Workers demonstrated in six Southern cities on Friday, November 1 against the prosecution of union activists and other participants in the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina. The Nov. 1 protests were held in Raleigh, Charlotte and Goldsboro, NC; Charleston and Columbia, SC; and San Antonio, TX, and organized by the Southern Workers Assembly (SWA), a coalition promoting rank-and-file labor activism and organizing across the South, formed at a gathering in Charlotte on Labor Day 2012 during protests at the Democratic National Convention. SWA was initiated by UE Local 150 in conjuntion with its organizing among Charlotte city workers which also led to the achievement of union dues checkoff.
Participating organizations in the Nov. 1 actions included the South Carolina AFL-CIO; UE Local 150, the North Carolina Public Service Workers Union; IATSE Local 322 in Charlotte; the Southern Piedmont Central Labor Council; Charlotte Mecklenburg Association of Educators; Farm Labor Organizing Committee; Southwest Workers Union; National Nurses Organizing Committee; the Carolina Workers Organizing Committee of fast food workers; OUR Walmart; and Triangle Jobs with Justice.
Thousands participated in weekly Moral Mondays protests in Raleigh beginning in April while the legislature was in session, and 940 were arrested, including eight UE Local 150 members. The first protester to go on trial was Saladin Muhammad, retired UE international representative, and on October 4 he was found guilty. Rev. William Barber, president of the state NAACP, organizer of Moral Mondays, and key speaker at UE’s national convention this year, went on trial along with 16 other clergy members on October 25. That trial has been continued to December 3 and 4.
Moral Mondays is directed against the extremist anti-worker and anti-democratic agenda of the right-wing Republican majority in the North Carolina legislature and the governor. The legislature has rolled back voting rights, drastically cut public education including the state university system, denied healthcare to hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians. In a state that already bans public employee collective bargaining and has an anti-union “right-to-work” law, the Republican majority is pursuing further anti-worker measures, such as banning dues checkoff and putting “right-to-work” and the bargaining ban into the state constitution.
The trial of UE Local 150 President Angaza Laughinghouse and Vice President Larsene Taylor was also supposed to be held on October 25 but has been postponed by the prosecution. Laughinghouse believes it is a deliberate tactic of the prosecutors to force people to travel from around the state and take time off from work for their scheduled trials, then postpone the trial and force them to do it again.