Jason Vorhees/Macon Telegraph
Alex Perkins, an organizer for the Steelworkers, speaks at a meeting with members of the union’s bargaining committee, June 21, 2023. Workers at the Blue Bird plant in Fort Valley, Georgia, voted to unionize in May.
FORT VALLEY, GEORGIA – Last week, the newly formed union at electric school bus maker Blue Bird’s plant in Fort Valley, Georgia, held its first bargaining session with management, two months after workers voted to unionize with the United Steelworkers. The two sides set ground rules for the upcoming negotiations, which could take several months and even years, given recent precedent with employers. Management agreed at least in principle to set up a process to redress worker complaints before reaching the first contract and also to let USW safety experts conduct a walk-through of the worksite.
The company recognized the union back in May, after an election that was hailed at the time as a victory for the Biden administration’s efforts to try to encourage union membership at companies receiving industrial-policy subsidies. Over the next five years, Blue Blue will receive a billion dollars in revenue from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean School Bus Program, funded by the bipartisan infrastructure law.
So far, Blue Bird has complied with the bargaining procedure. But inside the plant, workers say they’ve faced a more hostile environment from managers since the vote, including modifications to company policy.
The company changed their rules for lunch breaks, effectively shortening them for employees who chose to leave the worksite. Managers have ramped up disciplinary action against workers, and several workers have been fired. As part of the crackdown on informal policies that bosses previously let slide, the company handed out new employee handbooks for the first time in years.
The Steelworkers victory at Blue Bird achieves a goal sought by generations of the company’s workers, who have tried to unionize since the 1960s.
“It’s kind of like they’re trying to send a message that if you want to be a part of the union, this is how it’s going to be now,” said Craig Corbin, a worker on the floor at Blue Bird and a member of the bargaining committee.
In response, the Steelworkers sent a letter to Blue Bird in June outlining concerns from workers and requesting additional information. The union’s bargaining committee raised the issue to management during their first negotiating session but said they would only submit complaints to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), if necessary, once they conduct a further investigation.
In a statement to the Prospect, Blue Bird denied any charges of unlawful retaliation against workers since the union vote. Asked about the letter from the union, the company would not go into detail about the situation.
“We do not share such communications with parties outside the negotiating process. Instead, we will continue to negotiate honestly and fairly with the representatives of our employees,” the statement read.
THE 697-435 UNION VOTE, with an 80 percent turnout among the plant’s predominantly Black workforce, was historic for a variety of reasons. For one, Georgia has the ninth-lowest unionization rate in the country, hovering just below 5 percent. The state is particularly difficult for organizing because of aggressive union-busting tactics by employers and right-to-work laws that make union dues voluntary, undercutting collective bargaining even if workers do manage to form a union. Employers also frequently get help from Republican local and state officials, who go to the mat to help oppose union drives in their districts.
The Steelworkers victory at Blue Bird also achieves a goal sought by generations of the company’s workers, who have tried to unionize since the 1960s. Each time, organizing efforts were crushed by management with more forceful tactics than the last, including firing organizers.
The recent victory resonated throughout Fort Valley, population 8,700, where most residents know someone—be it family members, friends, or neighbors—who works at Blue Bird.
Vineville is one of Fort Valley’s historically segregated Black neighborhoods. The rows of homes on both sides of Hinton Street have been passed down within families for decades, with multiple generations cycling through employment at Blue Bird. Though the street shows signs of blight, with faded paint on the exteriors and several abandoned properties, the neighborhood comes alive when the factory gets off work. Friends and neighbors settle into lawn chairs on their patios while kids play in the front yards. The work crew, coming back from the plant, drive their cars idly up and down the street, stopping to chat while leaving the engine running and the radio playing. Talk of the union is on the tip of their tongues and most are hopeful about it, though they want to see what it can deliver first.
“It’s about damn time they got a union at Blue Bird,” said Kim Jones, in her late fifties, who, like other lifelong Fort Valley residents, pronounces the name of the company with a drawl like “Blue Berry.”
Born and raised in Vineville, Ms. Jones runs the block like she’s the town elder. She knows everyone by name, from the kids to their grandparents, and has every one of them on speed dial.
Matthew Pearson/WABE via AP
An all-electric school bus sits on display in front of the Blue Bird factory in Fort Valley, Georgia, February 8, 2023.
As with any town centered around a single dominant employer, people in Fort Valley harbor mixed feelings about Blue Bird. If you grew up in Fort Valley and couldn’t afford to go to college, the bus maker offered decent jobs, with higher pay and benefits than other options in town, Ms. Jones explained. Ex-felons would turn to Blue Bird because it was known to be one of the only employers in the area willing to hire them.
But the leeway Blue Bird offered in its hiring only went so far. “If you got a DUI on a Saturday night and it was reported in the local paper, you’d show up at work on Monday and find out you didn’t work there anymore. It’s a one-strike policy,” said Jones, whose father worked at Blue Bird for several years. When Jones was growing up, her grandmother was a house cleaner for the three Luce brothers—the Fort Valley family that had owned Blue Bird until it went public in 2013.
When it came to union organizing, the company, you could say, had a zero-strike policy. Jones pointed to a modest white starter home on the corner. The occupant, a man now in his later years, was pushed into early retirement by Blue Bird shortly after a union drive 30 years ago. The same was done to other organizers the company suspected of getting involved with the campaign.
Though that former employee couldn’t be contacted, a current member of the union who also sits on the bargaining committee, Tim Holderfield, confirmed similar cases from his more than 40 years at Blue Bird. When he first started at the company in the early 1970s, Holderfield heard stories about the prior drive with the Carpenters union that was crushed. During both unionization drives with the United Auto Workers in the 1980s and the early 2000s, Holderfield saw the same pattern play out. The company tried to scare workers by making an example out of a few organizers.
According to other workers, the company even threatened to close up shop and move the plant if they unionized with the UAW.
WHEN WORKERS BEGAN TALKING about organizing with the Steelworkers in 2019, Holderfield figured he’d stay out of it. He’d seen what the company would do if you undercut their authority, and he was only a few years away from getting his retirement payout. The pandemic stalled the organizing as it became difficult to hold meetups outside of work.
Once the economy opened back up, the Steelworkers sent organizers down to Fort Valley in 2021. They knocked doors and started to build numbers. In large part, the movement gained traction this time because of the workers’ experience at the plant during the pandemic. As COVID cases spread throughout Georgia, Blue Bird remained open, and many workers felt they hadn’t been adequately compensated for keeping the shop running under strenuous health conditions.
“Post-pandemic, it just seemed like everyone was eager to organize,” said Alex Perkins, a longtime Macon-based Steelworkers staffer who’s now the representative for the Blue Bird local.
Coming out of the pandemic, workers faced erratic work schedules because of supply chain disruptions for mechanical parts. When parts came in, the Blue Bird staff often had to work overtime to complete orders in time. Another issue cited by workers who voted for the union was regular delays to holiday and bonus payments.
In this campaign, organizers got an assist from a legislative victory under the Biden administration. In 2022, Blue Bird was awarded a grant, totaling a billion dollars in revenue over the next five years, from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean School Bus Program to scale up their electric school bus fleet. The program was expanded by the bipartisan infrastructure law, and included a provision blocking any recipient of the EPA grant from directly using the grant money to bust unions.
As COVID cases spread throughout Georgia, Blue Bird remained open, and many workers felt they hadn’t been adequately compensated.
The union neutrality provision was one of the major victories for labor from the set of Biden industrial policies. Though it doesn’t ban employers outright from running an anti-union campaign, the goal was to at least constrain the extent to which an employer under contract with the government could curtail collective bargaining, for example by using the grant funds to hire an outside anti-union law firm.
Enforcement of the rule, however, has proven more difficult because it poses an exceptionally high bar for prosecuting companies. “Proving that a company explicitly used government funds for anti-union activities is nearly impossible to do,” said Madeline Janis, the co-founder and executive director of Jobs to Move America, which has organized state and local campaigns to push contractors into community benefit agreements, particularly around transportation.
The union campaign at Blue Bird demonstrates both the strengths and limitations of the provision in practice. In the final stretch of the union campaign, workers filed a flood of complaints to the NLRB regarding anti-union tactics that management was employing. Those included the retaliatory filing of a pro-union worker (who Perkins said has since been reinstated), mass anti-union meetings, anti-union signs around the office, and intimidation of workers. Since winning the election, the unfair labor practice complaints have been withdrawn.
Asked by the EPA in a questionnaire recently sent to all the recipients of the Clean School Bus Program grants whether the company had “committed to remain neutral in any organizing campaign and/or to voluntarily recognize a union based on a show of majority support,” Blue Bird sidestepped the question about neutrality and simply said it was committed to voluntarily recognizing the newly formed union.
In a follow-up from the Prospect about the survey question, Blue Bird responded that it did not use EPA funds “in any way related to the United Steelworkers organizing campaign.” Regarding the seven unfair labor charges filed before election, Blue Bird pointed to the complaints being “voluntarily dismissed” after the election. The complaints were withdrawn by workers.
“After winning the election, we didn’t want to prolong the process before getting to the negotiating table, and these types of ordeals can be needlessly drawn out,” explained Perkins.
Neither the EPA nor any other government body ever intervened directly at the plant, but union organizers believe that Blue Bird softened its anti-union efforts because of the pressure organizers were able to exert on the company via the union neutrality condition in its contract.
“Compared to other companies we’ve had to deal with around this area, Blue Bird practically didn’t even have an anti-union campaign,” said Perkins.
As an example, he pointed me to a plant just several miles away. In 2020, the Steelworkers won a hard-fought victory to unionize a Kumho Tires factory. The company consulted an anti-union law firm, the Labor Relations Institute, and hired paid actors to pose as workers on the site to dissuade employees from unionizing. The company even enlisted the mayor of Macon at the time, Robert Reichert, to join the campaign against the Steelworkers. In one speech, the mayor compared unionizing to a newly wed couple seeking outside counsel from their in-laws during a rough patch in the marriage.
Steelworkers ultimately won the election, and Kumho was cited for worker violations by the NLRB.
Jason Vorhees/Macon Telegraph
The union has been focused on organizing its committee, electing representatives, and setting strategy to begin bargaining.
IN THE TWO MONTHS SINCE the Steelworkers won the election at Blue Bird, the union has been focused on organizing its committee, electing representatives, and setting strategy to begin bargaining.
For a union hall, the workers are using the Austin Theater, a refurbished former cinema on Main Street in Fort Valley’s downtown strip. Inside, the elections for the bargaining committee were illuminated by purple stage lights, which cast the proceedings in an evocatively dramatic glow alongside the faded grandeur of the theater’s red carpeting and exposed brick walls.
This backdrop set the stage—quite literally—for the high-stakes balancing act the union will have to strike in its first contract. In a right-to-work state, the 435 workers who voted “no” become a contested battleground, both for the union to persuade and for management to try and pit against the union.
“There’s a lot riding on this first contract,” Perkins admitted.
Since the union election, workers have been subjected to a new management regime inside the plant.
A worker on the chassis production line for the BBCV model bus, who did not want to be identified for fear of retaliation, said that in the weeks immediately following the vote, workers were flooded with an onslaught of new policies and workplace regulations, along with heightened enforcement seen by some workers as retaliatory. “We’re feeling bullied,” he said. In the plant, workers are “walking on eggshells.”
Shortly after the vote, supervisors began holding daily morning meetings in which they outlined more stringent dress code policies, and gave out new employee handbooks.
One of the more visible changes was a new policy governing lunch breaks, for which workers were newly required to clock off and on. A system of “points” governs disciplinary infractions, and workers say they’ve been given points for even brief delays after their lunch breaks, which wasn’t previously the case.
The chassis line worker explained that navigating the factory floor to return to one’s station can take time and involve unavoidable delays. “You may have to wait on the forklift; you may have to wait on anything that can be harmful when you’re coming back to your spot, so you have to be aware of your surroundings. And that may take a few minutes just from walking from here to there,” the worker said. “And you can be a minute or so off and they can use that in black and white to say this was a righteous reason to fire you.”
There are signs that the company’s hostility may backfire, increasing support for the union.
Another worker, Aramis Holmes, said he and those on his production line have chosen to simply not leave the factory for lunch since the new policy was put in place. Even local eateries around the plant have noticed the change. A manager at the nearby McDonald’s said she’s observed a decline in the usual lunch rush, which has impacted their sales.
Carolyn Allen, a worker elected by her colleagues to the union’s bargaining committee, said there has been a recent uptick in firings, and she chalked it up to retaliation for the union vote. Most workers by now either know about the firings directly or have heard about them and share Allen’s view that it’s related to the union election.
By law, the company must notify the union of any disciplinary actions it takes against workers. But Blue Bird management has ignored this, union representatives say.
In a text to workers last month, the union said it had informed the company of this requirement, but management nevertheless “continues to issue discipline without notifying or bargaining with your union. We sent another letter to Blue Bird today demanding that they stop this unlawful behavior.”
There are signs that the company’s hostility may backfire, increasing support for the union rather than sowing mistrust. Pete Smalls, who works on the floor, didn’t vote during the election. But after the firings, he’s now joining the union for better pay and protection against retaliation.
“I’d never been around a union so I didn’t know what it’s all about but now I’m hoping it can deliver for us,” said Smalls.
The Prospect’s reporting on the implementation of the Biden administration’s industrial policy is supported through funding from Omidyar Network.
