By John Slaughter

“A category 5 economic storm is brewing…”. So stated Michael Thurmond, Georgia’s Labor Commissioner after a Job Fair in Atlanta that was designed primarily for Katrina evacuees drew over 15,000 before the doors were closed. Over 75 percent of those who showed up were Georgia residents. Atlanta’s poverty rate is 27.8 percent, almost exactly the same as New Orleans. The nation and the world were shocked to see literally face to face the depths and the extent of the extreme poverty that prevailed in New Orleans in the aftermath of the hurricane. But it wasn’t just New Orleans we were seeing. It was America, and particularly the American South. At the heart of this growing new class of poor are the African Americans and the growing numbers of poor whites, but they are also the immigrant workers, particularly the Latinos.

It is somewhat misleading to define the Southern poor simply in terms of income. They are the Southern workers, whose conditions of poverty define them as a class. The Southern working class is an integral part of the new global class of poor that is in process of formation. It is African American and white, Native American, Latino and Asian. Because the first wave of the permanent elimination of jobs hit the unskilled worker, the African American forms the core of this new class of Southern poor. But as the revolution in technology develops, it draws into it workers from every level and aspect of society. None are spared. The robot recognizes no color line, even as it exacerbates the polarization of rich and poor. This new class is forged from every nationality.

 They are the homeless, the absolutely destitute; but they are also the temporary worker, the day laborer, the part-time, no-benefits worker, the throwaway worker on the way to becoming permanently unemployed. They are the locked out, the dispossessed. As Belfor, a German disaster recovery corporation operating on the Gulf Coast, describes its 400 strong work crews, they are “a mishmash of North Georgia country boys, Mexican and Central American immigrants, displaced Katrina victims, and one crew with many African American women from Alabama.” They are the hombres de paso, the “wayside men,” the mostly Mexican workers recruited to work 14-hour days in Asian restaurants for $2.50-$4.00 an hour.

New Conditions Set Stage for New Class

In 1948 International Harvester built a plant in Tennessee and began mass-producing mechanical cotton pickers. These new machines could pick cotton at the rate of 1000 pounds an hour, whereas human beings could pick at best only about 20 pounds an hour. The effect was to wipe out the sharecropping system almost overnight. The sharecropper’s labor was no longer needed.

The mechanization of agriculture was matched only by the industrialization of the South. These new conditions necessitated that the Southern work force had to be reorganized. Jim Crow segregation had to go, and Southern workers, black and white, poured into the factories and cities of both the North and the South. But the legacy of slavery meant especially for the African American worker that they enter the factory at the bottom. The jobs that were available to them were the most unskilled and paid the lowest wages. They were the last hired and the first fired.

The plight of the poor white worker was not dissimilar. The transition from tenant farmer to blue-collar industrial worker did not necessarily mean a ticket out of poverty. Writing about poor whites in Alabama, Wayne Flynt says, “Forced into industrial jobs they did not seek, poor whites frequently found a better life. Then … America’s manufacturing sector entered the postindustrial age of declining markets, increased foreign competition, layoffs, and unemployment.” Just as the sharecroppers were cast aside by the mechanical cotton picker, workers today are being permanently shunted to the wayside by the introduction of electronic technology. They are competing with automation and the robot.

A New Poverty and a New Class

Today’s poverty is different, and it gives rise to a new class of poor. It is no coincidence that large numbers of the homeless began to show up in our streets at about the same time that electronic production began to be implemented in a large-scale fashion. The computer chip, digitized information, robotics, automation – for the first time in human history a means of production was introduced that did not require human labor. Now, electronics renders the worker superfluous. An entire class of workers are suddenly hombres de paso. Every worker on the globe is being forced to compete with the robot, and it is creating a new global class of poor.

The new class of Southern poor is an integral part of the global class of poor.The Latinos in particular are swelling the ranks of the Southern worker. What is different about these new workers in the South is that they are becoming a permanent part of the Southern working class. They are service workers, construction and landscape workers; they process our poultry and manufacture our carpets and other textiles.

This new class of Southern poor and working people is black and white, Native American and Latino and Asian. They are united by a common history and a common poverty, exploitation, and oppression. The ruling class continues to employ the ideology of white supremacy to not only divide one section of the workers against another, but to prevent a growing consciousness of the fundamental unity of this new class of poor. A class conscious of itself as a class, and moving as one, is the indispensable condition for building a movement that can wage the fight for power and achieve the program and aims of all those who increasingly find themselves outside the system.

A New Movement

The movement of the new class of poor in the South is beginning to arise. Struggles are being waged on many fronts, from Alabama Arise fighting in Alabama to address the issues of poverty there, to those in Tennessee fighting against draconian cuts in health care for the poor, to the Labor Party in South Carolina waging a ballot initiative to put representatives of working and poor people in office who will fight for the program of their class, to the homeless and their advocates in Atlanta fighting against the criminalization of the poor and their exclusion and expulsion from the city.

When the corporations and the city government attempted to ram through the Atlanta City Council measures that would exclude the poor and make it a crime for the homeless to ask for help, the homeless and the advocates of the poor were outraged. Forces who had been working on various issues of poverty coalesced around the need to form a common plan of action and to take the offensive. City Hall was besieged with tent city encampments, rallies and protests. This new Movement to Redeem the Soul of Atlanta, inclusive and growing, began to reach into the poor neighborhoods, into public housing and tenant associations, and into the churches. Their demands and program expanded to include housing, health care, and livable wages for all of the poor.

 Community Labor United in New Orleans and the Hurricane Relief Fund and many others are organizing and fighting for Katrina evacuees and the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast. They are doing this in the interests of the class of poor who were so graphically revealed to all the world in the aftermath of the disaster. In the summer representatives of the struggles of the poor and workers will be gathering from across the South in a Southern Regional Social Forum that will provide an opportunity to hammer out the program, strategies and tactics as well as the organizational forms demanded by these times to advance the cause of this rising new class of poor in the South.

In the midst of these many struggles, there is a growing sense that something is different. This new class of poor is beginning to understand that the struggle is more than a fight around a single issue or a particular section of the workers or poor. More and more participants in the struggles of the workers in the South on many fronts are coming to see the building of a movement that is inclusive, a movement of the poor of all nationalities and which reaches across the color line. It is a movement that calls for housing for all, health care for all, living wages for all.

The new class is beginning to go on the offensive, and it is a movement that must necessarily develop new forms of organization that reflect the political reality of the times, and point the way to the next step. New class, new forms, new hope.  

John Slaughter, who grew up in rural south Alabama, has actively participated in the movement of poor and working people for over 30 years. He helped organize woodcutters on the Gulf Coast in the ‘seventies, and also served as a union steward at the paper mill where he was employed. The author of New Battles Over Dixie – The Campaign for a New South, he continues to be at the forefront of the developing new movement of the poor in the Atlanta area. He can be reached at glonjohn@comcast.net.  

Also read "The Roots of the Southern Workers and Poor"
by John Slaughter.

 

February.2006.Vol16.Ed2
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
P.O. Box 477113 Chicago, IL 60647 rally@lrna.org
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