Mississippi Yearning: Some Nissan Workers Want a Union Vote

DETROIT — The actor Danny Glover has enlisted on the side of Nissan workers in Canton, Miss., who asked him for help in getting what they call a fair vote on whether the roughly 3,000-worker plant there should unionize, he said at a news conference on Monday. The 10-year-old plant employs a mix of permanent and long-term temporary workers. Some employees have complained that lower-paid temporary workers jeopardize job security and depress overall wages.

Mr. Glover said he was approached by the plant workers two years ago during a civil rights event in Jackson, Miss., celebrating Medgar Evars, whose murder in 1963 gave a national focal point for the Civil Rights movement.

“I’m a storyteller,” Mr. Glover said. “I listened to their story and they were telling about details of themselves being in some sort of jeopardy.”

The actor was in Detroit on Monday to take part in a news conference, held adjacent to the North American International Auto Show, on behalf of the Mississippi Alliance for Fairness at Nissan, a coalition that includes some factory workers, religious leaders, legislators and civil rights leaders. The coalition is working with the United Auto Workers union.

The Rev. Isiac Jackson Jr., chairman of the coalition, said the use of long-term temporary workers at the plant makes second-class citizens out of some Mississippians. Such workers do the same jobs as permanent employees but have no job security, limited benefits and scant recourse if they are injured or laid off, he said. He added that Nissan had told employees that the company would leave Mississippi if workers organized a union.

A Nissan spokesman, David Reuter, interviewed at Nissan’s display in Detroit’s Cobo Center, said the company was operating within its legal rights. He said Nissan employees would be hired from within the temporary employee groups at the plant, and that Nissan had placed new products at the plant, which now assembles six kinds of Nissan vehicles. The automaker announced last week that it would begin building the next-generation Nissan Murano crossover sport utility vehicle at the plant in 2014.

Nissan has invested $2.5 billion in Mississippi over the plant’s life so far, Mr. Reuter said. It moved body-on-frame construction to the Canton plant from Tennessee, including the Frontier pickup and the Xterra sport utility vehicle, and it will begin building the new Sentra sedan there in the spring, Mr. Reuter said.

Coalition members say that Nissan uses company meetings and roundtables to push a nonunion agenda and that supervisors have said unionization at the plant would lead Nissan to shut operations there. The coalition members say they want an opportunity for pro-union presentations to be equally represented and for a fair vote to be taken in the future.

Mr. Reuter said that previous organizing efforts at the plant had failed and that Nissan had no obligation to welcome union presentations on its own property. “If interest groups want to solicit our employees, they can do so outside of the plant,” he said.

Under federal labor law, if more than 30 percent of a plant’s employees sign cards expressing interest in organizing, unions must be allowed into plants to discuss organization. An organizing election is held and monitored by the National Labor Relations Board. Such a card campaign is not under way at the Canton facility.

Nissan says that the wages it pays at the plant are significantly higher than the average for Mississippi and that most employees in the Jackson area are pleased with their pay. Mr. Jackson and others in the coalition say that represents exploitation of the local labor force. “It’s about Mississippi continuing the plantation mentality,” Mr. Jackson said.

In an e-mail, Mr. Reuter said: “The allegations being made by the U.A.W. against Nissan are unfounded. Nissan employees in Canton enjoy jobs that are among the most secure in Mississippi and offer some of the highest manufacturing wages in the state, strong benefits, a working environment that exceeds industry standards and an open dialog based on transparency and mutual respect. Nissan employees have conducted organizing attempts in the past that never gained enough support to lead to a vote, and just as with past efforts, the U.A.W.’s current campaign in Canton, Miss., has received little interest among employees.”