In a test of labor’s ability to expand its reach in the South, workers at a Nissan plant in Mississippi overwhelmingly rejected a bid to unionize, an election that the union quickly criticized.
Out of roughly 3,500 employees at the Canton-based plant who voted Thursday and Friday, more than 60 percent opposed the union. It was an emphatic coda to a yearslong organizing effort underwritten by the United Automobile Workers, which has been repeatedly frustrated in its efforts to organize auto plants in the region.
The union accused the company of waging an unusually aggressive fight against the organizing effort. “Perhaps recognizing they couldn’t keep their workers from joining our union based on the facts, Nissan and its anti-worker allies ran a vicious campaign against its own work force that was comprised of intense scare tactics, misinformation and intimidation,” Dennis Williams, the U.A.W. president, said in a statement after the vote.
The company said its employees had spoken and urged the U.A.W. to “respect and abide by their decision and cease their efforts to divide our Nissan family.”
The election campaign at the plant, where a large majority of workers are African-American, frequently took on racial overtones. Some employees alleged that white supervisors dispensed special treatment to white subordinates, a charge the company emphatically denied.
Union’s Loss Is the South’s Loss, Too
Workers at a Nissan plant in Canton, Miss., picked a bird in the hand when they recently voted against forming a union, and that’s understandable. Veteran workers, who generally opposed the union, make $26 an hour. That is less than the nearly $30 an hour for similar autoworkers in unions at the major American carmakers — but almost twice the median hourly wage in Mississippi.
This, in a nutshell, is what has made it so difficult to organize workers in the South. With employers and anti-union politicians telling them that unionization would threaten their jobs, Southern workers choose to stick with what they have rather than risk sharing the fate of their poorly paid neighbors. And while the threat does not square with reality, since major car plants worldwide are typically unionized, a majority of workers are not willing to call this bluff and organize for better wages and conditions.
