Workers at Blue Bird Corp. in Fort Valley, Ga., launched a union drive to secure better wages, work-life balance and a voice on the job.

The company resisted them. History defied them. Geography worked against them.

But they stood together, believed in themselves and achieved an historic victory that’s reverberating throughout the South.

About 1,400 workers at the electric bus manufacturer voted overwhelmingly this month to join the United Steelworkers (USW), reflecting the rise of collective power in a part of the country where bosses and right-wing politicians long contrived to foil it.

“It’s just time for a change,” explained Rinardo Cooper, a member of USW Local 572 and a paper machine operator at Graphic Packaging in Macon, Ga.

Cooper, who assisted the workers at Blue Bird with their union drive, expects more Southerners to follow suit even if they face their own uphill battles.

Given the South’s pro-corporate environment, it’s no surprise that Georgia has one of the nation’s lowest union membership rates, 4.4 percent. North Carolina’s rate is even lower, 2.8 percent. And South Carolina’s is 1.7 percent.

Many corporations actually choose to locate in the South because the low union density enables them to pay poor wages, skimp on safety and perpetuate the system of oppression.

In a 2019 study, “The Double Standard at Work,” the AFL-CIO found that even European-based companies with good records in their home countries take advantage of workers they employ in America’s South.

They’ve “interfered with freedom of association, launched aggressive campaigns against employees’ organizing attempts and failed to bargain in good faith when workers choose union representation,” noted the report, citing, among other abuses, Volkswagen’s union-busting efforts at a Tennessee plant.

“They keep stuffing their pockets and paying pennies on the dollar,” Cooper said of companies cashing in at workers’ expense.

Chad Newcome confided little to his wife over the years about the failing pension fund that threatened their dreams, wanting to spare her the anxiety that haunted him day and night.

But two years ago, after congressional Democrats passed legislation saving dozens of multiemployer pension plans at risk of collapse, Newcome opened up about their brush with financial calamity and how he finally felt free to breathe.

Sadly, Republicans are imperiling the couple’s future all over again with their cruel gambit to cut spending on the backs of working people.

GOP House members last week rammed through a bill that would raise the nation’s borrowing limit and prevent America from defaulting on its debts—but only in exchange for draconian cuts that would cost 200,000 vulnerable children access to Head Start programs, end Meals on Wheels for a million struggling seniors and inexplicably ax housing support in the face of growing homelessness.

The bill would slash billions from schools serving low-income students. And it would claw back money from the 2021 American Rescue Plan, including funds allocated to save 130 or so multiemployer pension plans hurtling toward collapse because of Wall Street recklessness, corporate bankruptcies and industry consolidation, among other factors.

Multiemployer funds, including the one covering Newcome, combine contributions from two or more employers in manufacturing, trucking and other industries. Workers like Newcome, president of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 14614-1 and an electrician at Tri-County Electric in Morgantown, W.Va., paid into the funds for decades and planned their golden years around them.

These union workers played no role in the plans’ financial troubles. Yet they were the ones who stood to suffer if the funds went under, and it was their advocacy—through rallies, marches, phone calls, emails and post cards—that moved congressional Democrats to save the funds without the support of a single Republican in either the House or Senate.

“This is what we’ve been fighting for. We got the votes we needed,” a joyful Newcome told family members at the time, recalling he felt “like the weight of the world had been lifted off my shoulders.”

But harming working people is sport to pro-corporate Republicans, whose debt ceiling bill puts Newcome’s pension—and those of hundreds of thousands of other Americans—back on the chopping block.

He was known to be aggressive and argumentative, the kind of patron who made others at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh branch uneasy.

But one day last year, the man walked into the building in a much darker mood, harassed a librarian and threatened to kill her.

Fortunately, library workers had joined the United Steelworkers (USW) in 2019 and built safeguards into their first contract to address dangers exactly like this.

The librarian received a temporary transfer to another building. And the library system banned the patron, ensuring he wouldn’t turn up again either to look for the person he threatened or target somebody else.

April 28 is Workers Memorial Day in America and the Day of Mourning in Canada, a time to remember those killed, injured or sickened at work. It’s also a day when union workers rededicate themselves to the fight for safer working conditions and renew their pledge to look out for one another, along with others in the workplace, leveraging all of the power that collective action provides.

“We are open to the public, which means everybody is welcome to come in, and we do our best to serve everybody,” explained David King, a steward for USW Local 9562 and a librarian in the music, film and audio department at the system’s main location in Oakland.

“We’re proud of that. We’re sincerely proud that we’re one of the few truly public spaces still left. But that does come with some of these dangers,” he added, noting that library workers face patrons who create disruptions, brawl, carry in weapons, damage property, overdose in restrooms and even stalk them.

Because library management failed to adequately address these risks, union members stood in solidarity together and negotiated a contract that not only provides temporary transfers for endangered workers but includes notification procedures to alert workers at various branches when a patron is banned.

“That is a huge change from before we negotiated the contract,” King pointed out, noting that workers previously “had no recourse” if they were harassed. “They just had to put up with it. They just had to stay in the same location."

Dominick Sapien’s patient threw up during cardiac arrest several months ago, and he instinctively grabbed a suction tool to clear the man’s airway.

The device failed to turn on, so Sapien picked up another. When it also failed, he reached for a third. When that one broke apart, a quick-thinking Sapien flipped the patient on his side and, with a fellow paramedic performing CPR, manually scooped the vomit out of the man’s mouth to keep him from choking.

The need for functioning equipment and safer working conditions prompted Sapien and his colleagues at Frontier Ambulance to join the United Steelworkers (USW) in February, making them the first workers in decades to form a union in Wyoming.

They aren’t the only ones breaking barriers. Determined to secure good wages and a seat at the table, a growing number of workers are banding together and fighting back in industries and states that long attempted to silence them.

About 1,000 firefighters, paramedics, fire marshals, emergency dispatchers and mechanics in Fairfax County, Virginia, overwhelmingly voted to unionize last fall, advancing working people’s fight in a state that’s tried to divide workers and deter union membership for decades. Now, the county must bargain with public workers for the first time in about 40 years.

Workers at TCGplayer, an online trading card marketplace, last month formed the first union at an eBay-owned company in the United States, helping to pave the way for others in the notoriously anti-labor tech industry.

And undergraduate student workers at the University of Oregon just filed for a union election to combat low pay and other exploitation. They’re part of a wave of unionizing campaigns involving faculty and staff as well as undergraduate and graduate student workers at universities across the country.

“It’s a chance to change things for the better, and I think everybody really believed in that dream,” Sapien said of his own successful union drive in Wyoming, a so-called right-to-work state with relatively few union members right now.

States with right-to-work laws permit workers to receive all of the benefits of union representation without paying even a small fee for services. These laws, pushed by corporations and right-wing politicians, undermine worker solidarity and starve unions of the resources they need to bargain good contracts, pursue grievances and otherwise fight for members.