Collective Press: Nowhere to go but up -- Overcoming Overbearing Economic Royalists: St. Johns County Private Employment Is 99.8% Union-Free!

Issue # 8 / 2005
Nowhere to go but up -- Overcoming Overbearing Economic Royalists: St. Johns County Private Employment Is 99.8% Union-Free!

by Ed Slavin


The local Chamber of Commerce brags that only 0.2% of private sector workers in St. Johns County are unionized — it says that 0.1% belong to the Musicians' Union and 0.1% belong to the Communication Workers of America (CWA) (representing BellSouth telephone technicians).

This is an anti-union county. It is little wonder that employees working for companies like Northrop Grumman and Luhrs have no support from any union. Keeping St. Johns County union free is a shared goal of local Babbit-like businessmen, politicians, preachers and school administrators. For generations, St. Johns County has been run as a police state, without democratic institutions. A few local families dominate local politics, sometimes writing letters to local newspapers demanding to know how dare these people who moved here in the last 300 years tell them how to run their town. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a term for such businessmen: he called them "economic royalists" and "malefactors of great wealth."

Anti-union messages are insidiously promoted everywhere, with "respect for authority" promoted as a secular religion in a place where people are often without hope or opportunity. Local churches, which routinely promote social justice causes elsewhere, were segregated until the 1960s (or later), with some churches actually having African-Americans arrested in 1964 for attempting to attend "white" churches.

Anti-union messages are imparted by the Morris Communications owned St. Augustine Record and the Gannett-owned First Coast News. Local educational institutions parrot the anti-union propaganda, from kindergarten to college.

The forces of social control are formidable and they are resulting in destruction of the middle class in our country, as documented by the New York Times series on class in America.

Meanwhile, many of the local workers exploited by rapacious corporations vote Republican. Like "working class Tories" in England in the 1980s, they are deluded by bigots, thinking that hating gay people has anything to do with them or their families. President Lyndon Johnson predicted in 1964 that if his Civil Rights Act passed, the South would vote Republican for a generation. That time has expired.

St. Johns County, Florida reminds me of the cancer survivor and whistleblower in Oak Ridge, Tennessee who worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), seated only three feet from radioactive waste barrels and told to sit there when he was not out doing menial chores (which Ph.D. managers of Martin Marietta, the world's largest arms merchant assigned him to do). When I first met him in October 1991, the ORNL whistleblower told me, "I've got nowhere to go but up."

With only 0.2% union membership, St. Johns County has "nowhere to go but up." Workers should learn about unions. Small businesses should decline to contribute any more money to the Chamber of Commerce, an anti-union organization that sends much of its dues money to Washington, D.C. to lobby for Big Business causes, while opposing every piece of reform legislation ever proposed since the New Deal.

It is time to roll up our sleeves and help our friends and neighbors overcome the economic forces that keep them trapped in poverty. Preachers and teachers and other opinion leaders worth their salt must support the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively.

Those rights were enacted by Congress in the National Labor Relations Act in the 1930s and they are in danger of extinction in places like St. Johns County.