By Lulit Shewan

The Southern U.S. has historically had the largest number of Black people in the workforce in the country. This is a region where workplace organizing faces hostile laws and employer power is emboldened. States in the South have some of the lowest rates of union coverage in the country, which means that a sizeable number of Black workers aren’t able to exercise their ability to organize in reprisal of their working conditions.

This issue is both historical and intentional. Low union density in the South is rooted in the ruling class of such states seeking to maintain the longstanding super-exploitation of Black labor following the end of slavery. While chattel slavery bound the enslaved to their masters across all colonies, the South’s agriculture-based economy put a particular premium on free Black labor to build the nation, enforced through extreme violence. This history is inextricably linked to the current state of the South. The same attitudes that harmed both the enslaved and their descendants can be found today in starvation wages, limited economic mobility, poor working conditions, and constrained organizing abilities.

Even as union membership grew in the industrial North, ultimately sparking the Great Migration of Black Southerners in the early- to mid-20th century, Southern powers remained resistant to unionization. Today, only 6 percent of all workers in the region are unionized. That is just one legacy of the region’s resistance; another is legislation that staunchly deters organization and demeans collective bargaining efforts. Such efforts have largely been enforced by the reign of “right-to-work” laws.

All states in the South have right-to-work legislation in effect, meaning that they prohibit union security agreements, which ensure that workers who are not in the union will contribute to the costs of union representation. Proponents of right-to-work laws claim that they protect workers against being forced to join a union, but the largely unspoken and intended effect of such laws are to tilt the balance toward corporations and employers, further rigging the system at the expense of working families.

Arkansas and Florida were the first two states to enact right-to-work laws in the 1940s. Christian Americans, who led the right-to-work campaign in its birthplace of Arkansas, were brazenly racist in their propaganda, warning that if the right to work amendment failed, “white women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes… whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.” It is not coincidental that right-to-work first took root in the Jim Crow South; these laws are just one part of a complex web of calculated efforts to maintain the poverty and exploitation of Black people. The subjugation of the working class and Black communities has always had a place in the region, and those who live at its nexus suffer the most.

While a majority of Americans support unionization, companies continue to push back against organized labor, driving a decline in overall union density and stagnating union growth in the South. The power of these companies is bolstered by anti-worker policymakers aiming to maintain the symbiotic relationship between government and wealth-hoarding corporation entities—a relationship that entirely diminishes the value and self-determination of the Black worker.

Given that the political and legal structures of the South have always been designed to prevent workers from expressing even the most basic forms of power, the collective power built by Black workers within a historically exploited region remains steadfast and inherently undeterred by oppressive administrations and policies. Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee made history in April 2024 when workers voted to unionize with the United Auto Workers (UAW) by a landslide, after tirelessly organizing in one of the states most hostile to unions. Leading up to the vote, anti-worker policymakers such as Governor Bill Lee vehemently spoke out against the UAW’s drive to organize Southern factory workers, in an attempt to dissuade workers from voting. The union won with 73 percent of the vote.

The service sector in the South comprises some of the most challenging workplaces to build labor power, in part due to difficult working conditions and high turnover. This is compounded by employer misinformation about unions and what union organization can offer workers, in support of right-to-work laws.

But the high concentration of Black workers in such industries continues to create a hotbed of collective anger and reprisal, given that this exploitation has history and that racial wage gaps continue to widen as wage inequality grows. In a 2022 study, the Economic Policy Institute found that Black workers have reaped even fewer gains from increased aggregate productivity than white workers. At the forefront of organizing this sector is the newly formed Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW), which found that Black workers make up 41 percent of the employees in South Carolina’s food or beverage, general merchandise, food services, and warehouse and storage jobs, but 27 percent of the state’s workforce. The steadfast organizing drive of the USSW is informed by endless stories of various forms of worker degradation and exploitation.

The Trump Administration wasted no time introducing a slew of anti-union sentiment and legislation. Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC) reintroduced The National Right to Work Act and Secretary of Labor nominee Lori Chavez-DeRemer walked back support for the PRO Act, which would have overturned Republican-backed right-to-work laws. For many Black workers in the South, these efforts hardly present new threats.

“We are building a union despite the fact that the rules are rigged against us as Southern workers. We are building a union by any means necessary and building it in a way that makes sense for us,” says Eric Winston, service worker and USSW member. Dockworkers, food service employees, and entertainment workers are among the organized groups in the South who have organized strikes in the last year, many reaching tentative agreements. These workers are adapting their organizing to modern workplaces, as with the USSW’s solidarity-centered approach of cross-sector organizing at various locations in different industries.

Organized labor requires investment of time and faces incessant obstacles. Black workers have adopted these undertakings since the Jim Crow South and are at the forefront of the fight against misinformation. For them, it is not a choice, but a necessity. The labor renaissance isn’t over, and the organized U.S. South provides the blueprint for the future.