Off New Leicester Highway – where new crops of cheaply-built, working-class housing grow perennially – lives Megan Greene, a lead organizer with the Union for Southern Service Workers.
“There is a saying coined by W.E.B DuBois, ‘as the South goes, so goes the Nation,’” Greene said, while she dug through stacks of books on labor, worker surveys, flyers and video games.
Spines with names like Claudia Jones, Velma Hopkins and Ella May Wiggins, bronzed by the late-day sun. Greene’s oversized red frames slid the length of her nose while she shuffled through the mounds of organizing history.
“Ahh, here we go! Harper, sit. Good boy,” they said after locating the bag of treats. They tossed the bone-shaped biscuit and calmed their excitable dog, “He’s gonna be featured in this, too.”
Greene, 28, hails from Caldwell County, near Morganton, an old textile mill town stitched squarely between Asheville and Charlotte, in the eastern foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains. They got their first taste of union work in Morganton, leading an organizing committee at their job at a grocery store in 2021.
“I had been there for 5 years. Food Matters, it’s called. It was like a little local health food store, and so, when it got bought out by a hedge fund, things started to change,” they said.
Green and their co-workers would often take food that had expired, headed for the landfill because it couldn’t be sold, to local food banks, shelters and families they knew who were in need. The new owners were unwilling to do the extensive paperwork to receive a tax write-off for donations. Employees were threatened with firing if they did not trash the thousands of dollars’ worth of products. Greene saw the conditions of their workplace deteriorate, relationships were tense and pay was decreased. Wondering what to do next, they turned to a local Facebook group about what was happening and asked their community.
“Someone just commented, ‘Sounds like y’all need to organize,’ and it took off from there,” Greene said.
Organizing in a small grocery store chain in Western North Carolina may seem disconnected from the broader plight of the working class, currently and historically. Yet, Greene and USSW thread the needle of struggle to quilt a picture of triumphs and lessons from generations of workers.
“I tend to ramble.”
The Western Piedmont area has been a wellspring of labor organizing. After the end of chattel slavery and the defeat of Reconstruction, Northern capitalists fell upon the undeveloped South. With the construction of railroads and the uprooting of agrarian life, cheap and mobile labor was plentiful. Uneducated poor white and Black people in the South were seen as docile and hard-working. Newspaper tycoon Henry Grady, in a bid to curry Northern investment, claimed the New South had “fallen in love with work.” People were promised a better life in wage work, in mill towns that had running water and electricity. Quickly, that promise was broken, in many cases, never realized.
“Corporations and landlords think that they can come to the South and buy up land and buy up workers and pay us less and that we’ll just sit and take it,” Greene said. “When we started building this union, the world took notice and was like, ‘holy shit,’ but that’s not from nothing.”
Far from the capitalists’ aspersions as backwards and incapable of collective action, workers in the Western Piedmont and Southern Appalachia began to fight back. They organized in solidarity, white and black. They sang and cooked, reaching into the hearts of the familial culture, where women worked at the forefront. They met in dark hollers, they picketed on foot and by truck, they created ‘flying squadrons’ that spread strikes from town to town.
“Your fight is our fight, and when y’all’s conditions improve, ours will inevitably,” Greene said.
At Loray Mill in Gastonia, ballad-singer and labor leader Ella May Wiggins, mother of 9, was shot down by company guns in 1929. She had been at the forefront of the communist-led National Textile Workers Union campaign at Loray, organizing not only black and white workers in the mills but also in the surrounding company towns. Garnering support and building a broader culture of resistance, what USSW would come to call the “community union.”
That year in Marion, a thousand mill workers went on strike, invigorated by the area’s multiple union struggles in the region. Six workers were murdered on the picket line by the sheriff and company-backed deputies to end the strike. Not one person was charged or found guilty for the killings.
Within five years, at the height of the Great Depression, 400,000 workers up and down the Eastern United States led a General Strike. Southern strikers were mainly textile workers who sought to squelch the abject exploitation of the so-called “stretch-out.” What mill owners called “scientific management” was to workers, lower-wages and a higher workload that caused bodily harm and suffering. Half of all millhands went on strike in North Carolina, a majority of them women and their children. The National Guard was sent in to violently break up the strikes. Ultimately, the workers returned to work, but the scale and militancy of the 83-day picket ushered in a groundswell of labor victories throughout the decade.
Greene leads regular monthly ‘Mass Meetings’ of the Southern Appalachia branch of USSW in Asheville. The Mass Meetings are inspired by the Civil Rights movement. At the last meeting in February, children and their mothers shouted “Union yes.” Food was shared and people sang. Workers gave reports on struggles they faced at their workplaces and discussed tactics. Nyla Paul, 24, and a two-year member, led a popular education on the labor movement and the Black Panthers’ 10-point program.
“There’s an increasing attempt to erase our history, Black history, women’s history, the history of the working class, we need to fight that every inch of the way,” Greene said.
Paul drew parallels to Black Panther’s program and the one laid out by the USSW at their annual Workers Power Summit. They celebrated the USSW supported Duke Graduate Student Union victory that won university graduate workers a raise to $20/hr and planned to continue the fight for $25/hr.
Greene reported on her work with other labor and immigrant organizations during the general strike in Minnesota in January.
“Everyone was immediately mobilized for the Minnesota strike, and as we learn from the 1934 strike, it can happen so fast that we need an organized base. It worked there; ICE is out of Minnesota the way it had been. What we learned is it can expand for other demands of the working class, housing, healthcare, everything we need to thrive,” Greene said.
USSW and Greene aim to build a grassroots working-class, anti-racist and militant union once again in the South.
“We are writing history,” Greene said.
