JOBS WITH JUSTICE I have always wanted to tell stories in a way that moved people to action. First, the viewer needed to be able to relate their own experience to that of others. The story had to begin from a common place that felt honest and real. Looking at this room I am certain that we share in a heart-felt need to organize the South towards the common goal of justice. That we must unite to fight against a new and horrifying attack, against the deep rooted hatreds that keep us divided and exploitable, and for secure and peaceful ways to live in communities that will see us, our children, and our grandchildren into the future. So now I want to move into the drama and beauty of 2 stories about working people – some in Texas and some in Tennessee. The first story is about Jobs with Justice and a small part of our history. In the early 1970’s, in Nacogdoches, in east Texas not far from Jasper, a small group of workers who cleaned the buildings, tended the grounds, and worked in the cafeteria at Steven F. Austin state university went to Arthur Weaver who was head of the Nacogdoches NAACP. Annie Mae Carpenter had been fired from her job when at the end of a hard night, she was ordered to clean the mens’ bathrooms and politely refused. Her testimony is amazing. Mr. Weaver, with the help of a then young lawyer Larry Daves, filed a class action racial and sexual discrimination suit on the behalf of Steven F. Austin workers against the State of Texas. The class dragged on more than ten years with small victories but no resolution. As Larry Daves said, You can tear down the old institutions with the law – and they need to be – the legacy of slavery and all those remnants that still exist – but then you still need to build a new world, a future. And who can build this but workers. So he got together with Danny Fetonte, an organizer with a new union of state workers in Texas – CWA/TSEU – and, introduced by Mr Weaver, Danny organized 400 workers and community members in Nacogdoches into a union. The university announced that they would privatize food services. The union responded with a massive Jobs with Justice march through the town of Nacogdoches and in 1988 the Steven F. Austin workers got their first real victory – back pay and a union contract. The other story is from a very different piece that I’ve been working on. It’s based in east Tennessee. MORRISTOWN is an hour-length documentary which tells the stories of east Tennessee workers – Latino, black, and white – and their communities over the last six years. It examines two basic features of the modern world: 1. Flow of capital to the “cheapest” labor parts of the globe – whether Mexico, China, or occasionally the U.S. rural south. Leaving unemployed workers, unsustainable communities and widening inequity. 2. Pushed migration of workers from poorer countries across national borders. So this is a clip of migrant workers from Guanajuato picking tomatoes in Tennessee and living in barracks. I wanted to show this because I’ve edited about an hour of source material that’s available at cost in Spanish and English for use in organizing. I brought flyers and a few copies. I also hope to express some of the conditions the brother and sister from Imokolee are confronting.
|