After a bruising three-year fight, workers at school bus manufacturer Blue Bird in Fort Valley, Georgia, voted May 12 to join United Steelworkers (USW) Local 697.
“It’s been a long time since a manufacturing site with fourteen hundred people has been organized, let alone organized in the South, let alone organized with predominantly African American workers, and let alone in the auto industry,” said Maria Somma, organizing director with the USW. “It’s not a single important win. It’s an example of what’s possible — workers wanting to organize and us being able to take advantage of a time and a policy that allowed them to clear a path to do so.” The high-turnout vote was 697 to 435.
At two factories and a warehouse near Macon, the workers build school buses and an array of specialty buses. Blue Bird is the second-largest bus manufacturer in the country, after Daimler Truck’s Thomas Built Buses. The United Auto Workers (UAW) represent workers at a Thomas Built facility in North Carolina.
The main issues in Georgia were pay and safety. Workers began organizing at the height of the pandemic in the summer of 2020. They overcame a fierce anti-union campaign in a right-to-work state where only 4.4 percent of workers are union members. But Somma adds that workers tapped into local union networks. “People think the South is nonunion, but we have a lot of members in middle Georgia,” she said.
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