Tennessee WordSmith: A Liberal Dose, April 18, 2024 "Your Voice Doesn't Matter to Them"

April 18, 2024

Troy D. Smith

“Your Voice Doesn’t Matter to Them”

Last month, for the first time in several years, I accompanied several of my United Campus Workers colleagues from across Tennessee to the state capital for “lobby day.” It happens every March; UCW members and various allies converge on Nashville to spend the day meeting with legislators and encouraging them to support a handful of bills that our union has decided we can get behind. In recent years, the action has always taken place during UT’s spring break, and that has not coincided with Tech’s, meaning I was teaching that day. This year, though, the stars aligned.

About ten years ago, UCW had a sustained campaign to try to get the Tennessee General Assembly to protect the Tennessee jobs threatened when our previous governor wanted to outsource all state building facilities jobs to a company in Chicago. For an entire semester, I went to Nashville every Tuesday (which I had off) with one or two fellow UCW members to talk to lawmakers one-on-one. A couple of folks I talked to last month remembered me from those days (and, by the way, the General Assembly came through for us back then, with a majority of them signing a letter to the governor opposing his plan).

We had several bills to promote this year, most of them things I would think most anybody would find worthwhile. There was a proposal (offered by Gloria Johnson) to significantly raise the minimum wage; there was one for free breakfast and lunch for public school students; there was one to establish six weeks of leave for employees who have taken on a new foster child. I talked with about a dozen legislators that day, all Republicans. Most of them (with one glaring -and rude -exception) were gracious and gave us a hearing, and a couple said they could support our initiatives if they made it out of committee and to the floor. I’d like to point out that this experience, and our union’s victory on the facilities workers issue, shows that you CAN still reach across the divide and find common ground on things if you try.

But then, at the end of the afternoon, I saw something that I found very disheartening -and a significant change from how things were just ten years ago.

Several of us sat in on the committee meeting where Johnson offered her minimum wage bill. She was near the end of the agenda, so we were there for the whole thing and saw several bills being presented, most of them from Democratic lawmakers (who have been a relatively small minority there for years, after having been the majority for decades before that). In each of these brief discussions, the single Democrat sitting on the committee in question asked relevant questions of the presenters about details.

Most of the rest of the committee, though, were sitting up there laughing and joking among themselves, or engaging in unrelated side conversations, talking over the presenter. The only time they turned their attention to the matter at hand was when the vote was called for and they said “no.” It was incredibly arrogant. The lawmaker who had been so rude to us in his office was on that committee; I had tried to tell him that there were studies which backed up our assertion that raising the minimum wage did not hurt the economy, and he’d said he had never heard of such studies. Johnson had one of my colleagues, a political economics professor from UT, testify about exactly such a study that day, and this guy and his colleagues talked over and ignored him the whole time.

Now, that guy didn’t surprise me. But as I have thought about that day since, and how respectful everyone else was to us, their constituents, on an individual level and yet how rude they were as a group, I’ve come to think it is reflective of a larger trend.

It’s hard to be rude to someone looking you right in the eye -in part because you see their humanity. But many Republicans in our legislature have gotten so used to thinking they have all the power, they no longer even acknowledge, much less listen to, voices from the other side. It no longer matters what you say, or what you want or need. If you are not in lockstep with them, you don’t matter.

Let’s all get to the ballot box in November and show them that theirs is not the only voice in this state.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE