A Short Q&A with the Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power Contributors
Today’s interview is with David Anderson and Drew McKevitt, Professors of History at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, Louisiana.
Tell us a little bit about your essay, “From ‘the Chosen’ to the Precariat: Southern Workers in Foreign-owned Factories since the 1980s.”
We set out to explain why many workers in foreign-owned factories in the South rejected the post-World War II labor-management “bargain” because of their adopted identity as a “chosen” professional class. Since the 1980s, Southern boosters have attracted foreign-owned factories to the region by offering lucrative incentive packages and the promise of a hard-working, non-union workforce. The boosters have been particularly successful in recruiting foreign-owned automobile assembly plants and automotive parts suppliers, with the region’s primary attraction being its self-professed identity as the “anti-Detroit,” a term we use in the chapter, which includes a rejection of the Fordist assembly line methods and a collective bargaining arrangement with its workers. Originally situated between large cities and college towns, these foreign-owned “transplants” have pushed deeper into the more remote and rural South, with the promise of improving the lives of the region’s poorest residents. While Southern workers have welcomed the job opportunities the foreign transplants have provided, the effect has been the creation of a three-tiered industrial workforce. At the top are those workers, directly employed by the company, who consider themselves “the chosen,” and identify as professional middle-class employees who have no need for a union. In the middle are those class-conscious workers who advocate for union membership and working-class solidarity against management. At the bottom are the increasing number of “permatemps” who management hires from third-party employment agencies and who, lacking job security, comprise part of the emerging “precariat” class produced by neoliberal globalization.
What sparked your interest in labor history?
DAVE: As with many labor historians, my interest in labor and working-class history was inspired by a combination of things. First, was my own work experience. Second, was observing others at work. When I lived in Los Angeles in the 1980s, I wanted to know the reason why those who worked the hardest didn’t earn the most money and exercised relatively little power over their lives. Finally, like many labor historians, I was fortunate to meet an inspirational professor and mentor; in my case, it was through taking classes on labor and social history from Jay Coughtry at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
DREW: I wasn’t trained as a labor historian. I still identify as a historian of U.S. foreign relations. But ever since I started dissertation research in graduate school I’ve been interested in the impact of foreign capital, especially Japanese, on manufacturing in the United States. In my 2017 book, Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America, I wrote about the arrival of Honda in central Ohio in the early 1980s, where the company opened the first Japanese-owned auto plant in the United States. In doing the research for those chapters, I realized that I couldn’t write about the local experience of Japan’s global capital without understanding the impact on the local workforce. In many ways, my interest in this project with Dave grew out of that experience engaging with labor history for the first time.
Why do you think that the study of labor history is important today?
DAVE: The study of labor (and working-class) history in all of its forms (work-centered studies, institutional trade union histories, community studies) provides one of the best ways to learn about power, progress, and human agency. Labor history is one of the most effective ways to study the formation of class, gender, political, racial and ethnic identities. It is particularly important today to help us understand increasing inequality amid the decline of the New Deal liberalism and the rise of neo-liberalism (and reactionary Trumpism) and to find alternative models for a more equitable and sustainable future.
DREW: As a historian who is relatively new to the field of labor history, I see the study of it as essential to understanding our current social, political, and economic moment. I don’t think it’s possible to see the rise of Trumpism in the places we write about, for instance, without understanding how transnational capital has connected some workers to the promise of high wages, good benefits, and social respect – the restoration of some “great” America, in white minds – that they previously believed was denied to them by a coalition represented in the synecdoche of Detroit – corrupt labor unions, greedy companies, a government that, in their eyes, prioritized the needs of people of color and women over white men. As a historian I’ve always had my mind on the present, and I’ve been drawn to projects that help us explain how we got to our contemporary moment.
What are you two working on now?
DAVE: In addition to turning this chapter into a book, I’m tracing the rise and fall of labor-liberalism through a history of northeast Texas’s Lone Star Steel plant from its founding during World War II to the present.
DREW: My next book project explores the connections between U.S. foreign relations and U.S. gun violence. Using a kind of microhistory of the 1992 shooting death of a 16-year-old Japanese exchange student in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I want to understand how Americans’ political and cultural approaches to guns and their consequence have been shaped by larger international and transnational contexts.