A num­ber of pro-labor groups, how­ev­er, are pool­ing their resources in order to make the voice of the Left loud­er in state pol­i­tics. ​“It would be nice for peo­ple to have some sense that there are sane peo­ple in Ten­nessee,” says Thomas Walk­er, who orga­nizes with the Unit­ed Cam­pus Work­ers (UCW), a high­er-edu­ca­tion union affil­i­at­ed with the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Work­ers of Amer­i­ca and head­quar­tered in Knoxville.

As long as the GOP is at the helm, with Repub­li­cans in the state leg­is­la­ture quash­ing a $1 raise to the min­i­mum wage for com­pa­nies that don’t pro­vide health insur­ance and block­ing fed­er­al fund­ing to expand Tennessee’s Med­ic­aid pro­gram, pro­gres­sives in the region will prob­a­bly con­tin­ue to feel disheartened.

In Ten­nessee, labor orga­niz­ers tend to brace them­selves for the worst when they see their state’s name in a nation­al head­line. And so far, the news this year has been par­tic­u­lar­ly grim. The after­shocks from the Unit­ed Auto Work­ers’ his­toric defeat in Chat­tanooga are still being cov­ered by major media out­lets ; just last month, the Depart­ment of Labor Sta­tis­tics revealed that Ten­nessee leads the nation in min­i­mum-wage jobs.

The UCW is one of 25 pro-labor groups unit­ing behind the ​“Put the Peo­ple First” coali­tion, which will hold May Day events this week in Mem­phis, Knoxville, Chat­tanooga, John­son City and Cookeville.

The pro­grams planned on May 1 — a hol­i­day, also known as Inter­na­tion­al Work­ers’ Day, meant to cel­e­brate the labor move­ment — will dif­fer among the five cities. John­son City will have a march; Chat­tanooga a ​“speak-out”; Mem­phis a ​“people’s assem­bly.” But all will cer­tain­ly include some sort of ​“food com­po­nent,” accord­ing to Walk­er. After all, he jokes, ​“That’s the South!”

Though ​“Put the Peo­ple First” offi­cial­ly launched just last month, it has its roots in a broad spec­trum of pro­gres­sive move­ments through­out the state. As Walk­er puts it, the cam­paign is focused on ​“eco­nom­ic jus­tice, edu­ca­tion jus­tice, and democ­ra­cy.” Specif­i­cal­ly, he says, activists are push­ing for a liv­ing wage for all work­ers; rein­vest­ment in pub­lic edu­ca­tion; and an end to attacks on res­i­dents’ right to vote, protest and col­lec­tive­ly bar­gain in their work­places. And they hope that the wide range of issues will inspire indi­vid­ual groups through­out Ten­nessee to col­lab­o­rate on future endeavors.

​“Giv­en the rel­a­tive strength of the Right ver­sus the Left in this state,” says Walk­er, ​“we need to con­nect more broad­ly with our part­ners. That’s some­thing we’ve always tried to do on a small­er scale, but nev­er with greater state-wide coordination.”

The inau­gur­al action of Put the Peo­ple First took place on March 11, when hun­dreds of sup­port­ers ral­lied on the Nashville capi­tol build­ing steps and deliv­ered a let­ter to Gov­er­nor Bill Haslam out­lin­ing their ​“dif­fer­ent vision of Tennessee.”

In a speech to the crowd, UCW local pres­i­dent Tom Ander­son announced the birth of the coali­tion: ​“Our gov­er­nor, this leg­is­la­ture and their mil­lion­aire back­ers are try­ing to destroy 150 years of pro­gres­sive reforms that the work­ing class has won in our state,” he said. ​“Today we’re launch­ing a move­ment to ​‘Put the Peo­ple First,’ just like our sis­ters and broth­ers did with Moral Mon­days in North Carolina.”

These so-called ​“Moral Mon­days” — recur­ring protests staged by grass­roots groups against North Carolina’s increas­ing­ly con­ser­v­a­tive leg­is­la­ture — have inspired oth­er move­ments else­where in the South, most recent­ly in Geor­gia. For its part, Put the Peo­ple First intends to emu­late Moral Mon­days by mobi­liz­ing a sim­i­lar­ly mul­tira­cial, mul­ti­faith, mul­ti-issue pro­gres­sive coali­tion in a tra­di­tion­al­ly con­ser­v­a­tive state. Unlike in Geor­gia, how­ev­er, Put the Peo­ple First is not explic­it­ly adopt­ing the ​“Moral Mon­day” moniker.

Walk­er explains,

At the meet­ings here in Knoxville where we’re plan­ning May Day, we talk about Moral Mon­days as an inspi­ra­tion. I mean, we don’t feel like we’re at a place for a lot of rea­sons to call our­selves a Moral Mon­day and then exact­ly repli­cate what they’re doing … But in con­tent I think we are real­ly try­ing to shoot for that, cer­tain­ly when we talk about our strat­e­gy and what we want to accomplish.

Thus far, the size and sta­mi­na of Moral Mon­days in North Car­oli­na have been due in part to a unique geo­graph­i­cal cir­cum­stance. The state’s Repub­li­can-con­trolled leg­is­la­ture is sit­u­at­ed in down­town left-lean­ing Raleigh, where orga­niz­ers can mobi­lize thou­sands of pro­gres­sives on a reg­u­lar basis.

Walk­er doesn’t feel that Ten­nessee, where coali­tion mem­bers are spread out across a wide state with impor­tant region­al dis­tinc­tions, has quite the same dynam­ics. After all, a North Car­oli­na Moral Mon­day protest on Feb­ru­ary 8 of this year brought out a crowd num­ber­ing in the ten thou­sands, a lev­el of atten­dance that Ten­nessee actions have yet to attract. In addi­tion, UCW is head­quar­tered in Knoxville, a three-hour dri­ve from the capi­tol build­ing in Nashville.

But it is still ear­ly. ​“It took North Car­oli­na sev­en to eight years to build [Moral Mon­days],” explains Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Com­mit­tee Pro­gram Direc­tor Tim Franzen in an inter­view with The Nation mag­a­zin e .

Even if actions in Ten­nessee haven’t been able to match North Car­oli­na in fre­quen­cy or num­ber of par­tic­i­pants, the num­ber of orga­ni­za­tions rep­re­sent­ed in Put the Peo­ple First is still remark­ably inclu­sive. In addi­tion to UCW, the prin­ci­ple orga­niz­er, two dozen oth­er groups have unit­ed behind the cam­paign, includ­ing the Ser­vice Employ­ees Inter­na­tion­al Union Local 205, Unit­ed Auto­mo­bile Work­ers, Work­ers Inter­faith Net­work, Jobs With Jus­tice, the Ten­nessee chap­ter of the NAACP, and Work­ers’ Dignity/​Dignidad Obrera.

Par­tic­i­pa­tion of some of the affil­i­at­ed groups has been lim­it­ed to endorse­ment and assis­tance with pub­lic­i­ty. But oth­er groups, such as the Nashville Stu­dent Orga­niz­ing Com­mit­tee (NSOC), have been more deeply involved in build­ing the coali­tion — and they’ve expand­ed their own inter­sec­tion­al advo­ca­cy as a result. On April 14, NSOC orga­nized a protest inside the capi­tol under the ban­ner of Put the Peo­ple First, call­ing for stronger labor rep­re­sen­ta­tion, a repeal of new vot­er iden­ti­fi­ca­tion require­ments, and an expan­sion of Tennessee’s Med­ic­aid program.

This was not the first time this year that NSOC, which rep­re­sents stu­dents from more than four col­leges in Nashville, had protest­ed at the capi­tol. But while its pre­vi­ous actions focused exclu­sive­ly on the civ­il-rights issue of vot­er sup­pres­sion, the launch of Put the Peo­ple First con­vinced NSOC lead­ers to broad­en the group’s demands to pri­or­i­tize all work­ers. Says Justin Jones, a lead orga­niz­er from NSOC:

We start­ed with vot­er ID, but now we’ve tak­en on issues of eco­nom­ic jus­tice. … In the mod­ern civ­il rights move­ment we see a big con­nec­tion between civ­il rights and eco­nom­ic jus­tice. They’re insep­a­ra­ble. Civ­il rights are work­ers rights. We see that the civ­il rights vio­la­tions that are hap­pen­ing now are eco­nom­ic. [With the] liv­ing wage, for exam­ple: The major­i­ty of peo­ple work­ing these low-wage jobs are peo­ple of color.

Chat­tanooga for Work­ers has also tak­en a lead­ing role in the Put the Peo­ple First cam­paign. The labor advo­ca­cy group was formed by a hand­ful of ​“com­mu­ni­ty vol­un­teers” dur­ing the Unit­ed Auto­mo­bile Work­ers’ recent union dri­ve at the Chat­tanooga Volk­swa­gen plant because they ​“saw that the work­ers real­ly need­ed com­mu­ni­ty sup­port,” says orga­niz­er Katie Cow­ley-Car­pen­ter. The group has since grown to about 100 peo­ple and has tak­en respon­si­bil­i­ty, along with help from UCW and fund­ing from SEIU, for the Chat­tanooga May Day event.

Chat­tanooga for Work­ers, says Cow­ley-Car­pen­ter, is also very inter­est­ed in help­ing to grow a Left-led move­ment in Ten­nessee in the style of Moral Mon­days. ​“Per­son­al­ly, I wish we were call­ing this coali­tion Moral Mon­days,” she says. ​“And we may even­tu­al­ly do that. I think that we’re still work­ing on build­ing our base before we com­mit to that, but we’re def­i­nite­ly in that same spirit.”

Addi­tion­al­ly, the bud­ding move­ment includes fast-food work­ers rep­re­sent­ing the Show Me 15 cam­paign, the mid-South incar­na­tion of Fight for 15 push­ing for a $15 min­i­mum wage in the region. Accord­ing to one orga­niz­er in the group, who asked not to be named, fast-food work­ers ​“have been at the table” since the first meet­ings of Put the Peo­ple First. The orga­niz­er adds that Show Me 15 will def­i­nite­ly make an appear­ance at the May Day event in Memphis.

With so many allies show­ing their sup­port, Walk­er says, the UCW intends to take a ​“social jus­tice union” approach to Put the Peo­ple First’s forth­com­ing work — mean­ing that the groups involved will be advo­cat­ing both on behalf of their own mem­bers and on behalf of every­one affect­ed by the aus­ter­i­ty pol­i­tics and anti-work­er leg­is­la­tion dom­i­nat­ing the state.

​“The issues at hand,” he explains, ​“real­ly affect the lives of mil­lions of peo­ple in this state. … We’re try­ing to both rep­re­sent the imme­di­ate pro­gram and inter­ests of our mem­bers, but in a way that is more broad­ly focused on soci­ety at large.”



The Put the Peo­ple First coali­tion has more events planned for this sum­mer, but the details haven’t been hashed out. That’s some­thing that will be dis­cussed at the events this week, Walk­er says — like­ly over barbecue.

Full dis­clo­sure: The UAW and the CWA are web­site spon­sors of In These Times. Spon­sors have no role in edi­to­r­i­al content.