Evil in Chattanooga

Last week’s thunderous defeat of the UAW by workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga auto plant goes to the role Protestant culture often plays in nullifying moral questions. Jung and Tillich described it as creating a state of “dreaming innocence.”  Their analysis of the nature of true evil—brought to the fore by their experience with Nazism and Sovietism—pointed to the use of religion to induce in people an imaginary innocence, blinding their ability to see evil by playing off their sense of being overwhelmed, of being powerless.

This requires mythicizing and re-writing history.  The weekly labor columnist at the Washington Post, Harold Meyerson, describes how that was done in Chattanooga.

Matt Patterson of the Center for Worker Freedom (a spin-off of Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform), compared the UAW’s campaign to the Union Army’s occupation of Eastern Tennessee during the Civil War and urged workers to repel it as Confederates forces had done to that Union army at the battle of Chickamauga. Clearly, this was not an argument Patterson would have made had the plant employed more than a handful of African-Americans, but Chattanooga remains one of the whiter bastions of the New South. (The website established by the Center for Worker Freedom is emblazoned with a logo reading “Liberating Labor, One Worker at a Time”—quite the slogan for a group that equated its anti-union struggle with a battle to defeat the army that actually freed Chattanooga’s slaves in 1863.)

Meyerson describes the role Walter Reuther’s UAW actually played in the emergence of social liberalism:

…no institution played a larger role in the construction of postwar American liberalism than the UAW. Under Reuther’s leadership, the union provided funds to civil rights activists who conducted the Montgomery bus boycott, paid for the buses and sound system at the 1963 March on Washington, detailed staff and dollars to the efforts to build municipal employee unions and Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers, donated resources to the fledgling efforts of Students for a Democratic Society and the National Organization for Women, and helped fund the first Earth Day.

Fundamentalist Christian Evangelicalism lives off the bitter sense of belonging to an underclass, so prevalent in Appalachia and deeper south locations like Chattanooga.  It makes one cling to racial identity and the dream of innocence in a world one is unable consciously to acknowledge actually bends him to this low estate. In the virtually empty slogans of this form of Christian parlance, God both loves you, redeems you and protects you from the very agency the Gospel proclaimed to be yours. Meyers continues on the important theme of self-management and self-governance:

For all of labor’s troubles organizing in the white South, Volkswagen was the one campaign that labor thought it could win….the union had won the support of the German auto-and-steel workers union, IG Metall, which, under the terms of Germany’s “co-determination” law, controls half the seats on Volkswagen’s corporate board. Indeed, due to Volkswagen’s Nazi roots, the American authorities in postwar Germany made the company go one step further, requiring a two-thirds majority from board members for any significant policy decision—in effect, giving the union veto power over Volkswagen’s various projects. Many of the workers who opposed the very idea of a union at Chattanooga argued, rightly, that Volkswagen was a good employer that paid them well and respected their rights. They failed to realize that the company’s conduct had been largely shaped by influence that IG Metall wields over VW’s labor relations.

         How did the Levitical teaching that you are not to slander your neighbor nor profit from his loss—claimed as roots by three world faiths—compose such contradictory violations in Chattanooga?  The answer is more and more faith communities are in love with the idea of themselves, the grace of God that will always protect them and save them. Of course this means evil can run rampant and your neighbor can be slandered because even to mention it would mix politics with religion.  

Faith communities that practice in the public square can build agency and responsibility for the battle against evils like those that carried the day in Chattanooga. They can freshly study and embrace the idea of worker dignity, worker co-determination—let us even say worker ownership—because it acts out, makes real, the sovereignty of individual freedom in its indissoluble responsibility to do justice to one’s neighbors, to one’s co-workers.

Can evil grow? Yes, and its petri dish is inequality. 

After Fifty Years More Questions About Capitalism

Last Saturday (February 8^th) a diverse coalition took their “Moral Monday” movement to the state capital in Raleigh, North Carolina. Grown to 30,000 from nearly a year of demonstrations involving the arrest of 900 North Carolinians, they protested  Republican actions that include refusal to expand Medicaid, imposing new photo ID voting requirements, and re-drawing district boundaries.

The North Carolinians marched to the familiar cadences of the faith-based civil rights protest era fifty years ago, but while the beat goes on Jericho’s walls remain.  [click on the URL in the right hand column to view the rally]

An awareness is growing on more and more people that it’s not the Republicans behind Jericho’s walls but our capitalist loyalties  that hold inequality in place.  Notice the “our.” From California Democratic leaders like Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsome—who gave Silicon Valley a free pass for exporting millions of jobs—to Kansas Tea Partiers, the heart of the American dream is to solve problems the capitalist way: by growing the economy instead of more fairly distributing it.  President Obama is expected to genuflect every day in this direction. 

Stale as accusations about capitalism may sound, on-going struggles coast-to-coast are freshly encoded with the search for policies that will bend our system to serve the basic dignity and needs of all people. The battle to raise the minimum wage, the battle to enforce the Volker rules in Dodd-Frank, the prosecutions of Wall Street fraud, and of course Bill Moyer’s broadcasts  are part of this rising tide.      

Old ideas like worker control or community ownership are coming back. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, workers at the Volkwagen plant are deciding this week whether to join the U.A.W. and  management is not opposing this for the interesting reason that it wants to see the plant adopt its successful German model of works councils and self-management. The company needs a UAW win in order to do this. According to the NY Times, Frank Fischer, Volkswagen local chief executive and chairman says

“worker councils” are a business model that helped to make Volkswagen the second-largest car company in the world. Our plant in Chattanooga has the opportunity to create a uniquely American works council, in which the company would be able to work cooperatively with our employees and ultimately their union representatives, if the employees decide they wish to be represented by a union.”

The Republicans are not only opposing this, but bringing in none other than Grover Norquist and his Washington-based lobbying  group,“Americans for Tax Reform.” In Tennessee Norquist has created a Center for Worker Freedom who’ve put up 13 billboards in Chattanooga, some calling the U.A.W. “United Obama Workers” and saying, “The UAW spends millions to elect liberal politicians.” Another billboard says, “Detroit: Brought to you by the U.A.W.,” and shows a photo of a Packard plant that was shuttered there 55 years ago.

Enjoining the battle may define what it means to be faithful.  But it may also mean developing the intellectual habit of courageous and critical thinking.  Some battles may be about dividing the spoils not helping the poor. In Memphis, where Dr. King was assassinated marching for sanitation workers’ low wages, the Kellogg company has locked out its workers in the hope of introducing a two tier wage system.  The union says Kellogg is asking for the right to employ up to 100 percent of the Memphis factory’s work force as temps or casuals — a lower tier that would earn around $22 an hour. The locked-out workers fear that if Kellogg wins the right to use as many casuals as it likes — the current contractual limit is 30 percent — then the company would somehow find a way to push out the longer-term workers, perhaps by preferring the casuals in assigning work schedules. [NY Times 2/11]

As usual, knowledge of these struggles is not widely distributed, but some of the groups that can provide a cure for this are the social justice units of Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and Muslim faith groups. In an internet age they have the capacity to provide thousands of study groups in local congregations with briefing and study materials, which could be entitled, “Why you and your children are getting poorer.”