Ellington

OXFORD—I remember my late father, a tool and die maker, telling me with pride how the company he worked for in central North Carolina paid fair wages, offered good benefits and treated workers with respect. "They do that to keep the union out," he said. As I got older and more jaded about business practices in America, I wondered, "How would Dad's company have treated its workers if it didn't have to worry about a union?"

Chip Wells knows the answer: Even the unofficial presence of a union and its supporters help workers long before an election is held and can force a company to act right. You may recall stories about Wells, the 44-year-old, 12-year worker at the Nissan plant in Canton, father of two and veteran with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He's also veteran of a 15-month battle with Nissan because he supports a vote to determine whether his fellow workers can join the United Auto Workers.

That battle hopefully ended this month with Nissan officials agreeing to approximately $6,500 in disability and back pay for Wells, whose pro-union views were met with such hostility by managers that he had to take unpaid medical leave. The National Labor Relations Board ruled that Nissan's treatment of Wells constituted unfair labor practices. Still, the board did not make the company provide compensation.

Nissan's agreement this month to compensation payments "was the minimum they could have done," Wells said. "I'm disappointed or mad or whatever that I had to fight just to get what I was entitled to."

However, he said, he is satisfied with the decision. "When they saw the pastors were not going to leave me hanging ... and they started getting questions from me and the outside, (Nissan) said ... 'We better go ahead and settle up,'" he said.

The "pastors" are members of the Mississippi Alliance for Fairness at Nissan (MAFFAN), a key organization in the years-long grassroots effort to get Nissan to agree to an intimidation-free union election and to address concerns about working conditions such as a years-long drought in pay raises, arbitrary decisions on work shifts and hours, the hiring of temporary workers, workplace safety and other issues.

MAFFAN embraced Wells' case as a prime example of what can happen when workers have no voice in a plant that ironically was financed in part through hundreds of millions of Mississippi taxpayer dollars.

Nissan "evidently know(s) they have been participating in some practices that violate his rights as a citizen and worker," said the Rev. Melvin Chapman, a MAFFAN member and pastor of the Sand Hill Baptist Church in Edwards.

Here's Nissan spokesman Justin P. Saia's emailed response to the Wells case: "Nissan has a well-known process for employees to file for short-term disability, as well as a ... process for evaluating and resolving employment issues. ... Nissan and the employee were able to reach a satisfactory outcome."

Wells isn't the only employee at Nissan's Canton plant whose pro-union views have gotten him into trouble. Calvin Moore, an 11-year veteran who worked in the body shop, was terminated in March 2014 for what the UAW publication Our Voices called "trumped up" and non-specific charges that really were a cover for management's anger at Moore's outspoken support of a union. After a campaign that included international support from as far away as Brazil and a Jackson-area student protest, Moore was re-instated with two months' back pay.

The hovering presence of the UAW office on Nissan Parkway and the growing grassroots movement around it may have been factors in other recent actions by the giant automaker. Workers finally got a pay raise after the UAW complained that many workers had gone nearly seven years without one. Following the UAW and MAFFAN's longstanding complaints about the company's growing dependency on temporary workers who receive less pay with few or no benefits, the company announced a new shortened timetable for temporary workers to be eligible for full-time, permanent status.

The UAW and MAFFAN's rallying cry that "Labor Rights Are Civil Rights" could also have been echoing in Nissan officials' ears when the company announced a $500,000 education grant to Canton and $100,000 gift to the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute. "Ultimately, the choice on who represents employees is theirs and theirs alone," Saia said. "Nissan respects the right of our employees to decide who should represent them." People like the Rev. Melvin Chapman will keep reminding Nissan of such claims. "We intend to keep voicing the necessary need to do the right thing. We certainly hope it is having an impact."

Joe Atkins is a veteran journalist, columnist, and professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi. Email him at [email protected].