Hurricanes put a damper on Labor Day celebrations along the Gulf Coast in the fall of 2008. The years before that had rained on organized labor’s parade across the South more generally. Yet as 2009 opened, the ground in south Alabama looked, at least on paper, unusually fertile for union organizers.
Consider what was being built. The ThyssenKrupp steel and stainless complex near Calvert was a $4.2 billion project projected to require 29,000 construction jobs, employ 2,700 people permanently and generate some 50,000 related jobs. Aircraft manufacturing at the Brookley industrial complex was a live possibility, and perhaps a likelihood. The Austal shipyard on the downtown waterfront was running at full throttle.
Thousands of industrial jobs were arriving in a region that had once been among the most heavily unionized in the South. Would the unions arrive with them?
The management lawyer’s answer
Veteran labor relations attorney Frank McRight, who typically represents management, was skeptical.
McRight is a familiar name in Alabama politics. Twenty-five years earlier, as the Democratic nominee, he lost a hard-fought contest to Sonny Callahan for the First District seat in the U.S. House being vacated by Jack Edwards. He later ran, as a Republican, for the U.S. Senate seat won in 1996 by Jeff Sessions.
He began, notably, with a defense of the institution he spends his professional life opposing. “The reality is organized labor played a vital role in the development of our country,” he said. In the 1930s, workers in production jobs “really didn’t have a lot of money to live on,” and collective bargaining gave them leverage that put money into the economy — “probably one of the factors that got us out of the Depression.”
What changed, in his telling, was the law. Congress enacted wage protections, protections against discriminatory practices and rules on unsafe working conditions. “The success in getting remedial statutes in place at the same time diminished the justification for employees turning to organized labor,” he said. Employers, meanwhile, learned that competitive wages and benefits were the price of skilled workers — and that treating employees well was also the surest way to avoid a union.
The numbers
The result, McRight said, was that only about 7.5 percent of private-sector employees nationwide who could be unionized were unionized. In Alabama the figure was roughly 5 percent. In the 1940s it had reached 35 or 36 percent. Public employees were now more likely to be unionized than private ones.
He pointed to the United Auto Workers, which maintained a local in Mobile at Teledyne Continental. In 1980 the UAW counted 1.5 million dues-paying members; by 2009 the number was fewer than 500,000 — a loss of two-thirds. It was no coincidence, he said, that the UAW had built halls near Honda in Lincoln and Mercedes in Vance.
Organizers had twice been rejected at Austal, he noted.
How Alabama’s union country disappeared
McRight’s account of the decline was a short economic history of the coast. Alabama was once probably the most unionized state in the South, owing to the steel plants around Birmingham but also to substantial representation in south Alabama — on the docks, in the paper mills, at the aircraft engine plants. Nearly all commercial and industrial construction was done by union contractors, and much chemical and factory work in Mobile was organized.
Then, sometime in the late 1970s, it turned. Globalization restructured manufacturing. International Paper and Scott left the business locally. Teledyne’s engine production shrank. Construction went open shop. Longshoremen represented by the ILA were replaced by non-union contractors and workers. Alabama Dry Dock gave way to non-union shipbuilding and repair companies.
The card-check fight
Much of the interview turned on the Employee Free Choice Act, the bill that would have allowed a union to be certified once a majority of workers signed authorization cards, without a secret-ballot election. It had passed the House and been filibustered successfully in the Senate. Barack Obama, days from taking office, had said he would sign it; John McCain had opposed it.
McRight’s objection was procedural and blunt. Workers sign cards for many reasons, he argued — including simply to end the pressure. “A lot of people in the workplace just simply don’t have the verbal skills to stand up to a guy or gal who is an organizer who has been taught not to take no for an answer.” The bill’s second piece troubled him as much: employers without a contract after 60 or 90 days would face mandatory arbitration, with government-appointed arbitrators dictating terms binding for two years. “It is hard for someone like me,” he said, “to see much fairness in legislation that takes away the right to a secret ballot election.”
His closing argument
Job security, McRight maintained, does not come from a contract. “Look around the state and you see plants shut down and that’s hardly job security. Job security always comes when successful companies are able to operate profitably and efficiently.”
He rejected the label of adversary. “I’m not anti-union and most employers are not anti-union,” he said. “They are pro-employee, not anti-union.”
It was, of course, one side of an argument — the management side, offered by a lawyer who has made his career on it. This was the first in a series of conversations on organized labor in south Alabama; management and labor voices were to follow.