Union of Southern Service Workers forms in Columbia, aims to bring labor power to Southeast

After years organizing, 150 delegates from across the Southeast met inside a north Columbia convention hall Friday to launch the Union of Southern Service Workers with hopes their actions spark a region wide labor movement.

“We have power in numbers,” said Jamila Allen, a fast food worker from Durham, North Carolina, addressing the crowded convention hall. “What we can’t do on our own, we can do together.”

The new labor group aims to organize service workers from industries ranging from fast food and retail to warehouse workers and home health aides. Workers attended the summit from all over the South, coming from South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia and as far as Louisiana.

The USSW grew out of of Raise Up, a labor advocacy organization. The new union will be part of the Service Employees International Union, one of the nation’s largest unions. Raise Up first began as an extension of the Fight for $15, which seeks to raise the minimum wage.

Just 6% of workers in the South belong to a union, the lowest of any region in the country, according to Gallup.

That participation might be shifting due to a movement led by workers who have not traditionally been in unions. A Starbucks in Columbia is just one of dozens around the country to have gone on strike Thursday after forming a union in a sector that has not traditionally had any organized labor.

While the union is new, activists said Friday they are aspiring to transform low wage, high turnover jobs into stable, livable employment by rebuilding the multiracial southern labor movement that hasn’t been seen since the civil rights movement.

“Seeing everyone out in the crowd, it feels like we’re making history,” said Naomi Harris, 21, a daycare worker and an employee at a fast casual pizza chain who now works at a Quaker Steak and Lube near Columbia.

The emergence of the new union reflects the changing landscape of the American job market.

Today, four out of five American workers in the private sector are employed in the service economy, according to the Brookings Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. While unions were once associated with traditional “blue collar jobs,” their reach is increasingly being reported in sectors that have never traditionally had unions.

“We come from all over,” said Beth Schaffer, 38, from North Charleston, who works at fast food restaurant Checkers and as a gas station attendant. “(But) we’re all going through the same things. We need to make rent, put food on the table, make a better life for our kids.”

A seat at the table

Workers who’d never met greeted each other Friday as old friends.

Unplanned chanting regularly broke out during speeches and in work sessions.

The delegates expressed hope that the union will help address a common series of issues that plague their jobs, such as wage theft, the number of sick days, erratic scheduling and a lack of care for their health and safety.

“I don’t want the next generation to have to fight as hard as I’ve had to fight my entire life,” said Cummie Davis, a home health aide from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “If we give employers what they want from us they should give us what we need from them.”

Their list of demands includes equal pay, raising the minimum wage, protection from harassment and discrimination, a fair grievance process, an end to arbitrary suspensions, guaranteed paid sick leave and a recognition of a right to organize.

Above all, workers said they want greater equality in negotiating with their bosses.

“Once we have a seat at the table it’ll be a domino effect,” Naomi Harris said.

For many workers, the strength to meet their bosses on equal footing came from their own success with strikes and other forms “direct action.”

“We walked people off the job at a McDonalds in Raleigh,” said Derrick Bryant, 28, who had worked as a dishwasher, in a factory, and most recently at a Red Roof Inn. “It gave me goosebumps, the pressure we put on (management).”

This kind of direct action was seen by many at the summit as the best way to address grievances when bosses held a disproportionate amount of power.

In South Carolina, a historically anti-union state, labor organization Raise Up has had success coordinating walkouts and strikes to force corporate management to address worker grievances at individual stores. In the past-few months, Raise Up has helped organize strikes at a Midlands Dollar General and a MOD Pizza franchise.

A remark repeatedly expressed by workers Friday was that not only were they being underpaid, but their wages were being stolen. The Economic Policy Institute, which describes itself as a nonpartisan think tank that analyzes the economic status of low and middle income Americans, has estimated that in 10 states workers had on average $3,300 stolen from their paychecks each year, totaling $8 billion annually.

Union support has grown nationwide. A 2022 poll by Gallup said 71% of Americans approved of unions — the highest since 1965.

Addressing a cheering crowd, Mariah Parker, an organizer from Atlanta asked, “Who truly has the power? Who truly makes this country run? It’s y’all!”

Deep roots

Addressing grievances, many workers said, will mean overcoming challenges that workers don’t have to face in many other parts of the country.

“When we try to organize the South the same way we organize the North we lose,” said Charles Brave, the president of the South Carolina AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the country, representing 56 unions.

Workers on Friday described having to contend with what they called overtly anti-union laws and a racial divide that they say has only benefited employers.

But the USSW is not without a model.

“The South has deep deep history of organizing across race lines,” Parker said.

The largely forgotten history of labor organizing stretches back before the civil rights movement, and includes groups like the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, which mobilized workers on cotton plantations to “fight for higher wages and better treatment from the land owners,” according to a statement from Raise Up.

“It’s like an old oak tree: it was planted years ago and now it has new branches on the tree but the roots are old,” Brave said.

The “main opposition” for the union movement, according to Brave, are so-called right-to-work laws, which limits union activities in the work place. Energetic engagement not only with workers, but also with faith leaders and legislators could mobilize organized labor in the Southeast, according to Brave.

“If you change South Carolina,” Brave said, “you’re going to change the South.”