Nissan's Mississippi Plant Latest Battleground for UAW in Southern Plants
The National Labor Relations Board accused Nissan of violating workers’ rights by creating a uniform policy for its workers at its Canton, Mississippi plant.
According to the charges, Nissan introduced a policy in 2014 that barred workers from wearing pro- or anti-union clothing at its Canton facility and at its plants in Smyrna and Decherd, Tennessee. Employees were expected to wear company-issued pants and shirts, and visible writing underneath those clothes was prohibited.
The United Auto Workers made the complaints leading to the charges, according to the Associated Press. The union has long sought to unionize workers at Southern U.S. manufacturing facilities with limited success. Last week, skilled trades workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted to join the UAW, the first victory for the union in decades.
A Nissan spokesman said the policy is voluntary and that employees could wear whatever they wanted as long as it adhered to the company’s dress code.
“Nissan’s uniform program is designed to help achieve the highest standards of safety and quality in all our manufacturing facilities,” Nissan spokesman David Reuter told the AP. “Employees have been able, and will continue to be able, to wear the clothing of their choice as long as it complies with the Nissan manufacturing dress code.”
According to the report, Reuter couldn’t provide documents stating that the dress code was only voluntary. A company handbook stated that employees had to wear shirts, pants and shorts provided by the automaker, and that if they wore undershirts, they could have no writing on them.
The NRLB’s regional director in New Orleans said Nissan doesn’t have a reason to ban T-shirts with writing on them.
“The T-shirts don’t hurt the cars,” Kathleen McKinney, the regional director of the labor board’s New Orleans office, told the Associated Press. “We consider that policy to be overbroad.”
The complaint is also targeting a temporary employee agency that provides Nissan with workers during especially busy plant periods. In March, UAW officials told the Wall Street Journal that they would target Nissan and its “abuse” of those temp workers, according to UAW Vice President Gary Casteel, who is in charge of the union’s presence at Southern plants.
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Well 46, social "science" professors construct the world they live in. Marx is alive and well and sipping coffee in the faculty lounge. All is bought and paid for with your tax dollars and your children's lifetime of debt. They can afford to scold the job creators and taxpayers. They never have to create a nickel of wealth. They just suck it down like a cold beer.
@Xeranar Thank you for your detailed reply to my request for your veiwpoint on government functions. Overall, and at the risk of ruining my reputation for individual freedom, at least with some, I would say that that sounds like a pretty reasonable and comprehensive list, modulo a couple of caveats. We have got to fix our healthcare cost structure without reducing doctors to the level of, for example, a heating and AC technician. Mainly that means removing antitrust exemptions for insurance companies, and implenting reasonable controls and patent lives on pharmaceuticals. Most of the pharmaceutical companies are owned by old Euro aristocracy interests if I am not mistaken, and they are quite happy to squeeze all the oligopilistic profits they can out of US consumers' pockets. Perhaps a provision that pharmaceuticals sold in the US must be sold at a price no higher than the lowest price that they are sold anywhere, coupled with shortening the time to generic availability? And while I don't want to have to defend the current policies of the Republican party (if they even have a modicum of defendability), but yo have to recognize that the Democrat party has been riding on the coattails of just opposing what the Republicans want to do, and for the most part they get free publicity and support from the newspapers of record. I would feel more comfortable if the US left were more like some Latin American Social Democrat or Christian Democrat parties, though I believe the tent should be large enough to not be restricted only to those of a Christian persuasion. I agree that if we provided free education to those who demonstrate an ability to benefit from it, that society would reap benefits well in excess of cost. The waste of talent due to unaffordibility of education is a shame. And the dampering effect of huge student loans on trying to invest in startups for new ideas is a second, more hidden cost, but real nevertheless. And of course, regulation should not be so much administratively created as legislatively created, and with room for free and open debate, rather than having a situation where government agencies set policies according to their own narrow agendas. I am thinking primarily of EPA, USDA and Dept of Ed, though there are clearly other offenders. But I have to say that if that is the type of policies you advocate in your classrooms, I might disagree with some details of some of them, but as long as you didn't dictate that students had to give only the answers you thought were acceptable in the area of policies, I wouldn't consider it a proto-Marxist education, if my son was sitting in such a class. More like a call to return to first principles, something this country clearly needs. Your lion analogy to capitalism is a pretty succinct and accurate metaphor for the situation the US is in vis-a-vis capitalism today. I also agree that we need to get costs for national defense under better control. Clearly we could defend our country better with less expenditures, if the fraud, waste and abuse components were drastically reduced. Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC (ret.)'s essay "War is a Racket" makes a pretty good argument for national defense without war profiteering. Should be required reading for every student involved in any way in studying social sciences, government policy or the like. To me, the evidence seems clear that in your case, calling you a Marxist or even ivory tower theorist amounts to a de facto troll. Although I know it is an unrealistic hope, I wish people here could stick to debating topics they have differing viewpoints on, and not read extra baggage into people's backgrounds.