U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, Congressman Bennie Thompson, NAACP President Cornell William Brooks, actor Danny Glover, Ben Jealous, Mississippi NAACP President Derrick Johnson, Sierra Club President Aaron Mair, the Honorable Nina Turner, and UAW President Dennis Williams join hundreds of Nissan employees, civil-rights leaders and others to protest Nissan’s poor treatment of workers and unsafe working conditions in Canton, Miss.
BACKGROUND: Nissan’s assembly plant in Canton is one of three company facilities in the world that do not have unions. (There other two plants are in Smyrna and Decherd, Tennessee.) Workers in Canton are laboring under punishing production quotas and unsafe working conditions, as well as lower wages and benefits among approximately for half of the workers, who were originally hired through temp agencies. Nissan has consistently fought the right of employees to form a union in Canton.
In late 2015, the National Labor Relations Board charged Nissan and a temporary worker agency with violating workers’ rights in Mississippi. The Labor Board found that Nissan unlawfully threatened to close the plant if workers unionize; threatened employees with termination for union activity; and unlawfully interrogated employees. The Labor Board said that Nissan has “been interfering with, restraining and coercing em-ployees in the exercise of their rights.”
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has issued multiple citations against Nissan for violations of federal safety and health laws. The most recent citations, issued in February, found that Nissan “did not furnish employment and a place of employment which was free from recognized hazards that were causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm to employees.”