Nearly 30 years ago, in the wake of the infamous chicken plant fire in which 80 workers were injured or killed in Hamlet, N.C., our state elected officials passed legislation to protect North Carolinians’ rights to speak up about risks to our health and safety, wage theft, violence, and discrimination at work. Now it appears some legislators would undermine this legacy of the Hamlet fire victims and survivors—a benefit to all working people— for their own gain.
The Retaliatory Employment Discrimination Act (REDA) ensures that the state Department of Labor investigates alleged violations of workers’ protected activities, attempts resolution and settlement of valid worker complaints, and notifies workers of their right to pursue further legal action when settlement is not possible.
This spring, in an amendment to the 2021 North Carolina Farm Act (SB 605), Republican lawmakers sought to strip workers of their private right of action under REDA. They proposed to instead entrust the Department of Labor to make decisions about the merit of workers’ claims, knowing full well that over the past decade this office—long criticized by worker advocates for its pro-employer bias—found a meager 10 percent of worker claims to have merit.
Perhaps less shocking is that this amendment was filed by District 10 Senator Brent Jackson, who, as a grower, has been accused by at least seven employees of violations of minimum wage and other Fair Labor Standards Act protections—complaints protected by REDA. Although Jackson later tempered the language of the bill after pushback from advocates, and alternative language remains under discussion in the House, it is clear that the intent is to dissuade workers from taking legal action against their employers who violate the law, and make it harder for those workers who do pursue legal action.
Self-serving, anti-worker corruption like what we’re seeing today from Senator Jackson has infused the N.C. General Assembly for at least 120 years.
During the earliest decades of the twentieth century, when the state first began passing legislation to prohibit child labor, the N.C. Cotton Manufacturers’ Association held a tight grip on the legislative committees through which all child labor bills had to pass. Their open hostility to all labor regulations is best captured in a pamphlet, pithily titled“Child Labor” Legislation. In it, John F. Shenk, Chairman of the Legislative Committee of the NC Cotton Manufacturers’ Association, referred to advocates for child labor reform as “active agitators of labor legislation” who “have declared war against us.”
The anti-labor political culture in North Carolina continued to proliferate throughout the 1920s and 1930s and had an effect on the progressive New Deal labor reforms of that era. For example, only four Democrats in the U.S. Senate voted against the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which granted most workers the right to form unions and collectively bargain with their employers; Joseph Bailey from North Carolina was one of them. Notably, legislators from North Carolina and other southern states were also instrumental in excluding farmworkers and domestic workers from these protections, as well as from the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Later, members of the N.C. congressional delegation would be among the most outspoken critics of FDR’s progressive agenda and advocates of legislative efforts to roll back the New Deal labor reforms. The crowning achievement of these efforts was the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which gutted the NLRA and, among other things, opened the door for “right-to-work” legislation at the state level. The N.C. General Assembly immediately passed North Carolina’s “right-to-work” law, which helped stifle labor organization in the state for the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond.
Today, 30 years after the devastating Hamlet fire, North Carolina faces another crossroads in moral leadership, one in which the precarity of those who bring food to our tables has again been laid bare. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, “essential workers” across the food chain have been compelled to keep working despite great risks to their own health. As a result, in the first year of the pandemic at least half a million farmworkers nationwide caught the deadly virus, and at least 9,000 died. Here in North Carolina, conservative estimates widely believed to represent a significant undercount put the numbers at 5,856 infections and 24 deaths. Meanwhile, researchers have found that North Carolinians living in meatpacking counties faced statistically higher rates of COVID-19 death than those of us in non-meatpacking counties.
If anything, the pandemic has laid bare the absurdity of recognizing workers as essential, but refusing to protect them. How will our leaders respond to this moment of sacrifice and struggle? Will they stand with those who seek to further the injustice wrought on food chain workers only to protect their own agricultural business interests? Will they continue to foment a political culture that has enabled a long history of stifling action against workers’ rights? Or will they instead step up, as their predecessors did following the Hamlet fire, and work to protect those whose labor sustains us all?
As the 2021 N.C. Farm Act wends its way through the state House, we call on House representatives to strip the bill of all of its anti-worker stipulations, including all language making it harder for workers to prevail when pursuing a private right of action. If the General Assembly fails to protect workers’ rights, we urge Governor Roy Cooper to veto the bill.
Beyond the Farm Act, we implore North Carolinians to root out anti-worker corruption in the General Assembly. It’s time we push our elected officials in Raleigh and Washington, D.C., to protect workers from abuse and enshrine our right to organize and bargain collectively with our employers.
Nathan T. Dollar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. His research lies at the intersection of migration, labor, and population health. He also serves on the governing board for the North Carolina Farmworker Health Program.
Kevin Gomez-Gonzalez is a student at the UNC Hussman School of Media and Journalism. His stories cover labor, particularly in industries with predominantly Latino workforces. He is an intern with the Workers’ Rights Project at the N.C. Justice Center.
Angela Stuesse is a cultural anthropologist at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and author of the award-winning book Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South. @astuesse
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Op-Ed: It’s Time to Root Out Anti-Worker Corruption In the N.C. General Assembly
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Nearly 30 years ago, in the wake of the infamous chicken plant fire in which 80 workers were injured or killed in Hamlet, N.C., our state elected officials passed legislation to protect North Carolinians’ rights to speak up about risks to our health and safety, wage theft, violence, and discrimination at work. Now it appears some legislators would undermine this legacy of the Hamlet fire victims and survivors—a benefit to all working people— for their own gain.
The Retaliatory Employment Discrimination Act (REDA) ensures that the state Department of Labor investigates alleged violations of workers’ protected activities, attempts resolution and settlement of valid worker complaints, and notifies workers of their right to pursue further legal action when settlement is not possible.
This spring, in an amendment to the 2021 North Carolina Farm Act (SB 605), Republican lawmakers sought to strip workers of their private right of action under REDA. They proposed to instead entrust the Department of Labor to make decisions about the merit of workers’ claims, knowing full well that over the past decade this office—long criticized by worker advocates for its pro-employer bias—found a meager 10 percent of worker claims to have merit.
Perhaps less shocking is that this amendment was filed by District 10 Senator Brent Jackson, who, as a grower, has been accused by at least seven employees of violations of minimum wage and other Fair Labor Standards Act protections—complaints protected by REDA. Although Jackson later tempered the language of the bill after pushback from advocates, and alternative language remains under discussion in the House, it is clear that the intent is to dissuade workers from taking legal action against their employers who violate the law, and make it harder for those workers who do pursue legal action.
Self-serving, anti-worker corruption like what we’re seeing today from Senator Jackson has infused the N.C. General Assembly for at least 120 years.
During the earliest decades of the twentieth century, when the state first began passing legislation to prohibit child labor, the N.C. Cotton Manufacturers’ Association held a tight grip on the legislative committees through which all child labor bills had to pass. Their open hostility to all labor regulations is best captured in a pamphlet, pithily titled “Child Labor” Legislation. In it, John F. Shenk, Chairman of the Legislative Committee of the NC Cotton Manufacturers’ Association, referred to advocates for child labor reform as “active agitators of labor legislation” who “have declared war against us.”
The anti-labor political culture in North Carolina continued to proliferate throughout the 1920s and 1930s and had an effect on the progressive New Deal labor reforms of that era. For example, only four Democrats in the U.S. Senate voted against the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which granted most workers the right to form unions and collectively bargain with their employers; Joseph Bailey from North Carolina was one of them. Notably, legislators from North Carolina and other southern states were also instrumental in excluding farmworkers and domestic workers from these protections, as well as from the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Later, members of the N.C. congressional delegation would be among the most outspoken critics of FDR’s progressive agenda and advocates of legislative efforts to roll back the New Deal labor reforms. The crowning achievement of these efforts was the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which gutted the NLRA and, among other things, opened the door for “right-to-work” legislation at the state level. The N.C. General Assembly immediately passed North Carolina’s “right-to-work” law, which helped stifle labor organization in the state for the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond.
Today, 30 years after the devastating Hamlet fire, North Carolina faces another crossroads in moral leadership, one in which the precarity of those who bring food to our tables has again been laid bare. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, “essential workers” across the food chain have been compelled to keep working despite great risks to their own health. As a result, in the first year of the pandemic at least half a million farmworkers nationwide caught the deadly virus, and at least 9,000 died. Here in North Carolina, conservative estimates widely believed to represent a significant undercount put the numbers at 5,856 infections and 24 deaths. Meanwhile, researchers have found that North Carolinians living in meatpacking counties faced statistically higher rates of COVID-19 death than those of us in non-meatpacking counties.
If anything, the pandemic has laid bare the absurdity of recognizing workers as essential, but refusing to protect them. How will our leaders respond to this moment of sacrifice and struggle? Will they stand with those who seek to further the injustice wrought on food chain workers only to protect their own agricultural business interests? Will they continue to foment a political culture that has enabled a long history of stifling action against workers’ rights? Or will they instead step up, as their predecessors did following the Hamlet fire, and work to protect those whose labor sustains us all?
As the 2021 N.C. Farm Act wends its way through the state House, we call on House representatives to strip the bill of all of its anti-worker stipulations, including all language making it harder for workers to prevail when pursuing a private right of action. If the General Assembly fails to protect workers’ rights, we urge Governor Roy Cooper to veto the bill.
Beyond the Farm Act, we implore North Carolinians to root out anti-worker corruption in the General Assembly. It’s time we push our elected officials in Raleigh and Washington, D.C., to protect workers from abuse and enshrine our right to organize and bargain collectively with our employers.
Nathan T. Dollar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. His research lies at the intersection of migration, labor, and population health. He also serves on the governing board for the North Carolina Farmworker Health Program.
Kevin Gomez-Gonzalez is a student at the UNC Hussman School of Media and Journalism. His stories cover labor, particularly in industries with predominantly Latino workforces. He is an intern with the Workers’ Rights Project at the N.C. Justice Center.
Angela Stuesse is a cultural anthropologist at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and author of the award-winning book Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South. @astuesse
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Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.