In the aftermath of the Alabama Mercedes-Benz union vote, I was really hoping to send out a different newsletter than the one I’m writing today. Last Friday, workers at the Tuscaloosa auto plant declined to unionize with the UAW, with 56% voting “no.”
I can’t offer an articulate answer to why this vote failed after the landslide victory of last month’s Volkswagen election. I wasn’t on the ground in Alabama, although I read about the corporation’s union-busting efforts, which were aggressive, compared to Volkswagen’s mostly neutral approach. I recommend getting more insight directly from workers at the plant, both “yes” and “no” voters, like these folks who spoke to Luis Feliz Leon and Jane Slaughter.
I do want to address one particular union-busting tactic from this campaign that stood out to me. Last week, as workers at the Vance Mercedes-Benz plant anxiously awaited their union vote, a message from a pastor suddenly appeared on their phones.
"Here in Alabama, community is important, and family is everything,” said Reverend Matthew Wilson in the short video clip. “We believe it’s important to keep work separate. But there’s no denying, a union would have an impact beyond the walls of our plant.”
Reverend Wilson also happens to be a sitting councilperson for Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His message was a Hail Mary from Mercedes-Benz, who likely saw the writing on the wall after the victory at Volkswagen. In the weeks leading up to the union election with the United Auto Workers, the company had mounted increasingly desperate tactics to persuade—or, according to complaints the union filed with the NLRB, to coerce and intimidate—their work force into voting no. Finally, the corporation enlisted the business-friendly clergyman and politician to their cause.
Hiring union-busting pastors might seem like an unusual move for Mercedes, but the tactic has deep roots in Alabama. When I saw Rev. Wilson’s video pop up on social media, I immediately thought of Robin D. G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe, which details how wealthy Alabama landlords in the 1930s tried to discourage sharecroppers from unionizing.
“Birmingham's black men of the cloth were notorious for using the pulpit to dissuade black workers from joining the labor movement, and some received healthy subsidies from corporate interests to do so. [Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company] and other companies built and maintained segregated churches for their employees and only hired pastors willing to disparage organized labor from the pulpit.”
Hammer and Hoe was a major source for my 2023 tapestry, titled Gospel, which explores 3 languages of labor organizing in the south: spirituality, textile craft, and folk music.
Even as Americans have generally drifted more secular over the last 100 years, there is still power in appealing to religious convictions in the south. As the UAW attempts to beat a new path through Tennessee, Alabama, and beyond, the union campaign has also taken up Christian allegories to make the argument for why these historically overlooked workers deserve collective bargaining rights.
A recent UAW video shows footage of Shawn Fain addressing a room of Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga. (As I’ll proudly note, the video also features a clip of Fain visiting my studio to see my tapestry.) His rhetoric falls somewhere between revolutionary and spiritual, and at one point, he directly recites Matthew 17:20.
“Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”
These words were spoken at a cathartic moment: the Volkswagen vote count had just rolled in, and workers could finally celebrate after two years of dogged organizing. They really had moved a mountain, after the union victory seemed impossible for over a decade.
Still, not every mountain is so readily moved. After yesterday’s upsetting news out of Alabama, I heard Shawn Fain turn to another Biblical allegory.
“This is a David and Goliath fight," he said in a statement to workers and press. “Sometimes Goliath wins a battle. But David wins the war.”
Over the last year in Chattanooga, many community solidarity efforts with the Volkswagen union were led by Reverend Dr. Charlotte Williams. A Methodist preacher and social worker, Rev. Charlotte grew up in Mobile, Alabama, where she witnessed race riots and police brutality against Black people. Through these experiences, she was struck by the church’s failure to stand up for its congregants. These early observations inspired a politically engaged style of faith leadership in which her ministry extends from the pulpit to the picket line.
Rev. Charlotte has made herself the opposite of the company preacher: a religious authority who acts in service of the people in political struggle. Of course, there’s plenty of historical precedent for this kind of preacher, especially within the Black freedom struggle: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a reverend, along with many civil rights leaders of his era.
This week, I’ve been reading about two “people’s preachers” who preceded Dr. King, in Gospel of the Working Class by Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll. The book opens with an anecdote about the Black southern preacher Owen Whitfield:
“He often told his congregants a story about one day in the field when he heard the hungry cry of his daughter come from the house and got angry.
‘I done worked, behaved myself, kept Your precepts,’ he cried out to the Lord, ‘and those that haven’t is getting along much better.’
And Whitfield heard God reply: ‘I bless you with enough product to fill many barns. Somebody’s gettin’ it. If you ain’t, that’s your fault, not Mine.’
Lesson learned: religion was not just about waiting for blessings to occur; it was about crying out against injustice, and challenging people to make their world anew.”
I’m returning to this book about two southern preachers and labor activists as I dive back into working on a series of tapestries about labor history in my hometown. Immediately after I finish the works, they’ll go on display at ICA Chattanooga in January 2025. Hopefully, after that, the exhibition will tour through some other cities.
I needed to come up with a show title, and as I cracked open this book, I realized Gospel of the Working Class was a perfect fit. In the contemporary south, labor struggle and Christian spirituality remain as deeply intertwined as they were in the 1930s. We have figures like Rev. Charlotte and Shawn Fain on the people’s side; movement leaders who drop scripture on the righteous path to justice. On behalf of the corporations, there seems to be no shortage of Reverend Wilsons: company preachers who happily defend capitalism from the pulpit.
The age-old questions remains: which side are you on?
I’m excited to begin my next tapestry this week. Shifting gears from the hottest contemporary labor news, I’ll be making a historical piece that centers the textile strikes of the 1930s in Chattanooga.
Thanks to research from CALEB and the People’s History Project, I’m reading some truly moving stories. When I summarized one of these historical moments to a friend, they said, “I just got chills!”
I really can’t wait to help bring this history of labor struggle back into the light. I want this project to anchor the current labor movement in Chattanooga back through time, reminding us of the brave working people who fought and won on the same ground.
Labor Intensive Recommendations
Hand To Mouth Roundtable Discussion — I’m speaking at this June 10 event at Stove Works to discuss labor, labor rights, art, process, and community support.
Chattanooga Rural/Metro Firefighters — in the first local union petition to go public since the Volkswagen vote, 20 workers announced their intent to join the International Association of Fire Fighters.
Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò — great book about the right’s pattern of overtaking identity politics and culture in general.