outside the fields of sports and entertainment. Similarly, it was taught that unions existed primarily to channel blacks into the most undesirable labor or to exclude them altogether from skilled, lucrative occupations, such as plumbing.

Skilled black tradesmen who worked in the New Orleans of the Jim Crow era did so mainly at the behest of white clients seeking to escape higher fees charged by white union workers; or they serviced black clients who simply couldn't afford to pay more.

And so we Brown children, members of what passed for the New Orleans black middle class, were encouraged by parents, teachers and clerics to get as much education as possible and leave, which is what five of the six of us did.

We were not alone.

Black and white working-class people in pursuit of more opportunity and higher pay left, too. They found better jobs and futures for themselves and their families in the big automotive and steel plants of the North.

Much to the joy of Southern black migrants, more often abused than protected by organized labor at home, there was the discovery of equity in the big industrial labor groups of the North, such as the United Auto Workers and the United Steelworkers of America.

That equity, manifested in equal pay for equal work and enhanced by organized labor's 1960s push for gender and racial equality, led to a broad expansion of America's middle class. Families once consigned to lower-class status by poor education, poorly paying jobs and gender and race discrimination began earning enough money to dream, to send their children to college, to move up the class ladder.

But that progress now seems unsustainable -- in many ways put at risk by the success that the talent and labor migration from the Deep South that set it in motion.

The region that once used race to divide and weaken unions and that once employed statutory discrimination to suppress educational and salary opportunities for women and minorities has, over the past two decades, become attractive to global companies seeking less-expensive, preferably nonunion labor.

That includes nearly all foreign-owned automobile manufacturers, most of which have union-represented employees at home, such as the Confederation of Japanese Automobile Unions. But unlike the American car companies, which have agreements to take the UAW with them wherever they set up shop stateside, most foreign car companies doing business here have escaped organized labor by establishing assembly, supplier and other facilities in southern states that historically have worked to weaken unions and keep them at bay.

From a corporate perspective, it was a smart thing to do.

The South's historic hostility toward unions and the UAW's repeatedly demonstrated ineptitude in organizing the plants of foreign automobile manufacturers (other than a few, such as the Mazda facility in Flat Rock, Mich., which were grandfathered into joint-venture agreements with domestic companies such as Ford) have helped to give foreign rivals a decided production-cost advantage -- chiefly via lower wages and less-expensive benefit packages. That amounts to an estimated $2,000 per car in favor of the foreign car companies, according Harbour Consulting of Troy, Mich.

But I've yet to run into any employee of Nissan in Mississippi, Toyota in Kentucky or Hyundai in Alabama -- be he or she black or white -- who objects to giving his or her employer a production-cost advantage by accepting less pay. I think I understand why.

The South has changed in fundamental ways since my departure in 1970. The racism that remains is social, as opposed to statutory. The law says blacks and whites should have equal opportunity and pay, and that is what all of the foreign-owned car companies provide.

Hyundai's pay package in Alabama might not be as high as Mercedes-Benz's pay in the same state, or as high as Nissan's in Mississippi or Tennessee. But it's a lot higher than the sub-minimum-wage, minimum-wage, or barely-above-minimum-wage salaries many of those workers were getting before the nonunion, foreign car manufacturers arrived.

In my recent travels through places such as Montgomery, Ala., where Hyundai operates a sprawling assembly and supplier campus and through Canton, Miss., where Nissan runs a gargantuan truck plant, I witnessed a profound sense of gratitude and pride among those workers, as well as lots of fear and self-interest.

They were grateful to have good jobs and proud to finally earn enough money to entertain middle-class dreams. Their lower-than-UAW pay didn't matter, because they didn't have the expense of paying union dues. And there was more than a little boasting about not having had to "run away from the South" to earn a living -- like me and my New Orleans siblings.

But the fear that the foreign car companies that have embraced them will drop them for cheaper labor elsewhere was ever-present in my visits with southern friends and family. They have reason to worry. Foreign and domestic car companies since the mid-1980s have been on an aggressive hunt for less-expensive labor wherever they can find it.

Native European companies and U.S.-based automobile manufacturers operating in Europe have traded more expensive workers in heavily unionized western portions of the region for less-expensive labor in the weaker union enclaves of Eastern Europe. Many big Asian, European and U.S. car companies have set up assembly plants in job-starved, wage-poor Mexico. In terms of compensation for factory and skilled labor in the automobile industry, it is a global race to the bottom.

In the United States, that is the underlying cause for conservative opposition to a federal rescue of Detroit's automobile companies. It matters not that the American manufacturers have demonstrably improved product quality and manufacturing efficiencies, or that the UAW has accepted major pay concessions. And it doesn't matter that their current problems stem from a nationally collapsed financial market and the debilitating absence of effective federal industrial and energy policies.

Conservatives view the present economic downturn as a chance to finish off a moribund UAW -- to kill it once and for all by bankrupting the companies that employ its members. Or to render it functionally ineffective by forcing it to accept the lower compensation offered by its foreign nonunion rivals in the United States.

Given the current economic milieu and the UAW's historical inability to organize Detroit's rivals, the conservatives' anti-union strategy probably will succeed. But I find no joy in that prospect, which is powered by the same ideology that caused me and my siblings to flee a chronically underpaying, opportunity-starved, racially and class-divided South in the first place.