Payday in The Guardian on the Historic “March for Mississippi”

Mike Elk was the only national reporter to attend the 5,000 person Historic "March on Mississippi" against Nissan.

Pro-union rally in Mississippi unites with community: “We Are Ready”

By Mike Elk, The Guardian

For a mile outside Canton Multipurpose Complex on Saturday, the road was backed up. Many cars sported bumper stickers, pro-Bernie and pro-union.

They came in school buses, hot rods, church vans and motorcycles, with license plates from Missouri, Texas, North Carolina, Illinois and Pennsylvania. A delegation of a dozen Nissan workers even came from Brazil, to support United Automobile Workers (UAW) activists who have faced illegal retaliation in a 13-year struggle to unionize the Japanese giant’s 5,000 workers in Mississippi.

“I feel their pain because we have been through the same thing with Mercedes,” said Kirk Garner of Vance, Alabama, who has been part of the decade-long UAW effort to unionize there.

Two weeks after the defeat of the Machinists Union at Boeing in South Carolina, an estimated 5,000 southern union activists gathered in Canton to lay the foundation of what they hope will be the large-scale community movements necessary to defeat anti-union forces nationwide – and in the White House.

To read the full article, go to The Guardian.

 

 

About the Author

Mike Elk
Mike Elk is an Emmy-nominated labor reporter and alumni of the Guardian. In addition to filing nearly 2,000 stories from 46 states, Elk traveled with Lula from Sáo Bernando do Campos all the way to the Oval Office in the White House. Credited by the Washington Post for being the first reporter to track the strike wave systematically, Elk started Payday Report using his NLRB settlement from being illegally fired for union organizing in 2015. He lives in his hometown of Pittsburgh and works frequently in Rio de Janeiro, where he attended college at PUC-Rio. He speaks both Portuguese and Pittsburghese fluently. His email is [email protected]

Be the first to comment on "Payday in The Guardian on the Historic “March for Mississippi”"

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.