Jaribu Hill is the director of the Mississippi Workers' Center for Human Rights in Greenville, Mississippi.

PA: How was the Workers' Center formed?

JH: The Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights was founded in the fall of 1996. It grew out of the first Southern Human Rights Organizers’ Conference, which was held at the University of Mississippi in Oxford in September 1996. One of the plenaries at that conference was on workers’ rights. During workshops there was a lot of discussion about the plight of workers in Mississippi – particularly low-wage workers and more specifically workers of color – in terms of racial harassment, perpetual low wages and other slave plantation-type conditions that occur in plants, shops, shipyards and other work locations. And there was concern for workers who are most vulnerable in places like the Mississippi Delta.

In 1999, the Center moved to the Delta where it is now located in Greenville, Mississippi. The Workers’ Center is an organization that provides support and solidarity for workers in their struggles to improve their work conditions and rid their workplaces of racism. This extends from the failure on the part of employers to provide safe and healthy work environments to hate violence in the workplace where nooses and racist graffiti are displayed. Klan terror and recruitment of Klan members goes on in some of these workplaces like Ingalls Shipbuilding Company in Pascagoula, Mississippi.

The Center works mostly with low-wage, non-union workers who are vulnerable because they have no rights and no one to represent them. Many are workers who are at the very lowest rung of payment. They have jobs that are not secure. They risk retaliation and termination when they speak out. The Center offers solidarity for the struggles that they are waging against retaliatory discharge and against other abuses they face in the workplace.

Our organizing sessions are threefold. We provide basic rights education as to what your rights are under various federal and state laws. We focus a lot on Title VII, which is the federal statute that prohibits racial and other forms of discrimination in employment. We also do a lot of talking and organizing around human rights issues and instruments available to workers such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

PA: Can you talk about the Center's current campaigns?

JH: We are involved in two campaigns. One is called “Dying to Make a Living,” which is a campaign to repeal the current workers’ compensation law in the state of Mississippi, which provides only 450 weeks of coverage for workers who are injured and those family members who survive the death of a worker. Mississippi is one of 11 states that have a ceiling on workers’ compensation. So we formed a coalition with organized labor, unorganized labor, civic organizations and community and religious leaders to convene a series of town hall meetings and hearings. We convened a meeting with the governor and some of the Black legislators and other legislators to try to get a new bill that provides unlimited coverage.
We also focus on what workers go through when they work in dangerous, dirty situations. Many of the jobs are still assigned by race. We deal with a lot of racial segregation because of job steering, where workers are automatically steered, because of the color of their skin, to the most dangerous and undesirable jobs. Instead of being steered toward clerical jobs in offices, they’re steered toward the factory and the bottom of the ship where you find the most danger and dirt.

Another campaign we are involved with combats hate violence in the workplace. It is called “Terror in the Workplace.” This campaign began with our work on a case against Ingalls Shipbuilding Company. We brought a lawsuit against Ingalls for promoting and maintaining a racially hostile work environment and failing to provide African American workers with protections from Klan and other forms of intimidation, humiliation and insult they experience in the workplace. We conducted a series of town hall meetings in the area on this issue. We have also done follow-up organizing sessions and support these workers in their effort to bring about a new day at Ingalls Shipbuilding Company. From that struggle we began to work with other workers who experienced similar types of harassment and abuses in the workplace because of the color of their skin.

PA: IS INGALLS SHIPBUILDING COMPANY ORGANIZED?

JH: Yes in fact we are working with 180 or so workers who are all members of various unions. There are 16 craft unions, from carpenters to boilermakers to welders, most affiliated with the AFL-CIO. In many cases we find the response on the part of labor has been lukewarm in terms of these issues. Organized labor focuses on the wage issue and, in some instances, health care for the workers. But there is very little focus on issues concerning race discrimination in the workplace. We are constantly working with organized labor to change that reality so that this becomes a union issue they take up just like they would take up someone being fired for no reason or a contract agreement broken in some other way.

PA: WHAT KINDS OF RELATIONSHIPS ARE YOU TRYING TO BUILD WITH LABOR?

JH: We are working now in coalition with some labor organizations to deal with the workers’ comp situation. The Mississippi Alliance of State Employees, better known as MASE, an affiliate of the Communication Workers of America, is working with us. Also, a non-AFL-CIO organization of immigrant workers called the Mississippi Immigrants’ Rights Alliance (MIRA) is involved. It’s for immigrant workers who are abused in unspeakable ways in the workplace, from hostility because of race or language, to differences in culture and the fact that they’re poor and vulnerable. The person who formed MIRA, Bill Chandler, also is a business agent for the hotel and restaurant workers’ union called HERE. He is involved with us in that struggle.

Our board president Sarah White of Local 1529 a former catfish worker on the line, is now a full-time organizer with UFCW. She works and organizes in the catfish plants, poultry plants, nursing homes and other places where UFCW is organizing. Through her, we’ve joined them into the coalition around the workers’ comp issues that the Center deals with. We also work with the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. Bill Lucy is a great friend of the Workers’ Center and a friend of working people. And we work with the group that came out of the struggles in Ingalls Shipbuilding Company.

We also work with a newly formed group called Wal-Mart Workers for Freedom. They are dealing with racial discrimination and hostility in Wal-Mart and retaliatory discharge issues. We are very close to the Mississippi AFL-CIO. They’re one of the coalition members around workers’ comp. They’re also one of the coalition members when we convene our annual Workers’ Memorial Day meeting at the capitol steps. They have been very much involved over the years in that effort. We also have some progressive state representatives involved – not as many as we would hope – but there are a couple we can count on to address these issues.

PA: Your website talks about a campaign on environmental issues.

JH: The “Campaign Against Workplace Pollution” is part of the “Dying to Make a Living” campaign. We not only focus on hazards that occur from slips and falling scaffolding equipment, but also on how workers are poisoned at the point of production through the overexposure to harmful carcinogenic chemicals. So we do a lot of educating around the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). We have a specific track of organizing and training around the right to know: what your rights are, how to identify if you are working in a hazardous situation and have not been properly protected, or have not been provided with information about what your rights are under OSHA. We also assist workers in taking on their employers when they are not in compliance with OSHA.

PA: What role does environmental racism play?

JH: There is a direct connection between workplace pollution and environmental racism in the community. If you look at most of the jobs where we find the people who come to us, they are often at the lowest rung of employment and payment. For instance, we worked with a community in Kelston a few years back where a tanker company stored its equipment on land where people were living. While the company owned the land, the hazards of exposure to emissions from equipment stored there was a problem because there were young children living in the area. We brought pressure to bear on the company, and we were able to get them to remove the equipment, because not only was it unsightly, it was also unsafe.

There are many areas in the Delta where communities are bombarded with pollutants and poisons. The drinking water is not safe. There’s a lot of exposure to chemicals and pollutants that poison fish. One of our board members is an environmental justice attorney. She has involved us in organizing around the Yazoo Pumps Project. This involved a situation in Yazoo County where the companies were looking to pump out carcinogens like DDTs and not doing it in a safe way bu in a way that would only profit the companies. In the course of the public hearings we learned of a lot of other irregularities and other disparities in the way African American communities are treated when they have an environmental problem. We know there is no real separation between what goes on in the workplace and what goes on in the community.

The hardest thing, though, is to get environmental groups to understand that, and to get those who fund environmental groups to understand. Those kinds of issues come up over and over again. Asbestos and fiber- glass screening needs to be done. Lead screening needs to be done. We need to be able to do that, or we need to be able to work in concert with occupational physicians to do that work. But that area of our work is not funded to the extent that it needs to be.

PA: Closely related to that is the issue of health care coverage. What’s it like in your state?

JH: I know the Mississippi Alliance of State Employees works a lot around the issue of the living wage and health care. And, of course, we obviously believe that all workers deserve free health care through their employment. [And] we believe that health care should be provided to all citizens, regardless of their ability to pay.

In Mississippi, which is one of the poorest, if not the poorest, state in the region, you have some of the lowest paid workers. Those workers also are forced to co-pay, if not pay for their insurance altogether. Workers a lot of times don’t even have sick benefits.

What we want to do in the next couple of years [is] launch a major workers’ health campaign. Our slogan is “No one should have to die to make a living.”