Eco-Collapse Hasn’t Happened Yet, But You Can See It Coming

Degrowth Is the Only Sane Survival Plan.

By Stan CoxMay 1, 2024

Source: Tom Dispatch


Something must be up. Otherwise, why would scientists keep sending us those scary warnings? There has been a steady stream of them in the past few years, including “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency” (signed by 15,000 of them), “Scientists’ Warning Against the Society of Waste,” “Scientists’ Warning of an Imperiled Ocean,” “Scientists’ Warning on Technology,” “Scientists’ Warning on Affluence,” “Climate Change and the Threat to Civilization,” and even “The Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future.”

Clearly, there’s big trouble ahead and we won’t be able to say that no one saw it coming. In fact, a warning of ecological calamity that made headlines more than 50 years ago is looking all too frighteningly prescient right now.

In 1972, a group of MIT scientists published a book, The Limits to Growth, based on computer simulations of the world economy from 1900 to 2100. It plotted out trajectories for the Earth’s and humanity’s vital signs, based on several scenarios. Even so long ago, those researchers were already searching for policy paths that might circumvent the planet’s ecological limits and so avoid economic or even civilizational collapse. In every scenario, though, their simulated future world economies eventually ran into limits — resource depletion, pollution, crop failures — that triggered declines in industrial output, food production, and population.

In what they called “business-as-usual” scenarios, the level of human activity grew for decades, only to peak and eventually plummet toward collapse (even in ones that included rapid efficiency improvements). In contrast, when they used a no-growth scenario, the global economy and population declined but didn’t collapse. Instead, industrial and food production both leveled off on lower but steady-state paths.
Growth and Its Limits

Why should we even be interested in half-century-old simulations carried out on clunky, ancient mainframe computers? The answer: because we’re now living out those very simulations. The Limits to Growth analysis forecast that, with business-as-usual, production would grow for five decades before hitting its peak sometime in the last half of the 2020s (here we come!). Then decline would set in. And sure enough, we now have scientists across a range of disciplines issuing warnings that we’re perilously close to exactly that turnaround point.

This year, a simulation using an updated version of The Limits to Growth model showed industrial production peaking just about now, while food production, too, could hit a peak soon. Like the 1972 original, this updated analysis foresees distinct declines on the other side of those peaks. As the authors caution, although the precise trajectory of decline remains unpredictable, they are confident that “the excessive consumption of resources… is depleting reserves to the point where the system is no longer sustainable.” Their concluding remarks are even more chilling:


“As a society, we have to admit that, despite 50 years of knowledge about the dynamics of the collapse of our life support systems, we have failed to initiate a systematic change to prevent this collapse. It is becoming increasingly clear that, despite technological advances, the change needed to put us on a different trajectory will also require a change in belief systems, mindsets, and the way we organize our society.”

What is America doing today to break out of such a doomed trajectory and into a more sustainable one? The answer, sadly, is nothing, or rather, worse than nothing. On climate, for example, the most important immediate need is to end the burning of fossil fuels as soon as possible, something not even being considered by Washington policymakers in the country that hit record oil production and record natural gas exports in 2023. Even a quarter-century from now, wind and solar energy sources together are forecast to account for only about one-third of U.S. electricity generation, with 56% of it still being supplied by gas, coal, and nuclear power.

Now, it appears that rising electrical demand will delay the transition away from gas and coal even further. According to a recent report by the Washington Post’s Evan Halper, power utilities in Georgia, Kansas, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, and a host of other states are feeling the proverbial heat from exploding electricity consumption. Analysts in Georgia have, for instance, increased by 17-fold their estimate of the generation capacity that the state will require 10 years from now.

Such an imbalance between energy demand and supply is anything but unprecedented and the source of the problem is obvious. As successful as American industry has been in developing new technologies for generating energy, it has been even more successful at developing new products that consume energy. Much of the current rise in demand, for instance, can be attributed to companies working on artificial intelligence (AI) and other power-hungry computational activities. The usual suspects — Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft — have been on data-center building sprees, as have many other outfits, especially cryptocurrency-mining operations.

Northern Virginia is currently home to 300 football-field-sized data centers, with more on the way, and there’s already a shortage of locally generated electricity. To keep those servers humming, electric utilities will be crisscrossing the state with hundreds of miles of new transmission lines plugged into four coal-fired power stations in West Virginia and Maryland. Plans were once in the works to shutter those plants. Now, they’ll be kept operating indefinitely. The result: millions more tons of carbon dioxide, sulfur, and nitrous oxides released into the atmosphere annually.

And the digital world’s energy appetite will only grow. The research firm SemiAnalysis estimates that if Google were to deploy generative AI in response to every Internet search request, a half-million advanced data servers consuming 30 billion kilowatt hours annually — the equivalent of Ireland’s national electricity consumption — would be required. (For comparison, Google’s total electricity consumption now is “only” about 18 billion kilowatt hours.)

How are Google and Microsoft planning to weather an energy crisis significantly of their own making? They certainly won’t back off their plans to provide ever more new services that hardly anyone asked for (one of which, AI, according to its own top developers, could even bring about the collapse of civilization before climate change gets the chance). Rather, reports Halper, those tech giants are “hoping that energy-intensive industrial operations can ultimately be powered by small nuclear plants on-site.” Oh, great.
It’s the Wealth, Stupid

The problem doesn’t lie solely with data servers. During 2021–2022, companies announced plans to construct 155 new factories in the United States, many of them to produce electric vehicles, data-processing equipment, and other products guaranteed to suck from the electrical grid for years to come. The broader trend toward the “electrification of everything” will keep lots more fossil-fueled power plants running long past their expiration dates. In December 2023, the firm GridStrategies reported that planners have almost doubled their forecast for the expansion of the national grid — probably an underestimate, they noted, given the rise in demand for charging electric vehicles, producing fuel for hydrogen-powered vehicles, and running heat pumps and induction stoves in millions more American homes. Meanwhile, increasingly hot summers could trigger a 30%-60% increase in power use for air-conditioning.

In short, this sort of indefinite expansion of the U.S. and global economy into the distant future is doomed to fail, but not before it’s crippled our ecological and social systems. In its 2024 Global Resources Outlook, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) reported that humanity’s annual consumption of physical resources had grown more than threefold in the half-century since The Limits to Growth was published. Indeed, resource extraction is now rising faster than the Human Development Index, a standard measure of well-being. In other words, overextraction and overproduction while producing staggering wealth aren’t benefiting the rest of us.

UNEP stressed that the need to deeply curtail extraction and consumption applies mainly to wealthy nations and the affluent classes globally. It noted that high-income countries, the United States among them, consume six times the mass of material resources per person as low-income ones. The disparity in per-person climate impacts is even greater, a tenfold difference between rich and poor. In other words, wealth and climate impact are inextricably linked. The share of recent global growth in gross domestic product captured by the most affluent 1% of households was nearly twice as large as the share that trickled down to the other 99%. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the 1% also produced wildly disproportionate quantities of greenhouse gas emissions.

In addition, societies with a wide rich-poor divide have higher rates of homicide, imprisonment, infant mortality, obesity, drug abuse, and teenage pregnancy, according to British epidemiology professors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. In a March commentary for Nature, they wrote, “Greater equality will reduce unhealthy and excess consumption, and will increase the solidarity and cohesion that are needed to make societies more adaptable in the face of climate and other emergencies.” In addition, their research shows that more egalitarian societies have significantly less severe impacts on nature. The higher the degree of inequality, the poorer the performance when it comes to air pollution, waste recycling, and carbon emissions.

The message is clear: curtailing ecological breakdown while improving humanity’s quality of life requires banishing the material extravagance of the world’s richest people, especially the growing crew of global billionaires. That would, however, have to be part of a much broader effort to rid affluent societies of the systemic overextraction and overproduction that threaten to be our global undoing.
Phase Out and Degrow

Old-fashioned computer simulations and present-day realities are, it seems, speaking to us in unison, warning that civilization itself is in danger of collapse. Growth — whether expressed as more dollars accumulated, more tons of material stuff produced, more carbon burned, or more wastes emitted — is coming to an end. The only question is: Will it happen as a collapse of society, or could the reversal of material growth be undertaken rationally in ways that would avoid a descent into a Mad Max-style conflict of all against all?

Increasing numbers of advocates for the latter path are working under the banner of “degrowth.” In his 2018 book Degrowth, Giorgos Kallis described it as “a trajectory where the ‘throughput’ (energy, materials and waste flows) of an economy decreases while welfare, or well-being, improves” in a fashion both “non-exploitative and radically egalitarian.”

In the past few years, the degrowth movement has — how else to put it? — grown, and quickly, too. Once a subject for a handful of mainly European academics, it’s become a broader movement challenging the injustices of capitalism and “green growth.” It’s the subject of hundreds of articles in academic journals, including the new Degrowth Journal, and a stack of books (including the captivating Who’s Afraid of Degrowth?). A 2023 survey of 789 climate researchers found almost three-quarters of them favoring degrowth or no-growth over green growth.

In a 2022 Nature article, eight degrowth scholars listed policies they believe should guide affluent societies in the future. Those include reducing less-necessary material production and energy consumption, converting to workers’ ownership, shortening working hours, improving and universalizing public services, redistributing economic power, and prioritizing grassroots social and political movements.

Could such policies ever become a reality in the United States, and if so, how? Clearly, the private businesses that dominate our economy would never tolerate policies aimed at shrinking material production or their profit margins (nor would the federal government we know today). Nevertheless, if more enlightened lawmakers and policymakers ever took control (hard as that may be to imagine), they might indeed head off the societal and environmental collapses now distinctly underway. The most effective pressure points for doing so would, I suspect, be the oil and gas wells and coal mines that now power such destruction.

As a start — unbelievable as it might seem in our present world — Washington would have to nationalize the fossil-fuel industry and put a nationwide, no-matter-what cap on the number of barrels of oil, cubic feet of gas, and tons of coal allowed out of the ground and into the economy, with that cap ratcheting briskly downward year by year. The buildup of wind, solar, and other non-fossil energy would, of course, be unable to keep pace with such a speedy suppression of fuel supplies. So, America would have to go on an energy diet, while the production of unnecessary, wasteful goods and services would have to be quickly reduced.

And yet the government would need to ensure that the economy continued to satisfy everyone’s most basic needs. That would require a comprehensive industrial policy directing energy and material resources ever more toward the production of essential goods and services. Such policies would rule out AI, bitcoin, and other energy gluttons that exist only to generate wealth for the few while undermining humanity’s prospects for a decent future. Meanwhile, price controls would be needed to ensure that all households had enough electricity and fuel.

My colleague Larry Edwards and I have been arguing for years that such a framework, what we’ve called “Cap and Adapt” is a necessity not for some distant future, but now. Similar federal policies for adapting to material resource limitations worked well in World War II-era America. Unfortunately, we live — to say the least — in a very different political world today. (Just ask one of this country’s 756 billionaires!) If there was ever a chance that a national industrial policy, price controls, and rationing could, as in the 1940s, be passed into law, that chance has sadly vanished — at least for the near future.

Fortunately, though, the international situation looks brighter. A burgeoning, vigorous movement is pushing for the two initial actions that would be essential to avoid the worst of climate chaos and societal collapse: the nationalization of, and a rapid phaseout of, fossil fuels in the affluent world. Those could turn out to be humanity’s first steps toward degrowth and a truly livable future. But the world would need to act fast.

And no excuses, okay? We’ve been given fair warning.

Stan Cox began his career in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and is now the Ecosphere Studies Research Fellow at the Land Institute. Cox is the author of Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing, Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer) and Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine.

In Coastal British Columbia, the Haida Get Their Land Back

By Serena Renner

April 30, 2024

Source: Hakai Magazine


Image by Felipe Fittipaldi, Province of British Columbia



Twenty years ago, Geoff Plant, the then attorney general of British Columbia, made an offer to the Haida Nation. Many West Coast First Nations, including the Haida, had never signed treaties with the Canadian government ceding their traditional lands or resources, and Plant was trying to revive the faltering process of treaty making. He wanted to smooth over relations with Indigenous peoples, but he also wanted to help the province extract more resources from Indigenous lands. To entice the Haida—a nation known throughout Canada for its political savviness and resolve—he had what he thought was a bold bargaining chip.

Like many other officials, Plant viewed the BC government as the clear landlord of provincial lands, including those of the Haida Gwaii archipelago—10,000 square kilometers of forested islands located roughly 650 kilometers northwest of Vancouver, British Columbia, and the Haida’s home for at least the past 13,000 years.

So here was Plant’s pitch: the BC government would give the Haida control of 20 percent of their lands, but that would require the nation dropping a title case it had recently filed with the BC Supreme Court. Title refers to the inherent right to own and manage Indigenous territories based on traditional use and occupation. The Haida maintained that their territory included all of the land area in the archipelago, as well as the surrounding airspace, seabed, and marine waters.

The Haida saw Plant’s offer to the door.

“Why would we give up 80 percent of our land to get 20?” said Gidansda (Guujaaw), the then president of the Council of the Haida Nation, to media at the time. “This case is about respect for the Earth and each other. It is about culture, and it is about life.”

The Haida’s steadfastness paid off. Although Haida leaders have kept a potential court case in their back pocket all these years for leverage, they ultimately haven’t needed it. In April 2024, the Haida Nation and the province of British Columbia announced the Gaayhllxid/ Gíihlagalgang “Rising Tide” Haida Title Lands Agreement. In it, the BC government formally recognizes Haida ownership of all the lands of Haida Gwaii. This is the first time in Canadian history that the colonial government has recognized Indigenous title across an entire terrestrial territory, and it’s the first time this kind of recognition has occurred outside of the courts. Experts say it marks a new path toward Indigenous reconciliation.

“It’s groundbreaking, really,” says John Borrows, a member of the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation and an expert in Indigenous law at the University of Toronto in Ontario. Although Indigenous title is widely considered an inherent right that doesn’t need to be granted by an external government or court, Borrows says, First Nations struggle to enforce it without legal backing. And so far, only two courts in Canada have recognized Indigenous title.

In 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld title for the Tŝilhqot’in Nation in the interior of British Columbia, and just last week, in mid-April 2024, the BC Supreme Court affirmed it for the coastal Nuchatlaht First Nation. However, neither ruling recognizes title across an entire traditional territory, and since the 1970s, Canadian courts have urged federal and provincial governments to resolve such differences through negotiation. Now, with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and growing public support on their side, the Haida and the province have finally done just that.

Gaagwiis (Jason Alsop), president of the Council of the Haida Nation, says the agreement ends a dark chapter in his nation’s history with the provincial government and provides a fair starting point for real reconciliation.

“What it signifies,” says Gaagwiis, “is a new foundation based on Yah’guudang, or respect, of recognizing this inherent title that preexisted [European contact] and will continue to exist as the basis going forward. And, essentially, the province kind of ceding their claim to this land.”

The new agreement will soon be enshrined into BC law, naming the Haida as the rightful owners of all 200-plus islands of Haida Gwaii, which they have been stewarding for millennia. After a two-year transition period, the Haida Nation will manage the 98 percent of its archipelago that was formerly considered Crown land, including protected areas and other forested lands. Having more of a say over the logging industry—which has clear-cut over two-thirds of the islands’ old-growth forest since 1950—has been a focus of the Haida’s title fight since the very beginning. The agreement won’t affect private property or municipal and provincial services, from highways to hospitals, which will continue to be regulated by the province.

“The idea that each legal system is recognizing the other one is a turning point,” Borrows says. “It’s also radically democratic and participatory.” This marks a new kind of relationship, which can draw on the best of Haida and Western influences, he adds. And unlike a treaty or court decision, which are more set in stone, this approach requires ongoing negotiation that can adapt and evolve with the times.

“It can keep people at the table, learning and working together with one another and trying to find that path to mutuality,” Borrows says.

The federal government of Canada is notably absent from the agreement for now. Both the province and the Haida Nation say their federal partners were delayed by procedural constraints but plan to sign on eventually. (The Feds were part of two other agreements—a reconciliation framework and a recognition of Haida governance—that led up to this title recognition.)

Gaagwiis says the Haida are also still negotiating with Canada over their rights to control the waters surrounding Haida Gwaii, which fall under federal government jurisdiction. These waters—teeming with shellfish, herring, sea cucumbers, five types of salmon, and more than 20 species of whales, dolphins, and porpoises—are not included in the land agreement but are paramount to the coastal First Nation and are a key part of its overall title declaration.

If marine areas or any other outstanding issues, such as financial compensation for past damages, can’t be sorted out through negotiation, the courts are still a fallback. The Haida Nation’s 20-year-old title claim, which hasn’t been judged in court, could still be heard as early as 2026.

While Indigenous people in Canada and abroad are hailing this land title agreement as inspiring and precedent setting, Murray Rankin, British Columbia’s minister of Indigenous relations, says the Haida’s unique circumstances made the process more successful.

“Haida Gwaii is not downtown Vancouver,” Rankin says. It’s a remote territory where the provincial government controlled the vast majority of the land, which is mainly protected and unprotected forest, as opposed to an urban environment comprised mostly of private properties. The population of Haida Gwaii is 45 percent Haida. The Council of the Haida Nation, which represents the Haida people, has a 20-year-old constitution, agreements with every local municipality, and widespread support from non-Indigenous residents. And they’ve been on better terms with the provincial government since 2009, when they hashed out the Kunst’aa guu-Kunst’aayah Reconciliation Protocol (which translates to “the beginning”).

Of course, they also have a strong historical claim to the archipelago, complete with extensive archaeological evidence. And, unlike some other Indigenous communities whose territories overlap, the Haida Nation doesn’t have to contend with competing land claims. A 2002 decision from the BC Court of Appeal on a forestry lawsuit called these facts “inescapable.”

All of this has created ideal conditions for negotiation that may elude other Indigenous communities, such as Cowichan Nation on the south coast of British Columbia, which is currently fighting the province in court over its own title claim. The province says it prefers negotiation, however. That’s in part because court rulings are not only costly but often opaque, Rankin says. “I hope [the Haida agreement] is a step toward other kinds of positive resolutions,” he adds.

Perhaps unexpectedly, the provincial government’s marked shift is a welcome one to Geoff Plant, the former attorney general who once offered the Haida 20 percent of their land. Plant now works for a Vancouver-based law firm and spends a lot of time in meeting rooms trying to convince business people of the benefits of acknowledging Indigenous title; he says doing so breeds better engagement, harmony, and certainty. And he now recognizes how flawed the government’s former approach was, which he compares to building and defending a wall between the province—which he once referred to as the landlord—and First Nations. “It’s clearer in hindsight what’s wrong with that,” Plant says.

Indigenous leaders in Canada and around the world have helped society reckon with the injustices Indigenous communities have faced, and power, public opinion, and legal precedent have all shifted in response. “We should see that, collectively, as an opportunity to build a better society,” Plant says. “Let’s figure out how to work constructively within that world rather than pretend that it doesn’t exist.”

The provincial wall may not have fully crumbled, but the tide is rising against it. And at least on Haida Gwaii, a colonial government is no longer lord of the land.

May Day May Have Been Obliterated from US History, But It’s Legacy Continues

By CJ Polychroniou

May 1, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


May 1st is International Workers’ Day and was established as such in celebration of the struggle for the introduction of the eight-hour workday and in memory of Chicago’s Haymarket Affair, which took place in 1886.

May 1st is celebrated in over 160 countries with large-scale marches and protests as workers across the globe continue to fight for better working conditions, fair wages, and other labor rights. International Workers’ Day, however, is not celebrated in the US and has in fact been practically erased from historical memory. But this shouldn’t be surprising since US capitalism operates on the basis of a brutal economy where maximization of profit takes priority over everything else, including the environment and even human lives.

Indeed, the US has a notorious record when it comes to worker rights. The country has the most violent and bloody history of labor relations in the advanced industrialized world, according to labor historians. Subsequently, unionization has always faced an uphill battle as corporations are allowed to engage in widespread union-busting practices through manipulation or violation of federal labor law. The recent activities of Amazon and Starbucks speak volumes of the anti-union mentality that pervades most US corporations. Accordingly, unionization in the US has been on decline for decades even though the majority of Americans see this development as a bad thing.

The backlash against unionization and worker rights in general in the US also takes place against the backdrop of an insidious ideological framework in which it has been regarded as a self-evident truth that individuals are responsible for their own fate and that government should not interfere with the free market out of concern for social and economic inequalities.

Social Darwinism first appeared in US political and social thought in the mid-1860s, as historian Richard Hofstadter showed in his brilliant work Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915, but it would be a gross mistake to think that it ever went away. The conservative counterrevolution launched by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s and refined by Bill Clinton in the early1990s aimed at bringing back the loathsome idea that the government should not interfere in the “survival of the fittest” by helping the weak and the poor. Progressive economic ideas have been on the whole an anathema to the US political establishment and violence against labor militancy has always been the norm for almost all of the country’s political history.

Long before the movement for an eight-hour workday in the US, which can be largely attributed to the influx of European immigrants mainly from Italy and Germany, radicalism had set foot across a number of post-colonial states. Rhode Island, often referred to as the Rogue Island, had one of the most radical economic policies on revolutionary debt, which was wildly popular with farmers and common folks in general, and experimented with the idea of radical democracy. At approximately the same time, Shays’ rebellion in Massachusetts was also about money, debts, poverty, and democracy. Naturally, the elite in both states pulled out all stops to put an end to radicalism, and the pattern of suppressing popular demands has somehow survived in US politics across time.

The pattern of suppressing social and political movements from below continued well into modern times. The Red Scare, climaxed in the late 1910s on account of the Russian revolution and the rise of labor strikes and then renewed with the anti-communist campaign of the 1940s, played a crucial role in the establishment’s fervent dedication to crushing radicalism in the US and putting an end to challenges against capitalism.

In light of this, it is nothing short of a shame that May Day has been all but forgotten in US political culture even though the day traces its origins to the fight of American laborers for a shorter workday.

Last year, after marching on May Day with thousands of other people in the streets of Dublin, one of the questions that was posed to me was how could it be that International Workers’ Day is not celebrated in the US. I am still struggling to come up with a convincing explanation, as may be evident from this essay, but Gore Vidal was not off the mark when he said, “we are the United States of Amnesia.”

Nonetheless, the US labor movement has not yet been defeated and is surely not dead. In spite of the bloody suppression and the constant intimidation over many decades, the US labor movement has made its presence felt on numerous historic occasions, from the Battle of Cripple Creek in 1894 and the 1892 Homestead Strike in Pennsylvania to being behind the historic 1963 march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and continues doing so down to this day. Scores of victories for the working class were achieved last year—and all against prevailing odds. Moreover, in 2023, labor strikes in the US jumped to a 23-year high and some of the largest labor disputes in the history of the US were also recorded last year.

So, while May Day may have been formally obliterated by the powers that be from US public awareness, the labor movement is still alive and kicking. Even a small victory is still a victory, though time will tell of the historic significance of each step forward. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that the unionists, socialists, and anarchists that made Chicago in 1886 the center of the national movement for the eight-hour workday had foreseen what the impact of their actions would be in the struggle of the international labor movement for democracy, better wages, safer working conditions, and freedom of speech. All these social rights have been amplified over time, though much remains to be accomplished and the struggle continues.

But this is all the more reason why we must not forget—and indeed celebrate every year with marches and protests—May 1st.




CJ Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author, and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Currently, his main research interests are in U.S. politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He has published scores of books and over one thousand articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (2017); Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors, 2020); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021).

How Southern Autoworkers Can Reverse Decades of Job Quality Decline

BY MARC BAYARD - DEV WAKELEY

MAY 3, 2024

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Photo by Victor Sutty

The United Auto Workers recently scored the largest union victory in decades in the South. Their success at a Tennessee Volkswagen plant could be a turning point for labor in a region long known for governmental hostility to unions.

The next test will be a UAW election scheduled for the week of May 13 at a Mercedes-Benz factory in Alabama, a state that has attracted so much auto investment it has earned the nickname “the Detroit of the South.”

If the roughly 5,000 Mercedes workers vote to unionize, the ripple effects could empower workers nationwide.

For decades, Southern states have pursued “low-road” development strategies, luring investors with massive public subsidies and repressive labor policies. This has pitted workers across the country against each other, undercutting everyone’s ability to secure fair compensation.

Alabama has spent $1.6 billion to woo Mercedes, along with Toyota, Hyundai, and Honda. All these foreign companies’ operations in the South are non-union, in contrast to the unionized Big Three of Ford, GM, and Stellantis.

This foreign investment has created thousands of Alabama jobs — but with weak worker protections, the state remains one of the nation’s poorest. And while these companies have enjoyed rising corporate profits, they have left workers behind.

An in-depth report by the nonprofit group Alabama Arise found that inflation-adjusted average pay for the state’s autoworkers has dropped by 11 percent over the past 20 years to $64,682. Meanwhile, CEO pay stands at $13.9 million at Mercedes and $6.9 million at Toyota.

The foreign-owned firms’ payrolls also reflect Alabama’s long history of racial discrimination, with Black and Latino workers earning substantially less than their white counterparts. By contrast, the Economic Policy Institute has found that union workers make 10.1 percent more on average than non-union workers.

The benefits are even greater for workers of color. Unionized Black workers make 13.1 percent more than non-union Black workers in comparable jobs — and Latino union members make 18.8 percent more than non-union Latino workers.

Equitable pay practices boost local economies by putting more money in workers’ pockets for groceries, housing, and other goods and services from local businesses. And that’s good for families of every color.

But Alabama Governor Kay Ivey doesn’t see things that way. Before the UAW vote in Tennessee, she joined GOP governors from Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas to discourage VW workers from voting yes with unfounded threats of mass layoffs.

When 73 percent of those autoworkers voted for the UAW, it was a strong rebuke of the region’s low-road, anti-worker model. So corporate lobbyists in the region have enlisted state legislators and cabinet officials in a sustained campaign to blunt organizing momentum.

How will the election turn out in Alabama?

A new poll indicates that 52 percent of residents in this deep-red state support the autoworkers’ union drive, while just 21 percent are opposed. This echoes a 2022 poll commissioned by the Institute for Policy Studies in Jefferson County, Alabama, where workers were attempting to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer. That survey showed nearly two-thirds support.

While the Alabama Amazon campaign fell short in the face of aggressive anti-union tactics, increased public approval of unions is a testament to many years of community and labor organizing.

The fact that a large majority of workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant signed petitions earlier this year in support of the election is encouraging. We need a New South economic structure based on fairness and equity. Organized labor is an essential partner in that mission.

Marc Bayard directs the Black Worker Initiative at the Institute for Policy Studies. Dev Wakeley is Alabama Arise’s worker policy advocate.

In Relay Race to Organize the South,

Volkswagen Workers Pass the Baton to

Mercedes Workers

By Luis Feliz León

May 1, 2024

Source: Labor Notes


Mercedes-Benz workers in Alabama are slated to vote in May on whether to join the United Auto Workers. Photo: UA


Michael Göbel, president and CEO of Mercedes-Benz U.S. International, stepped down from his post yesterday, according to a video message that workers were shown.

Göbel had groused in an April captive-audience meeting about a worker’s claim that Mercedes had come for the “Alabama discount”: low wages. His departure is another win for Mercedes-Benz workers, who already scored pay bumps and an end to wage tiers—and they haven’t even voted on the union yet.

The company and Alabama politicians are ramping up their anti-union campaign as an election draws near. The 5,200 Mercedes workers at a factory complex and electric battery plant outside Tuscaloosa will vote May 13-16 on whether to join the United Auto Workers, with a vote count May 17.

They’re following close on the heels of Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who notched a historic victory April 19—the first auto plant election win for the UAW in the South since the 1940s.

The VW vote was a blowout: 2,628 yes to 985 no, with 84 percent turnout. The National Labor Relations Board certified the results April 30, meaning VW is legally required to begin bargaining with the union.

BOSSES WAKE UP

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey and the Business Council of Alabama have been vociferous in their opposition to the UAW’s new drives. Ivey said that unions would attack “the Alabama model for economic success.”

The BCA expresses the will of the state’s most powerful corporations, including Alabama’s biggest utility company, health care provider, and bank, according to an analysis by Derek Seidman for Truthout.

Meanwhile auto workers at Hyundai in Montgomery have signed up 30 percent of their 4,000 co-workers in another ambitious drive to unionize.

“Gov. Ivey has been on the phone with both the leaders of Mercedes and Hyundai, and has said, ‘If there are issues, you need to fix this,’” said Alabama Commerce Secretary Ellen McNair last week on a TV talk show.

She said the union drives have “gotten the attention of all manufacturers across all states. It really is a wakeup to listen to your employees.”

FIGHT TO GATES OF HELL

If the Alabama workers vote yes, workers in South Carolina might stand up next: at Mercedes in Charleston, Volvo in Ridgeville, and BMW in Greer.

The 1,600 workers at that Mercedes plant produce Sprinter vans. At Volvo, 1,500 build S60 sedans and luxury SUVs, including the fully electric Volvo EX90. Volvo is owned by the Chinese multinational automotive company Geely, but it is still run by the Swedes.

The Greer plant is the largest BMW factory in the world, employing 11,000 workers. Workers there assemble the BMW X series and XM SUVs, vehicles, and coupes.

South Carolina also hosts numerous European companies, such as Michelin, which supplies BMW with tires, BASF, a supplier of emissions control technologies, and the world’s largest auto supplier, Bosch, which makes fuel injection systems.

The UAW will face a tough fight in the state, where only 1.7 percent of working people are union members. South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster said in January, referencing a dispute with dock workers, that he would “fight” unions “to the gates of hell.”

MOMENTUM FROM BIG 3 STRIKES

The UAW is riding a wave of momentum after winning landmark contracts at the Big 3 automakers last year. Workers in the South especially paid attention to these lucrative gains.

“We could see what other auto workers were making compared to what we were making,” said Yolanda Peoples, a member of the organizing committee on the Volkswagen engine assembly line.

Production workers at VW were starting at $23 per hour and topping out just above $32, compared to the $43 that UAW production workers at Ford’s nearby Spring Hill assembly plant will make by 2028 under the new contract.

In a vain attempt to head off a union drive, Volkswagen boosted wages 11 percent to match the immediate raise UAW members received at Ford. Peoples saw her pay jump from $29 to $32.

The UAW spent $152 million on strike benefits for workers in 2023, compared to the $116 million the entire labor movement spent in 2022, according to union researcher Chris Bohner.

But even in the Stand-Up Strike, the UAW didn’t win everything on its list of demands. Mercedes is leaning into the union’s failure to win pensions. “Is the UAW promising you a pension if you vote for them? They made the same promise at the Big 3 and then failed to deliver,” reads a flyer the company is distributing across the plant.

DENSITY IS DESTINY

In a Facebook Live video on April 23, UAW President Shawn Fain described the union’s dues investment in organizing the South as part of its strategy to keep building power to win those demands next time.

“This ain’t charity; this is power,” he said. “Density is destiny. In 2028, we’re going back to the table with Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis. If we want the leverage to win back our pensions and retirement health care, we need to organize the unorganized.”

“Their strategy has been to frame the organizing campaign as over a whole industry, not just against individual companies,” said labor organizer and writer Dave Kamper. “This allows them, for example, to have members who work for one automaker go campaign for workers at another company, and their messaging doesn’t try to pit workers from one company against others. It truly is a working-class strategy, appealing to class solidarity over company loyalty.”

The big nonunion automakers are strategic targets for the union. But crucial to the success at VW and the momentum of the other drives so far is that they’re also what organizers call “hot shops”—that is, workers are enthusiastic to organize.

“A top-down campaign can’t conjure the militant desire for a union out of nothing,” said Richard Yeselson, a writer about labor and a former union campaign strategist. This is where he has seen many other “strategic” union drives fall flat. Success “requires a fighting workforce to attract a union campaign—not a union campaign to contrive a fighting workforce.”

MASSIVE ORGANIZING COMMITTEES

At VW, “we didn’t think things would happen so fast,” said worker Victor Vaughn.

The organizing committee recruited 300 co-workers as election captains. “We have well over 90 percent coverage within the plant, every position, every line,” Vaughn said. “At that point we knew, ‘Yes, we’re where we need to be.’”

The workers got support from UAW organizers from the West Coast’s Region 6 in building a highly representative and well-trained committee. The organizers emphasized recruiting a broad range of leaders. They made it easier for workers to get involved—simply by agreeing to speak to their co-workers, sign a public “vote yes” petition with their faces on it, and wear union gear in the plant.

The volunteer organizing committee ran its own meetings, solidifying members’ leadership and confidence. As in the Mercedes campaign, the organizers also shared real-time data as cards came in, so the committee could see where there was support and where there were holes.

Many of the UAW staff organizers came from higher education—a sector where grad workers have recently been unionizing in large numbers, in worker-led campaigns.

The worker-led approach made it tougher for management to convincingly portray the union as an outside “third party.”

PUBLIC CAMPAIGN FROM DAY ONE

Unlike in previous drives, workers boldly showed their union support from day one.

“In 2019, you could have your union flyers, but you had to be hush-hush,” said Renee Berry, a logistics worker on the organizing committee who has worked at the plant for 14 years. “We had to hide flyers in our bag. We couldn’t lay them on the table.”

Both anti-union and pro-union workers had offices in the plant in 2019. “People were too scared to go over to the union office,” said Berry. If management caught her answering a worker’s question about the union on the floor, she was hauled in to HR.

Rather than challenge this culture of fear, UAW organizers back then retreated from direct confrontation. “The people that were pushing for the UAW, it was like we were part of a secret society,” said Peoples. “We didn’t want to get in any trouble with HR because we said the word union. So it was real hard for us to get the word around to our co-workers.”

In the winning drive this year, workers on the volunteer organizing committee were highly visible and confrontational when necessary. “We have VOCs that are really out front passing out handbills,” said Vaughn. “We’re right in the face of everybody—not afraid of anything that’s gonna come down the pike.”

Berry said workers had gotten so fed up they would openly defy management. “They don’t care, to the point that they are tired of being intimidated,” she said. “They are either going to fire me or write me up. You have to stand for something, or you’ll fall for anything. You’ve got to say, ‘I gotta keep on going, no matter whatever happens.’”

US VS. THE BILLIONAIRES

While politicians have lined up to oppose the union drives, the organizing committees at VW and Mercedes have striven to make the choice not about Democrats vs. Republicans, but about the working class vs. the billionaires.This idea resonates; workers have good reason to be angry.

“People for the most part are smartening up. And they’re not paying attention to the political crap,” said VW worker Angel Gomez. “The politicians know nothing about blue-collar work. They are born with a silver spoon in their mouths.” Take Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, heir to a family construction business with annual revenues of $220 million in 2019 when he became governor.

“We have a Democrat in the U.S House of Representatives out of Birmingham named Terri Sewell,” said Jeremy Kimbrell, a measurement machine operator at Mercedes. “She’s a corporate Democrat. She will give lip service to workers and the unions, but when it comes down to it, man, she’s bought and paid for by businesses.”

“For centuries, the Southern economy has been a rigged game—a scheme designed to enrich a select few at the expense of the many,” said Fain, rallying with Daimler Truck workers in North Carolina ahead of their April 25 contract expiration.

The wealthy and powerful have “dominated the state governments and written laws to protect their own interest,” Fain said. “They think of the world as divided between those who make the rules and those who are ruled… But now they sense that things are changing.”

On the brink of a strike, the union and Daimler reached a tentative deal, which workers will be voting on. The deal ends wage tiers, boosts wages 25 percent over four years, and adds a cost-of-living adjustment and, for the first time, profit-sharing.

“We set an example for the entire South,” North Carolina UAW Local 3520 President Corey Hill told Reuters. “I hope Mercedes in Tuscaloosa was paying attention to what we’re doing,”

A BOLD APPROACH

If workers have gotten bold on the shop floor, the UAW took the same principle to the national stage when it vowed to organize 150,000 non-union auto workers, especially in the South.

“They didn’t say, ‘Let’s start at one or two plants and see if we can make this work,’” Kamper said. “They targeted All The Plants, all at once, and have committed serious resources to that work. The willingness to invest in the campaign, to brag about investing $40 million, represents a brashness we don’t see enough of.”

“In order to launch these campaigns and move so quickly, the leadership had to relinquish some control and trust workers,” said Stephanie Luce, an author and professor of labor studies at the City University of New York. It goes to show: “We need leadership, investment, risk-taking, and creativity—from the top, and from the rank and file.”