OUTthere

Southwest Labor Relations Need Work
by: Aran Valente

Reconstruction-era New Orleans was a site of progress for labor unions. Since then, however, unions have experienced ups and downs—today construction labor relations have declined to early 19th century levels.

      After the Civil War President Lincoln gained legitimacy in the south largely by convincing working class voters that his political organization had the better labor relations policy. Contemporary Unionists believed that if the Confederacy reformed it would create an aristocracy more menacing than Britain’s; it would be in their best interest to “sap and undermine the foundation of this absurd and tyrannical system.”  These fears led to the creation of the first bi-ethnic union of blacks and whites on the Mississippi waterfront. However, white farmers in the north and south sought to undermine the integrity of U.S. freedom by organizing a counter-revolution. By the time of the Great Depression, the Waterfront workers had been segregated again.
 
The 1960s Civil Rights movement encouraged union relations. Within the last 30 to 40 years many trade workers have received the justice they deserved.  Furthermore, several industries have begun a process of integration.

  But the plight of trade workers is far from over. In 2007 Phoenix, Arizona construction workers were only allowed as much water on the job site as they could carry to work in the morning. This amounted to about 2 hours worth, and was expected to last them the entire ten-hour day. This resulted in dehydrated workers and a dissatisfactory product—some houses had buckling floorboards and cracks running up the ceilings. Furthermore, workers were forced to record overtime hours but never paid. They were not even given definitive minimum wages and were told that if they reported the discrepancy to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) their jobs would be in jeopardy. In the workplace, white employees were favored over Hispanics and given corporate positions by their bosses who refused to learn Spanish.

Many organizations, including the University of Arizona, continue to employ companies that practice these injustices almost as a show of prestige seeing as the outcomes of such cheap labor tends to be less than substantial in the long run.

      Labor relations in the southwest have declined to the way they were at the dawn of the 19th century, but there is still hope.  Many unions, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), and Teamsters are in support of creating an equal and fair system for how labor is dealt with in construction. A few new unions have formed by dedicated strikers who received aid from the AFL-CIO as well as various other union organizations.