Mississippi organizer pitches need for unions

WASHINGTON – Unions are widely mistrusted in the South, but black women, particularly in Mississippi, need to organize to improve working conditions and close pay gaps, a Mississippi labor leader said Tuesday.

“It’s very necessary for African-American women, black women in my great state and in the Southern states, to unionize,” Sanchioni Butler, a lead organizer for the United Auto Workers union, told congressional staffers at a Capitol Hill briefing. “In the South, ‘union’ is a bad word. It’s just like, the roadblocks are incredible because they’ve been conditioned to think that unions close plants.”

The “Black Working Women Matter” briefing, sponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, and the National Women’s Law Center, focused on economic stability for black working women.

Butler was profiled in a recent IPS report for her work on labor issues, along with 26 other women. She has participated in an effort by Mississippi autoworkers and state NAACP officials to win support for unionizing the Nissan plant in Canton.

Unions aren’t popular in conservative Mississippi and other parts of the South.

“The need to invest in organizing in the South is paramount,” Melanie Campbell of the Black Women’s Roundtable, a national coalition, said after the briefing.

Campbell, whose first organizing effort helped catfish workers in Mississippi, noted that 55 percent of the nation’s blacks live in the South and most are women.

Mississippi ranks 48th among states and the District of Columbia in the wage gap between African-American women and white men, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Louisiana ranks 51st. Idaho has the smallest gap.

Butler and other speakers at Tuesday’s briefing called for pay equity, a higher minimum wage and safety improvements in the workplace. They also urged lawmakers to support efforts to allow workers to unionize.

Campbell said it may be hard to get Congress to address the income gap.

“I think they have to be pushed into doing the right thing,” she said.

Butler said she hopes the briefing raises awareness of the disparity.

“It’s something that we need to talk more about,” she said. “This should be an awakening for a lot of people.”

Contact Deborah Barfield Berry at dberrygannet.com. Follow @dberrygannett.com on Twitter.