Acting Locally and Globally: The Black Workers for Justice

The window in the door is boarded up. The wood, black and mealy with age, breaks through the halfhearted whitewash at the corners. Inside are less-than-state-of-the-art office machines, file drawers, stacks of paper, a meeting table, and a lot of open space that amplifies footsteps on the worn hardwood floor.

On one wall is a map of the South, overlaid with commentary on race and poverty. On the opposite side is a map of the world, which sits next to a huge photograph under cracked glass of young Angolan guerrillas, men and women, in battle fatigues with weapons slung across their shoulders. It reads, “The liberation of women is a basic requirement for the revolution, the guarantee of its continuity, and a pre-condition for its victory.” The international connection is right on the wall.

The building is called the Worker’s Center — just that. Based in Rocky Mount, it serves as the base of operations in eastern North Carolina for the Black Workers for Justice, or BWFJ.

Saladin Muhammad, the organization’s National Chairperson, settles onto the wooden step outside and props his backs against a 4x4 beam. He’s a fireplug of a man, stocky and built close to the ground. His features are youthful, but the frosting in his hair gives away his age. He begins talking in a measured tone, like he’s testing his words for traction, until his subject animates him.

“We have to understand that you can’t bring people around a ‘project,’ but around a need. That’s how we’ve built real infrastructure at BWFJ for 17 years,” he says. While he talks, a local worker shows up with a lawn mower to cut the grass. It seems an unlikely scene for a group that is currently reaching out to workers in eleven other countries and across the United States to wage a fight with the Goliaths of the international financial establishment.

Black Workers: Organizing for Power

Founded in 1981, BWFJ was formed to “advance the rights and dignity of the working poor in the southeastern United States.” Beginning with a three-person organizing committee, they built themselves into one of the most credible and effective organizations in the South.

By 1988, they were organizing at the Schlage Lock plant in Rocky Mount, N.C. When the company moved to Mexico in search of cheaper labor, BWFJ led 800 workers in the successful fight for severance pay, extended benefits, and the cleanup of Schlage’s environmental waste. In 1991, after the fire at the Imperial Foods plant in Hamlet, N.C. — where 25 people were killed because the company had locked the emergency exits — BWFJ offered assistance to devastated families and led the fight to bring Imperial Foods to justice.

BWFJ combines its aggressive grassroots approach with a willingness to adopt innovative strategies. In-plant organizing, like that which BWFJ began in 1994 among auto-sector workers at the Consolidated Diesel company in Whitakers, N.C., is a good example. They began by forming Unity Committees inside the plant, where a standard certification drive was unlikely to succeed, and then partnered the committees with the United Electrical Workers union (UE) for organizational backing. BWFJ calls these “non-majority unions,” which have been successful in contesting firings and opposing wage cuts.

BWFJ’s focus on black workers is based on the premise that building political power among the least powerful, in the least organized region of the country, is a prerequisite for overcoming the setbacks of working-class movements. These setbacks have become more ominous as a result of the “race to the bottom” tactics that U.S. companies have used in shifting Northern unionized jobs to the South, playing southern white workers against politically powerless black workers, and finally shifting jobs into developing countries under the cover of free trade agreements.

“Our historical circumstances as black workers tell us that black workers are central to organizing in the South, and to organizing workers generally,” says Ashaki Binta, BWFJ Director of Organization. “BWFJ was founded on an understanding of the special oppression of the entire African-American people, who are 90 percent working class. Acquiescing to racism and gender oppression is an error that both the left and organized labor have been guilty of in the past,” she adds. “These struggles continue today.”

“The question of power and powerlessness for black people in this country,” Binta continues, “is inextricable from the issue of self-determination.”

Telling the World about the South

To highlight the “strategic necessity” of organizing black workers in the South, BWFJ launched a series of Organize the South Solidarity Tours in 1990 and 1992. “The tours were designed, in part, to bring the national labor movement into a discussion about the condition in the South,” says Binta.

BWFJ is now taking this call to the global stage, by co-hosting three Southern International Workers’ Schools, focusing on the Public Sector (1998), the Private Sector/Auto (1999), and a Workers’ Conference in 2000.

“We want to bring national and international solidarity to the southern fightback, and we want the southern fightback to directly confront the antiworker initiatives of international finance capital,” says Binta. “For us, that work has begun in organizing the public sector — a focus due to privatization and cutbacks in social services.

“Public workers all over the world are experiencing this phenomenon directly, putting them on the cutting edge against current trends in globalization.”

Public Workers Against Private Gain

Last year, BWFJ initiated their most recent anti-privatization strategy by taking part in a “Grievance for Justice Campaign” among public workers in North Carolina. Building on a six-year fight by housekeepers on two university campuses over wages, workloads, and job security — and organizing by the NC Public Service Workers Union — BWFJ invited an independent union, the United Electrical Workers, to begin a new kind of organizing drive.

Faced with North Carolina’s prohibition against collective bargaining by state employees, the union began to sign up and listen to workers through mostly volunteer “Grievance Brigades.” Grievances ranged from racial discrimination to work speed-ups to disrespectful behavior by bosses, and were sent by the hundreds to the University Board of Governors, the press, and state officials. Currently, six campuses are being organized and UE Local 150 has become a fully chartered union. Anti-privatization efforts though public worker organizing are also progressing in Atlanta through SEIU Local 1985, and in MASE/CWA Local 3570 in Mississippi, which, along with UE 150, are also supporting the first Worker’s School this October.

Acting Globally

The First Southern International Workers School is a collaborative effort between BWFJ, the Brisbane Institute: Southern Center for Labor Organizing (SCLEO), and the Transnational Information Exchange (TIE), based in Germany. The School will be hosted by the Brisbane Institute of Morehouse College, and will featured labor representatives from Brazil, Canada, Cuba, England, France, Haiti, Mexico, the Netherlands, Puerto Rico, Senegal, and South Africa.

Phil Denniston, a staff organizer with SEIU Local 1985 in Atlanta, sees these efforts as valuable to his work on the ground. “With no collective bargaining in Georgia and the state being right-to-work, we concentrate on building and spreading power,” Denniston says. “Education is important, and efforts like [the Workers’ School] are important to educating workers.”

As a popular bumper sticker says, “If You’re Being Attacked Globally, You’d Better ACT Globally.” Workers around the world are reaching across international frontiers to lock arms. The Black Workers for Justice and the First Southern International Workers’ School are on the front lines of these efforts.

“We are not working on winning elections,” says Saladin Muhammad, “but on building organization and consciousness. The Workers’ School is a key part of the movement to organize the South.”