Gov. Henry McMaster’s accelerateSC task force released its final report today, a day after Covid-19 deaths peaked in South Carolina. The rush to reopen businesses here concerns leaders of organizations advocating for the rights of workers, whose voices were missing from the task force. They worry that employees are being sacrificed for the economy that they sustain.

SC AFL-CIO President Charles Brave Jr. said none of the $1.9 billion in federal Covid-19 relief funds will be directed to provide protective equipment for those being forced back to work, nor is there a recommendation that employers be required to follow CDC guidelines on protective measures. Brave’s office sent letters to the governor, the House Speaker, and the Senate Minority Leader offering to serve as the voice for workers on the task force. “I never heard back from any of them,” he said.

The SC AFL-CIO represents the interests of union and nonunion workers in South Carolina. Brave wants to be sure that their health is a primary consideration in the drive to reopen South Carolina businesses. “If getting South Carolina back to work is as essential as the governor claims, there must be funds to protect workers,” he said, noting that nobody on the task force risks being fired for refusing to put themselves or their families at risk.

State government has historically placed profit over public health, said Brett Bursey, director of the SC Progressive Network. “Rather than making worker safety a priority, the legislature is rushing to pass a bill to protect corporations from any liability resulting from Covid-related deaths of their workers.”
   
Members of the task force representing corporate interests supported legislation to prohibit local governments from establishing sick leave benefits for workers. In 2017, Gov. McMaster signed a bill adding the prohibition of local sick leave ordinances to an earlier law prohibiting a higher minimum wage.

“In 2014, restaurant workers testified in legislative hearings that employees were being fired for not coming to work sick,” Bursey said. “The bill we supported (S-906) called for 40 hours of earned paid sick leave for large companies, and earned unpaid sick leave for small ones.”

Efforts to pass even modest laws to prevent sick workers from being fired for not going to work never have made it out of legislative subcommittee.

SC NAACP President Brenda Murphy has been helping NAACP units around the state cut through the confusion and misinformation surrounding the pandemic. “Disproportionately, we’re already seeing injustices that must be addressed before they worsen and cause further damage within the African American communities,” she said. “Our state and local governments must ensure necessary policies, practices, and testing of all citizens, and ensuring proper Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for health professionals and workers at risk. We must see that needed information, training, resources, and care are available equitably, and reach people in all communities.”

According to a May 20 CDC report, a majority of South Carolina’s Covid-19 deaths are in the state’s minority-black population. “More of us are dying because more of us have been denied adequate health care,” Murphy said. “This pandemic provides evidence that our communities are still separate and unequal.”

While it defies logic, local minimum wage, sick leave, and any employee benefits are banned by law in SC (SC Code of Law: Sect. 41-1-25). Bursey said, “If you trust our state government to protect workers’ health, safety, or wages, then you aren’t paying attention.” If you had any doubt, just look at the task force, where the strongest lobbies against any employee benefits are represented, while workers are not.

On the day he was to be married, we mourned the loss of our friend Tim Liszewski and celebrated the love he shared with his fiancee, Maris Burton. More than 100 of his friends and family gathered online to share stories, read poems, play music, and toast a life well lived.

Tim died unexpectedly on March 28 at the Columbia home he shared with Maris. He had recently returned from an Indivisible conference in Wisconsin.

On Sunday, Tim was listed on the front page of the New York Times along with 999 others, their names representing just 1% of Americans dead since the pandemic hit. “Toward the end of May in the year 2020,” the paper reported, ” the number of people in the United States who have died from the coronavirus neared 100,000 — almost all of them within a three-month span.”

South Carolina numbers are hard to trust, as the state has been opaque about testing and contact tracing, and has dragged its feet in setting clear public protocols. In fact, last month the Palmetto State earned an “F” for its handling of the pandemic thus far.

A few Network members put together a video for Tim’s homegoing, a movement tune we have sung for years at meetings and conferences. It is a June Jordan poem set to music. You can see our interpretation of it here.

It was a bittersweet afternoon remembering Tim and holding Maris in a virtual group hug. We will miss him.

The pandemic has exposed the moral bankruptcy of basing critical public services such as health care and education on profit. Two recent examples:

South Carolina remains one of the few states to refuse using our federal taxes to provide health care to the quarter-million poor people living here who are now the most likely vector for spreading Covid-19. The Network led the fight to expand Medicaid, but our governors continue to choose free enterprise over public welfare.

South Carolina is the only state whose taxpayers own the entire educational broadcast system. The state’s control of all 63 broadcast licenses and 700 towers began in 1958, when the legislature started ETV and was considering closing public schools to keep them all-white. There were no black legislators then in SC, or in Mississippi, where their Jim Crow legislature owns 75% of the licenses. In other states, communities and universities own the majority of licenses.

In 2009, when the nation’s broadcast spectrum went digital, the Network was the only voice at the table fighting to use the “excess spectrum” of our educational broadband system to provide a statewide system of free internet, at least for the 600,000 school children who qualified for free lunch.

Now, more than a decade later, the schools are finally closed, and students are told to watch their lessons on television. They could be taking interactive classes at home on their phones or laptops, but the legislature continued to worship free enterprise by leasing out ETV’s excess broadband to telcom corporations for a fraction of its value. Sen. Harvey Peeler argued that giving citizens something for free would be “socialism.” Free enterprise won again.

President Trump’s slavish obeisance to profit over people is killing those he was sworn to protect. Let us not let them die in vain. For the past 25 years, the SC Progressive Network has been in laying the groundwork for a movement to reconstruct democracy. Our Missing Voter Project has been reaching out to the 75% of young South Carolinians who don’t believe that voting will do any good. We agree with them, and tell them we can’t rely on the system that cheapens life to reorder its priorities and we need a movement outside the system to change it.

Our nonpartisan voter education and registration efforts focus on policies rather than candidates or parties. Our 2020 MVP is using high-tech tools to identify and mobilize the fewer than 10 percent of South Carolinians under 28 years old who have never voted in a general election.

Nearly 75 years ago, Modjeska Monteith Simkins wrote, “It must be conceded that at this very hour more so than at any time in the history of this nation, there is urgent need for the development of progressive thinkers to become the leaders of TOMORROW.”

It was the lead of an appeal Simkins mailed to college students across the state inviting them to attend a Leadership Training School she was helping organize in the summer of 1946 at Harbison College in Irmo.

In 2015 the SC Progressive Network launched the Modjeska Simkins School for Human Rights to honor her legacy and to advance her work for social justice. “We didn’t even know about the leadership institute when we started the school,” said Network Director Brett Bursey, who was mentored by Simkins during the last 18 years of her life. “It was stunning to find out how closely its curriculum mirrored our own, how this history had been lost, and how little things have changed.”

Students learn a people’s history of South Carolina, stories of the resisters who through the years have challenged the state’s unjust laws, culture, and customs. They also learn practical skills to be better citizens and more effective grass roots organizers.

“The Modjeska School pushes its students to think about the importance of history to the here and now,” said the school’s faculty coordinator Dr. Robert Greene II, assistant history professor at Claflin University in Orangeburg. “In an era when facts and experience are constantly under attack, it is important for citizens of South Carolina to understand that every decision, every bill passed, every statement uttered by a politician, has a history.”

South Carolina has long had an over-sized influence on the national stage, in terms of individual players as well as historical significance. The reasons can be traced back to the state’s beginning, a state built on a slave economy and maintained through the centuries by its exploitation of the working class, and its unrelenting resistance to progressive change. Connecting those dots — and understanding what they mean — lies at the core of the school’s curriculum.

Classes cover political and social theory, as well as strategies, tactics, and practical skills for making progressive change. Upon graduation, students work on one of the Network’s ongoing projects or create one of their own.

Among last year’s graduates was Vivian Anderson, who founded Every Black Girl after the attack of a Black child by a school resource officer at Spring Valley in 2015. She wanted to understand the history of South Carolina in order to make her a better organizer. “I do the work I do because I believe in humanity,” she said, “but I really stand for the liberation of Black people and how they define liberation for themselves. I want something different for legacies beyond me.”

Chris Gardner decided to attend the Modjeska School because he wanted to become more effective and strategic in his organizing rather than simply reacting blindly. “I was ashamed to be from Columbia, and as soon as I had a chance I moved away, but I realized I can’t be from somewhere else. Rather than chase greener grass, I thought, who else is going to fix it? There’s not many other people who are going to roll up their sleeves and try to figure things out. It’s up to all of us.”

Dr. Greene said, “Modjeska Simkins, Martin Luther King, Jr., and so many other activists believed in the importance of  history to making change in the present. The Modjeska School continues that tradition into 2020. Anyone interested in activism, or simply becoming better informed and more effective citizens, should apply for the Modjeska School. Being well informed is the first step to taking action to make our community, our state, our nation, and our world a better place.”

Enrollment is open for this year’s spring session, which runs March 15 – July 5. Classes will be held on alternate Monday evenings 6:30-8:30 at the SC Progressive Network’s new HQ at 1340 Elmwood Ave., downtown Columbia. For details about the school or to download an application, see the web site.