Culture » August 20, 2009

Dixie Media Versus Unions

A new book reveals how Southern media have strengthened the region’s corporatocracy.

By Roger Bybee

The slavocracy-rooted Southern model of low wages and harshly anti-union labor relations has successfully undermined and defeated many social-welfare protections throughout the nation. Indeed, the South increasingly sets the terms of America’s social contract between labor and capital, as was apparent during last December’s debate over federal aid to General Motors and Chrysler.

Southern senators—all from states home to non-union auto factories run by international firms—claimed that excessive United Auto Worker (UAW) wages were responsible for Detroit’s crisis, insisting that only massive wage cuts imposed immediately by the federal government would address the problem. As a result, the UAW has been forced to accept a starting wage of $14.50 per hour for new autoworkers—a bit more than half the typical $26 to $28 union wage. 

More broadly, the Southern model of all-powerful management, docile low-wage labor and public subsidy-fueled operations has become the dominant form of U.S. capitalism exported around the globe, argues Joseph Atkins in his compelling book Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press (University Press of Mississippi, 2008). The media of the former Confederacy has played a crucial role in promoting the low-wage Southern model, and Atkins traces its development alongside the still-strong oligarchic pillars of the South. 

Throughout the Southern system’s history, the region’s media have almost invariably been part of what Atkins labels the “solid phalanx” of powerful interests: a unified business community, elected officials, the clergy and other opinion shapers. Southern newspapers and radio stations joined the forces relentlessly battling unions, the New Deal and advancements in civil rights for African-Americans.

Southern media acted as uncritical stenographers transmitting and amplifying the crudely racist views of segregationist politicians like Strom Thurmond and Theodore Bilbo, who viewed the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the civil rights movement and communism as equal partners in a grand conspiracy to destroy the Southern way of life. 

Eventually, the overt resistance by Southern media to African-American rights receded, as it conflicted with the image of a tranquil, cosmopolitan “New South” open to investors from the entire world. But to this day, the Southern press routinely celebrates corporations’ investments—however richly subsidized by the public—as a beneficent gift to local communities. Few media outlets have investigated any corporate misconduct or even acknowledged the existence of unions and the plight of low-wage workers. 

By the 1970s, the South had become the main fulcrum by which Corporate America gained the leverage to engage in what the late UAW President Douglas Fraser in 1976 called “a new class war.” The war escalated in the 1980s as unionized workers in the North were routinely threatened with the loss of their jobs to the South unless they took pay cuts. State legislatures across the North found themselves under pressure to slash corporate taxes to create a “good business climate.” 

Corporations succeeded in winning enormous state and local tax cuts and reaped the benefits of an ever-escalating competition between states for jobs. But in many cases, corporations merely pocketed these tax benefits and joined an onrushing tide of Northern-based firms opening up new non-union subsidiaries in the South. The South became the nation’s fastest growing region, in terms of both jobs and population. 

This approach to luring industry with subsidies has during the past eight decades evolved into an interstate race to the bottom, encouraging low wages, low corporate tax rates and rich packages of incentives for corporations that don’t need them—all at the expense of public needs.

Ironically, as Atkins notes, the South has been hit hard by “free-trade” agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was aggressively promoted by Arkansas-born President Bill Clinton and gained overwhelming support from corporate-friendly Southern legislators of both parties. Corporate America’s leap-frogging to even-lower-wage nations like Mexico and China has begun to seriously deplete the former Confederacy’s manufacturing base, in much the same way that the South once sapped jobs from Northern states.  Thus, capital’s mobility has succeeded in undermining the U.S. labor movement as an effective force for economic and social democracy, especially in the South.

As Atkins’ book vividly shows, another crucial component of genuine democracy has been grievously lacking in the South: independent mass media willing to challenge and investigate corporate power and to serve as the voice of those shut up by bosses, shut out of power and shut down by multinational corporations seeking ever cheaper labor.

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• Reader Comments

  Good and true article—My family lived in the ‘south’ until i was 12—we moved to n-central Illinois dad got a union job and we thought everyone was rick! and they were compared to the south in 1969 [and now]. used to be a lot—A LOT—of socially-categorizing and classification. we always heard how unfriendly, Godless and weak the northern people were—BOY WERE THEY WRONG!

  One used to hear how much a southern boy-man would ‘like to whup a “sissy” Chicago yankees a!#... well, needless to say, that was only because they could safely say that from their pathetic and pitiful ‘palce(s0’ down there; besides, when we moved to Peoria and later rural Illinois we found REAL people who didn’t ya’ll this and ya’ll that with the false so-called southern manners [don’t get me wrong-there are a lot of good people there and everywhere-but none so angry, mean-spirited as many southerners who were always looking for someone to fight, hate, classify, argue with or ‘be above;’ either through religious self-righteousness, political and/or ‘class categorizations.’

  WE LEARNED THAT UP NORTH PEOPLE DIDN’T CARE WHO YOUR FAMILY, DADDY, MOMMA, OR ANY OF THE OTHER ELITIST BS THAT WAS SO IMPORTANT DOWN THERE. ALL THEY CARED ABOUT WAS WHO YOU WERE, WHAT YOU DID AND HOW YOU DID IT. TRULY GOOD PEOPLE WHO DIDN’T CARE WHAT EVERYBODY THOUGHT OF THEM BECAUSE THEY KNEW WHO THEY WERE, WHAT THEY WANTED AND DIDN’T CARE FOR OR NEED THE OPINION OF THE LOCAL GENTRY OR THEIR UNDERLINGS.

  WE NEVER LOOKED BACK AND NEVER MISSED ‘THAT’ SOUTH; THE RACISM, DISCRIMINATION, CLASSISM, RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY; HYPOCRISY AND IT’S EXCUSES FOR EVERYTHING MENTIONED ABOVE AND BEING GREEDY, SELFISH, AND MANY—TRULY UGLY EXCUSES FOR HUMAN BEINGS!

  Posted by Leslie 'DAVID' Patrick on Aug 22, 2009 at 4:15 PM

  As a hypothesis, I think Atkins’ book is correct.

  The question then is:  In the Internet era, why isn’t the “solid South” breaking down?  Why isn’t racism breaking down, why isn’t anti-union hatred breaking down?

  One answer may be that the digital divide (the relatively low access that poor people have to the Internet) disproportionately affects Southerners.  Except that in Texas, Florida, and North Carolina—states where the digital divide’s effect is lessened—I don’t think we see much difference.

  Another answer may be that the Internet’s “long tail” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tail) allows the indoctrinated Southerner to seek out only news and communities on the Web which reaffirm and reinforce the racist, anti-union indoctrination that the Southern media and others have imposed on them (sic).

  This raises a new issue:  If the Internet age really won’t promote a new awareness because of the long tail, then how can progressives and union ever hope to change the South?  It seems to me that you need that megaphone (e.g., a mass media outlet) to achieve change; according to Atkins’ book, that megaphone is what allowed the solidly racist, solidly anti-union Southern elite to remain in power.  Dying newspapers and dying local television stations mean that unions must use the Web, but is the Web useless due to the existence of the long tail?

  Posted by Tim Evanson on Aug 23, 2009 at 2:04 PM

  As I wrote earlier, there are good people there—but it’s hard not to be indoctrinated with over a hundred years of anti-yankee-losing-side-shame-and entrenched insecurities of every kind.
  Sadly, they’re STILL calling northerners ‘yankees,’ and still many have that old insecure and spitefulness concerning: foreigners—i.e., anyone not from there.
  I HAVE NEVER HEARD ANYONE IN THE NORTH TALK ABOUT SOUTHERNERES—OR REFER TO THE CIVIL WAR AS IF IT’S STILL AN ACTIVE BATTLE—LIKE I STILL HEAR M SOME SOUTHERNERS TALK ABOUT NORTHERNERS(Get over it already! )!

  Posted by Leslie 'DAVID' Patrick on Aug 23, 2009 at 4:33 PM

  Leslie D Patrick…..Although you may be somewhat accurate about the south, the north ain’t much better, and Peoria is probably no better than most southern towns.
  See , what most white folks do not understand is the blatant racism that goes on behind your back.Northern cities have been just as bigoted and racist as any southern town on the map.
  The difference you just wrote about is only on the surface, the subtle ways in which people express viewpoints and ideas, the culture nuances that don’t make the news are very much in play.But when all is said and done northern white folks are no different than their southern neighbors. Let use not forget ” red line mortgages” and all the bigotry behind “school desegregation"just to mention two examples..
  Racism is a sociopathic eco-cultural disease ,that has no respect for longitude or latitude. If profits can be made by the marginalization and genocide of any group of individuals ; racism will be front and center in that conflict. Because that’s what racism is; the economic debasement of a group of people, based on visual phenotype…...

  Posted by blackhorse on Aug 25, 2009 at 8:28 PM

  I reside in Texas a former slave state. Texas has a low number of organized workplaces and a very poor job site safety record.

  While labor is weak, the GOP is strong. Neither civil rights or labor rights are high on the agenda here in the Lone Star State!

  Texas has a rich history of union struggles from the oil refineries, to the manufacturing plants and more recently the uprising of low wage workers in the serice industries.

  One major draw back in Texas is the lack of good, objective news media. Progressives along with organized labor and the civil rights movement must come together and fill in the gap!

  We must also demand more from our so-called friends of the Democratic Party or begin organizing a viable alternative.

  Just my thoughts after 35 plus years in the civil rights, labor and peace movements.

  Posted by Frank Valdez on Aug 28, 2009 at 10:35 PM

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