
          Coalition-Building for a New Labor Climate
          By Johnson, KennyKenny Johnson
          Vol. 9, No. 3, 1987, pp. 8-9
          
          The release last fall of the Southern Labor Institute's report,
The Climate For Workers in the United States, marked
the first comprehensive look at our national economy from the
perspective of those who produce the goods and services that fuel the
economic engine. The document, sharply different from the usual
business climate report, revealed that despite numerical gains in job
growth that lead the nation, and despite recent improvements in state
funding of education, the South has failed to keep up with the rest of
the nation in almost every other way:
          For example, the South has recorded the smallest gains in wages and
per capita income, is home to the largest proportion of working poor,
and maintains the highest incidences of poverty.
          This report was followed in the spring by a conference focusing on
the profound impact the South's changing workplace is having on the
region's working people. Central to both the report and the conference
was an attempt to sharpen the questions and stimulate answers about
economic development in the South and the nation. The framing of such
questions has traditionally been the province of government, chambers
of commerce, and narrow business interests, and the resulting analysis
has typically been slanted toward measurements of a climate pleasing
to the managements of major companies. In the low-wage, low-tax South,
that climate has usually been given good ratings.
          However, it is ever more clear that what is good for big business
is not always good for the South, and the considerable economic growth
that has come to the region has hardly resulted in a comparable
improvement in the lives of most Southern workers. To quote from the
Labor Climate Report "The challenge and the task
that face the South today and in the future is to create jobs with the
income and benefits needed to bring the region's workers above the
poverty level--not just new jobs as in the past, but jobs that will
significantly improve the standard of living for people who work
full-time, year-round."
          With the Report as a starting point, the challenge
of the recent conference was to develop strategies that could help
improve the standard of living in the region. To accomplish this, the
conference brought together leaders from the ranks of organized labor,
local governments, religious organizations, and civil rights
groups. The members of this broad-based and potentially powerful
coalition were asked to re-examine state policies and practices on
economic development.
          In the articles that follow, several of the speakers from the
conference share some of the insight and discussion from the valuable
weekend of strategizing in Atlanta. As the Labor Climate
Report had done, the conference challenged the basic notion
that economic development depends on cheap land, unreasonable tax
concessions to industry, and an unorganized, untrained, and
undereducated labor force willing to work for less than elsewhere.
          The Report attracted widespread publicity both to the concepts it
addressed and to the Southern Labor Institute which produced it. The
conference was an effort to build upon this attention while expanding
participation in the examination of the national economy's current
transformation, and what world economic trends mean to most
citizens.
          One omission of the Report was a lack of specific policy
recommendations--geared to the realities of the 1980's and the
1990's--of what the states should be doing to improve the standard of
living. The conference helped in this respect by bringing together
leaders who may only rarely concern themselves with long-term
development policy and who, for the most part, may not readily see the
links between their interests in economic development and the
interests of others. Labor unions, religious denominations, civil
rights organizations, and local governments tend to see only their own
interests, occasionally becoming involved with state economic
development policies that may affect them. They may never recognize
the need to combine forces. This spring's conference was a chance to
unify a large number of organizations and agencies in the South whose
common interests have not yet been combined for common activities.
          One of the first steps of the conference was to provide a common
knowledge base about problems, issues, past practices, and the status
of the South today.
          Then, discussion was sought. While unemployment, for example, was a
major issue for labor unions and for black community leaders,
representatives of the two groups approached the issue differently. A
local leader from the Alabama Black Belt talked about the desperate
need for jobs for his community. He was interested in job creation--
whether those jobs were low-wage, unionized or not. But labor unions
saw a shrinking job market that they felt a need to protect. The
conference goal was to get the partici-

pants to understand these
differences and to focus on common needs rather than accenting
differences.
          An important aspect of developing this mutual understanding rests
in the ability to get community leaders to understand that at the
minimum wage full-time workers can still be stuck at the poverty
level, unable to afford those things one usually thinks of as the
rewards of working for a living--such things as decent housing,
educating one's children, and providing the family with adequate
medical care. These things labor unions, too, viewed as important. In
short, the conference brought to the same table people who do not
ordinarily meet to discuss economic issues and policies.
          The need now is to bring that same kind of regional discussion to
the state and local level. As an example, the Southern Labor Institute
is now working in Birmingham to bring unions together with the black
community. The unions are interested in organizing health care
workers, and, for the first time, prior to taking that kind of action,
these labor leaders are sitting down with black leaders. The message
of labor in Birmingham is that the service industry, and health care
in particular, remains one of the fastest growing sectors in the city,
increasingly becoming a larger percentage of the total job base. Black
workers make up a disproportionate share of the orderlies, nursing
assistants, maintenance workers, and other service workers who are
finding full-time employment in this industry. However, the wage scale
on these jobs is doing very little to improve their overall standard
of living.
          The low wages of service industries are especially significant to
female heads of households, who, with their children, are the fastest
growing poverty group in the country. On a purely economic basis, a
single female with two children often cannot afford to take a
minimum-wage job. The cost of transportation, day care, and housing
costs exceeds what she can earn.
          Cities like Birmingham have to do better in attracting jobs that
pay better wages, and their workforces in the existing service jobs
must be organized to increase wages and deal with other issues related
to the workplace--issues like health care and job security. It is in
the interest of black community leaders to begin forming coalitions
with unions who are organizing the workplace.
          The mission of the Southern Labor Institute and the Southern
Regional Council is to sustain and accelerate this unification. The
Council is currently studying the temporary workforce issue, which is
probably the most serious threat to the workplace that has come along
in a long while. Employers are moving away from permanent workers to
whom they have to pay not only some sensible salaries but also
benefits, and they are moving instead to a temporary workforce with
lower pay and no job benefits. At one time, these temporary workers
were basically day laborers, but temporary workers are now moving into
skilled job categories.
          These are some of the issues of the 1990's that were on the minds
of the participants at the recent SLI conference, of which
excepts are offered in the following articles.
          
            Kenny Johnson is director of the Southern Labor
institute. Copies of The Climate for Workers in the United
States are available for $20 each from the SRC, 60 Walton St.,
N.W., Atlanta, GA 30303-2199. An abridged version of the Labor Climate
Report is contained in Southern Changes,
Octember/November 1986, which is available for
$5.
          
        