Charleston’s hospitality industry workers can take the lead.
Charleston and much of its outlying metropolitan area has been transformed into something of a playground and gated community of the wealthy of the world.
This growing and increasingly gilded playground and gated community, this Garden & Gun Disneyland, stands on the back of an extreme and deepening proletarian misery. A most foul opulence is facilitated by an imperialist plague upon the local working class, by the local working class’s impoverishment and dispossession.
Behind the three figure suppers downed by vacationers, compradors, and the Carpetbagger bourgeoisie is the agony and sweat of kitchen workers toiling away in galleys of the twenty first century and paid wages insufficient to cover the cost of living in the city. Delivering meals are in house restaurant employees and gig economy contractors who receive compensation as paltry and face conditions as deplorable as do delivery workers in places where millionaires are far less frequently encountered. Handling front of house operations are servers and bartenders that, outside of the most exclusive establishments and breakneck paced bars and nightclubs, seldom bring home anything which could be described as a “reasonable living”.
Ferrying around tourists and local residents too hammered to pilot their own automobiles or stumble home are gig contractors, taxi company employees, and rickshaw chauffeurs remumerated hardly any more generously than are their food delivery compeers.
Making possible the stays at the area’s ritzy and gaudy hotels are valet drivers, bell hops, concierges, and maids who live economic nightmares.
Maintaining the grounds and facilities of the resorts and golf courses surrounding the city are landscapers toiling (often in suffocating heat and humidity) for pittances and being left in penury.
Keeping spotless and pristine the mobile floating palaces enjoyed by the marine jetsetter clique and their sycophants, the ostentatious private yachts that clog the local marinas and waterways, are crews who can’t afford private residences, let alone private cruises.
And every year, hundreds of residences housing the area’s hospitality and other blue collar workers are transformed into AirBnB units and luxury housing. Few new “affordable” residences are built in areas within a reasonable commute’s distance from the “action” (not that residential construction of any sort would be anything close to ecologically responsible in most of these areas), and those that do go up are often components of cronyist, tax credit-laden “public/private developer partnership” developments that price out those at the very bottom. The construction of housing developments for high tuition out of state College of Charleston students is sanctioned by the college in gentrifying neighborhoods as their native proletarian inhabitants are pushed out onto the street! General rent control and meaningfully punitive taxation of “investment property” and secondary residences is a treated as a topic that is not to be broached in “respectable” places. Anything more than softly spoken and heavily qualified nominal opposition to the prevailing imperialism is written off by the elite as outright pathology.
But to the present, this ever advancing and worsening immiseration has faced no meaningful opposition. The hospitality and other service industry workers of the city and its outlying metropolitan area remain unorganized and without mutual aid institutions for housing and other pressing concerns.
That isn’t to say that the last year has not turned on light bulbs in the minds of the area’s downtrodden. The slowdown in the operations of the hospitality industry resulting from, and the federal unemployment programs in response to, the SARS-CoV2 pandemic have given idle workers time to begin to realize how atrocious their predicament is and begin to recognize how little of the wealth they produce goes to them, to recognize the severity of their undercompensation, to begin to develop some conception of the whole surplus value thing.
We must show Charleston’s hospitality industry workers that they should take the lead! Charleston, with its name recognition, with its epitomization of the ills of neoliberal capitalism, the service industry economy, and the Garden & Gun chicification and gentrification of the South, with its fame as a historical bastion of reaction, with its opulence juxtaposed against poverty and proletarian misery, is the place to begin a struggle for a worker’s Dixieland. South Carolina, with its regularly hyped right to work law, its political elite’s explicit advertisement of it as an anti-labor race to the bottom destination, and the lowest unionization rate of any state of the South or, for that matter, any state of Uncle Sam’s empire at large, is the place to begin a struggle for a worker’s Dixieland.
Yes- It is certain that, even in the early days of a movement, even in an early highly local struggle by an openly revolutionary party for radical reforms such as wage increases and property tax regime restructure, there will be huge obstacles in our way, including the simple fact that Taft-Hartley and other Second Red Scare era anti-socialist and anti-labor protest legislation is still on the books. There will be display of and testimony to hospitality group owner “paternalism” and showcasing of the most well off managerial and front of house workers. There will be harassment from and surveillance by state and non-state actors. There will be valorization of scabbing. There will be blacklisting and ostracism. There will be attempts to pit workers against workers on racial, ethnic, gender, professional, and sector lines. Early work on the microscale will be strenuous, frustrating, and dangerous all the same.
But none of this changes the fact that Charleston and its outlying metropolitan area is the most fertile ground to plant the first seed for a socialist Dixieland in, and none of this changes the fact that the hospitality sector of the economy, the sector staffed by what is now the most oppressed and class conscious sector of the proletariat, is the place to begin the struggle for radical class consciousness-raising reforms towards a maximalist agenda.
Comrades of the Lowcountry, South Carolina, and the South, let us wait no longer. Let us build a party and attached labor union capable of winning class consciousness-raising radical reforms towards maximalist goals within the near future. This is our first fight to win. Let us get to organizing.
-Strom McCallum
