Southern Women

By Tina Williams

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1978, pp. 23

In Atlanta recently, the YWCA Vocational Counseling Center in conjunction with Project Focus, a CETA funded program offering vocational counseling to high school students, hosted a career conference, featuring a panel of professional Black women in mostly non-traditional career areas. The purpose of the conference was to expose the mostly Black female audience to information, resources and techniques for job hunting.

Women about to enter the work force for the first time, college graduates and what is called unskilled or lesser skilled women discovered that they need not be trapped in pay-nothing jobs; that with actual skill assessment they, too, could find a rewarding career. The employment trends of Black women show them traditionally occupying clerical, office and other service jobs such as secretary, maid, waitress, teacher or nurse. Still more frequently than not, they are earning minimum wages. This conference brought together some of the women who dared to step out beyond established traditions. The common reaction to the conference was “I didn’t know there was a Black woman doing that.”

The panel included a personnel director for Burger King; a mounted patrolwoman with the Atlanta Police Department; a business manager of a YMCA; an insurance sales person and financial planner; an auto mechanic for Sears; a computer programmer for the Atlanta Constitution; an assistant manager for Southern Bell’s Network Design Group; a camerawoman for WXIA television; a special market manager for Coca Cola; a firefighter; and the manager of the largest Black hair care salon in the country.

The second part of the conference allowed participants the chance to develop tools and techniques to help them take that giant step into nontraditional career opportunities.

For information on how to organize a career conference of this nature in your community, write Tina Williams, P. 0. Box 743, Atlanta, Ga. 30303.

Tina Williams was the coordinator for the YWCA Vocational Counseling Center Conference. She lives and works in Atlanta.

Health Care

By Ron Sailor

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1978, pp. 25

Southwest Community Hospital currently has only 125 beds – but it wants to build a new wing with 75 additional medical-surgical beds. The construction request, however, has been repeatedly turned down by the state health planning and development agency whose approval the hospital must have if federal dollars are to be used in the construction.

The Black Atlanta hospital claims a 90 percent occupancy rate for its medical-surgical area, but the agency discounts this and concerns itself with the hospital’s over-all occupancy rate of less than 85 percent. Still, the biggest contention is being fought over the definition of what a “community” is.

The hospital has applied a practical definition of community as the 3.5 mile radius contiguous to the hospital. The agency uses an expansive definition including much of the southern, southwestern, and northwestern portions of Fulton County, where the hospital is located. Using its definition, the agency is steadfastly insisting that there are available beds in the immediate “service area” of the hospital.

Southwest Hospital administrator A.W. Mumford, in a recent meeting with Georgia Gov. George Busbee, sounded, what for him has become a familiar refrain, “We are concerned that if Southwest is not allowed to expand, then it will die for lack of growth and insensitivity will be the cause.”

Hospital administrators see the problem they are experiencing as being typical of the kinds of struggle facing Black hospitals around the nation and particularly in the South. In less than 20 years the number of Blackowned hospitals across the nation has dropped from just over 100 to 26. The remaining 26 all face a number of the same problems.

At least three factors are responsible for their rather precarious plight:

(1) All of the Black-owned hospitals must have the approval of state regulatory agencies if they hope to expand or improve their facilities. Without the approval, federal dollars cannot be used to reimburse cost. These agencies are shielded from any direct control, and are autonomous and independent. Yet, while these agencies are independent they are subject to pressure from the formidable medical and convalescent industries’ lobbies. Blacks have little clout and small representation on the agencies’ boards, thus it follows that Black interests are often subordinated.

(2) Most of the remaining Black hospitals are in need of expansion and face-lifting. Many were built during the days of segregation as a response to the refusal of White hospitals to care for both indigent and non-indigent Black patients. Even then the physical plants were not impressive and the full range of programs underdeveloped. They face the most critical need to expand and improve their operations at a time when federal restraints have been placed on the construction of new hospital beds.

(3) Group insurance programs have brought beds in newly constructed suburban hospitals into the reach of the Black community. In Atlanta, in less than 10 years, at least five such hospitals have opened. They come complete with wall-to-wall carpeting, papered walls and prestige. Black hospitals are forced to compete with community pride or historical reverence because as in the case of Southwest Community, they must fight to improve.

Ron Sailor is an editor for the Atlanta Daily World and a commentator for WAOK Radio.

J.P. Stevens Workers Seek ‘Some of the Harvest’

By Bill Finger

Vol. 1, No. 7, 1979, pp. 19-21

You would have thought it was the Darlington 500 the way people were flocking to the South Carolina Piedmont. But the gathering at Textile Hall in what the local chamber of commerce calls “the textile capital of the world” lacked the gaiety of a good stock car race.

On this chilly March morning in Greenville, S.C., J.P. Stevens and Company was holding its 1979 stockholders meeting. The nation’s second largest textile company with 44,000 workers, Stevens has been the target of a union campaign by textile workers since 1963. For the last four years, the stockholders meeting has been the central and public event in the escalating controversy. After large demonstrations and media coverage in 1977, Stevens moved the meeting away from the traditional New York site to Greenville. This year they again came to Greenville because, as Stevens board chairman James Finley put it in his opening remarks, “At least we’re welcome here.”

On the Monday before the meeting, the “Greenville Piedmont newspaper did the official honors. “The standing invitation for Stevens to move its headquarters from that increasingly hostile environment (New York) to Greenville remains as warm and earnest as ever.” However, there is also a hostile environment in Greenville – created by preachers, civil libertarians, civil rights leaders, attorneys, women’s advocates, and most important, Stevens workers.

“Why is my labor – my hands – so much cheaper than the same hands in New York?” asked Stevens worker Pat Burgess. “I love to weave and I’m good at it. I wasn’t raised to be chicken. I was raised to be proud and stand up for what I believe.” An attractive mother of two teenagers, Burgess was raised by her grandparents in Jessup, Georgia, where she picked cotton as a child. Now she’s a feisty union supporter in Greenville’s White Horse mill. But despite first amendment rights of’ free speech and association, people like Pat Burgess have to be careful about the statements they make.

“Mr. Chairman,” said Maynard Lovell at the stockholders meeting, “last year I spoke for the union here. Then last summer I was fired.” Lovell’s firing is but another chapter in the long and crucial conflict. Thirty eight-year-old Lovell, who presided at a pro-union rally in Spartanburg last year, was a union leader in the 4-plant complex in Stuart, Virginia, where he’d worked for 19 years.

The litany of Stevens’ lawbreaking record is familiar to many. The company has more labor violations than other company in history. They include: the firing of’ 191 workers for union activities (The workers were ordered back to work by the courts and paid $1.3 million by Stevens in back wages.); widespread violation of cotton dust standards, bad faith bargaining at Roanoke Rapids, N.C.; closing of the Statesboro, Ga., plant after the courts granted the union bargaining rights there; and a company-wide Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation for discriminating against Blacks and women.

Still, while the boycott and corporate strategies have received much public attention, the heart of the campaign lies in Stuart, Va., Greenville, S.C., and the scores of’ other Southern towns where Stevens has plants. “We just get pacified,” says Pat Burgess with fire in her eyes. “We don’t get satisfied. We can’t have a free election in any J.P. Stevens plant. There’s too much conspiracy.”

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National attention has highlighted this Stevens record to millions – from “CBS 60 Minutes” to church resolutions against such policies. But the pattern continues. In 1974, a majority of the 3300 Stevens workers at Roanoke Rapids, N.C., voted for the union. The Textile Workers Union began bargaining for a contract, but negotiations dragged on unsuccessfully, especially on the key issue of a meaningful arbitration system for grievances.

In June 1976, the Textile Workers and Clothing Workers merged into the stronger Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU). Fresh from the Clothing Workers successful boycott of Farah Pants and ambitious to crack the nation’s only major non-unionized industry, ACTWU embarked on a three pronged campaign against Stevens. It involved (1) a nationwide consumer boycott; (2) a sophisticated legal campaign building on numerous remedies and rulings already handed down against Stevens; and (3) a company-wide organizing campaign in the 83 plants.

Like the Cesar Chavez-led Farmworker boycotts of the 60s, the ACTWU boycott is dependent for momentum upon local citizens groups taking up the issue as a social cause. Boycott director Del Mileski feels that this first stage of the boycott has been accomplished in many of the nation’s cities. Local citizens’ groups – ministers, civil rights leaders and others – meet with department store officials and ask them to stop buying Stevens products as a matter of conscience. Highly visible pressure tactics on stores have been limited because of stringent secondary boycott prohibitions. (You can boycott Stevens products but not the store where they’re sold.) Because of the thousands of Stevens product lines, many of which are not sold in the retail market, making a dent in the company’s sales is difficult. Cancellations by retail stores are occurring though, and Mileski feels that “these cancellations are holding up better than Farah,” the pants company boycott of a few years ago. ACTWU has concentrated the boycott in the northern and western cities, away from the organizing campaign.

Another ACTWU tactic is the “corporate campaign”, led by 34-year-old Ray Rogers. Rogers focuses on individual Stevens Board of Directors members and their interlocking corporate lives, attempting to isolate Stevens from the entire financial community. During 1978, he achieved several successes that shocked Wall Street. In one instance, he marshaled holders of union pension funds and other liberals to pressure Manufacturers Hanover Trust to remove two of their directors – Stevens’ board chairman Finley and David Mitchell, chairman of Avon Products. Unions threatened to remove portions of their $1 million reportedly managed by Hanover Trust unless Finley and Mitchell were

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removed. Two weeks later when Women’s groups supporting Stevens workers threatened to boycott Avon Products, Mitchell quit the Stevens board as well. “Amalgamated has now resorted to terrorizing businessmen who do business with Stevens,” said The Wall Street Journal, expressing the fear of the business world over Rogers’ successes. Labor columnist Victor Reisel called the tactic “the first real test of a 21st century organization technique.”

Because of the numerous and repetitive labor law violations against Stevens, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has taken an unprecedented approach to the case. The board is now holding hearings to determine whether they should award bargaining rights to ACTWU in Wallace, N.C. (1000 workers); Montgomery, Al. (3400); Stuart, Va. (1600); and New Millford, Conn. (200). If a majority of the workers have expressed their desire to have a union by signing union cards and if the labor law violations are serious enough to prevent a fair election without intimidation, the board, and then the courts (since Stevens always appeals such rulings), would award ACTWU bargaining rights for the workers in that location without having an election.

Scott Hoyman, ACTWU’s Textiles Director for the South, has been involved in many of these hearings. “Our view, and apparently that of the board, is that it would be impossible for the Stevens workers to vote their beliefs.” On the other hand, from the podium of the stockholders meeting, Stevens’ chairman Finley said he felt the climate was fine for elections. “(We have) again publicly challenged the NLRB and the Union to let the employees decide this issue.” However, when ministers and workers rose to question Finley on the amount of money the company spends each year in legal fees fighting the labor board cases, Finley stonewalled, “This is a private matter between the lawyers and the corporation.”

Since the three-pronged campaign began in 1976, it has been anything but a private matter. The initial burst of media and celebrity attention has abated somewhat and what lies ahead for Stevens workers like Pat Burgess and Maynard Lovell is a protracted campaign in small communities where the national media rarely reaches.

As in the past years, the stockholders meeting this year proved to be merely a showcase for persons on both sides of the issue to vent their opinions. Tensions were evident as Finley gaveled down his opponents and praised the company’s supporters.

The legal remedies for the Stevens labor law violations could take several years in the appeal process. Meanwhile, the union Is slowly building support in the Stevens towns so that when NLRB elections are held, the workers are prepared for the intimidation that has been the pattern in the past. “Rome wasn’t built in a day you know,” says Burgess, explaining her steadfastness.

The Stevens campaign dramatizes the labor-management battles ahead in the South as well as the emerging issue of civil rights in the workplace. The country’s major unorganized industries – textiles and furniture – are deeply rooted in the South and the lowest average wages are still in our region. But the workers who have tasted the union campaign seem to know what they’re up against. The odds are long, but momentum is building slowly. And workers have no place to go in most cases but back to their looms and spindles. “We’re stronger than ever,” says Maynard Lovell. “People are standing up now stronger than I ever thought they would.”

“I want J.P. Stevens to make money,” says Pat Burgess, “because then my job runs. I just want to get some of the harvest.”

Bill Finger, a freelance writer, lives in Raleigh, N.C.

Interchange: In This Issue

By Betty Norwood Chaney

Vol. 1, No. 9, 1979, pp. 2

This issue of Southern Changes is devoted primarily to the plight facing the workers of the South. We dedicate it to A. Phillip Randolph who died May 16 at the age of 90. Not only did he give 70 years of his life to the labor movement, he is also called the father of the civil rights revolution. Inhis birthday mesage to America on April 15, presented in “Soapbox,” he lauds the role of trade unions: “It is the trade union movment that has fought to preserve the minimum wage, to keep the CETA jobs programs in tact. And it is the trade union movement that has mounted a major effort to organize low-paid and exploited workers throughout the South.”

In this issue, we carry two in-depth articles about the struggles of workers trying to organize in the South and the obstacles they encounter.

Tony Dunbar in “The Old South Triumphs at Duke” relates the efforts of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)union to organize wage workers at Duke University. Duke, a cener of learning, erected upon the lofty principles “to develop a Christian love of freedom and truth” and “to promote a sincere spirit of tolerance,” responded by hiring an anti-union consulting firm. These “Chicago union busters” as AFSCME called them, launches the kind of campaign against AFSCME and Duke laborers that makes Dunbar conclude that the “New South so ably represented at Duke University is not really much different from the old.”

The second piece, Phil Wilayto, a member of the Center for United Labor Action, offers a vivid, heartrending account of the Steelworkers strike that brought silence to the yards of the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company for 11 weeks this past winter as workers fought to win recognition for their union. Although unsuccessful this tim in their attempt to establish a union, the attitude of the workers following the strike is “We aren’t broken. We’re regrouping, we’ll be back and we’ll get our union.”

Probably the most important affermative action case since Bakke is the United Steelworkers of America v. Brian F. Weber, known familiarly as Weber. It could affect all voluntary affirmative action for racial minorities in the nation’s work force. In our third piece onlabor concerns, Laughlin McDonald, Southern director of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, details for us the factors involved in the Weber case. He determines that ultimately it is voluntary compliance that will eliminate the need for state and federal enforcement agencies.

Our Action Patterns department this issue outlines “How to File Complaints and Civil Suits Against Job Discrimination,” and the SRC Publications section lists materials available from the Council that relate to affirmative action and the employment of Blacks and women.

In addition, this issue carries an assessment of the 1979 legilative session of the Georgia General Assembly. Look for more analyses of this nature in Southern Changes as we enter our second year of publishing in September.

In closing, along with A. Phillip Randolph, we encourage you to take an active interest in the struggles of the Southern workers. We look upon the plight of the low-paid and often exploited laborer in the South as being one of the most important issues facing us today. As Randolph implores in his parting remarks, “Please, join the good fight.”

Soapbox

By A. Philip Randolph

Vol. 1, No. 9, 1979, pp. 4, 23

Editor’s Note: Southern Changes dedicates this issue to A. Philip Randolph who died May 16, 1979, at the age of 90 after 70 years in the trade union movement. For many years he was head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and later president of the Negro American Labor Council. He was also the first Black vice-president of the AFL-CIO. The message carried here was delivered April 15 on the occasion of his 90th birthday and conveys his convictions and feelings concerning the trade union movement.

I am happy to have this opportunity to address my brothers and sisters as I celebrate another birthday, this one being my 90th.

For most people, birthdays offer an opportunity for careful personal reflection. They are a time for taking stock, a time for evaluating the course of events. Now, as I mark the beginning of my 91st year, I wish to make a few brief comments about the difficult challenges confronting Black people and all American workers.

In many important respects, today’s challenges bear a striking similarity to the problems we have grappled with for decades. Essentially, they are problems of economics and problems of politics. And, most important, they are problems which cannot be solved in isolation from the overall society.

Consider for a moment the plight of our Black youngsters. Throughout the nation, thousands upon thousands of Black teenagers and young adults have no opportunity of obtaining decent employment. They are forced to waste their talents, to waste their youthful enthusiasm, indeed, to waste their lives. To make matters worse, some political leaders dismiss this scandal as a necessity, a permanent feature of our economic system.

Consider also the condition of low-wage workers throughout the so-called Sunbelt, and throughout America’s great urban centers. Amid affluence and newfound wealth, thousands of workers Black as well as White – receive subsistence wages. And because so few have the protections of a union contract, they have no job security, no fringe benefits, and no rights in the workplace.

And consider the new political atmosphere in America, an atmosphere best characterized by crude conservatism and social defeatism. From every corner of the land, we hear demands for cuts in school budgets, social security payments, health care, and jobs for the unemployed. And we hear inflation blamed on the moderate wages of workers and the dismally low wages of those people forced to accept the minimum wage. Workers and poor people, the true victims of inflation, are everywhere scolded for their so-called excesses.

In my view, we have one reliable and steadfast ally – the trade union movement. And I make this statement based on 70 years of experience in the civil rights and labor movements.

Why the trade unions? The answer, I believe, is quite simple: The vast majority of Black people are workers, and the trade union movement, even with all its imperfections and failings, is the most effective, and most powerful defender of the interests of all American workers, Black as well as white.

At this very moment, for example, organized labor is spearheading the attack against the Administration’s so-called austerity budget. It is the trade union movement that has fought to preserve the minimum wage, and to keep the CETA jobs program intact. And it is the trade union movement that has mounted a major effort to organize low-paid and exploited workers throughout the South.

In the area of organizing, I hasten to call your attention to three crucially important campaigns, campaigns which hold special significance for Black workers. First, there is the ongoing strike by thousands of workers at the Newport News shipyard in Virginia. These workers, members of the Steelworkers, were forced to strike by a company which refuses to recognize their right to join a union and negotiate for better wages and working conditions. As the company cleverly evades the real issues by filing appeal after appeal with the courts, the workers at Newport News continue to suffer.

Similarly, J.P. Stevens & Co. and the Winn-Dixie supermarket chain continue to block their employees from freely organizing

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into unions. The injustices at these two companies are well known. Thus, I urge you to support the boycott of all J.P. Stevens products.

In addition to taking an active interest in the struggles of Black workers, we must also intensify our activity in the political arena. Last November, for instance, Black people in Missouri and Philadelphia dramatically demonstrated the power of the united Black vote. In Missouri, Black voters overwhelmingly opposed an anti-labor question on the ballot; and in Philadelphia, Blacks united together in opposing a proposed change in the city charter. Yet despite these two impressive examples, Black voters throughout the country seem to be withdrawing from politics.

We and our children, we and our grandchildren, cannot afford to abandon the fight. We must continue, indeed we must strengthen our political position by registering and voting in even greater numbers than ever before. Our participation in the upcoming political battles will, to a very large extent, determine the outcome of our long years of dedication and sacrifice. You, brothers and sisters, will make the difference between ultimate victory or bitter defeat. Please, join the good fight.

The Old South Triumphs at Duke

By Tony Dunbar

Vol. 1, No. 9, 1979, pp. 5-8

Somewhere in the annal’s of Duke University you will find these lofty words:

The aims of Duke University are to assert a faith in the eternal union of knowledge and religion as set forth in the teachings and character of Jesus Christ, the Son of God; to advance learning in all lines of truth: to defend scholarship against all false notions and ideals; to develop a Christian love of freedom and truth; to promote a sincere spirit of tolerance; to discourage all partisan and sectarian strife; and to render the largest permanent service to the individual, the state, the nation and the Church. Unto these ends shall the affairs of this university always be administered.

Not long ago the following comment was made:

My father worked at Duke. His mother worked at Duke, and now three members of my family work there, too. I guess it’s always been one of the best jobs you could find in Durham. But I’ll tell you, they don’t care anything about you here and I don’t think they ever will. I don’t count on it ever changing.

As amazing as it may seem, the “Duke” referred to in the second statement is the same institution referred to earlier in such laudable terms. It is difficult to believe that an institution erected upon such noble principles recently hired one of the most successful and expensive anti-union consulting firms in the country, Modern Management Methods of Chicago (“3M”), at $2,500 a day to block the path of a labor union. But, in addition to being a fountain of learning whose graduates people the walkways of Southern government and commerce and whose endowment would give comfort to many a small nation, it is also the largest employer in Durham, North Carolina. When the union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), set out to organize the 2,100 wage workers at Duke University Medical Center, Duke responded by putting up the best fight that money could buy. What ensued is one of the best examples of “Old South” justice a “New South” institution could provide.

Duke has had serious labor difficulties since the mid 1960s when the university service employees, most of them Black, began to agitate for a union. Their essential grievance then was the manner in which Duke had historically treated its Black workers. Janitors, until they simply refused to do so any longer, had been required to address White undergraduates as Mister and Miss, and the Black custodial staff had to take its meals in the kitchen rather than in the dining hall. Under the leadership of Oliver Harvey, a custodian who had participated in the Greensboro sit-ins, a Duke Employees Benevolent Association was formed which tried unsuccessfully for two years to win benefits from the university.

Then the assasination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a Memphis sanitation workers strike turned the small question of Duke employees’ welfare into a major campus issue. Fifteen hundred students made a vigil at the home of Duke President Douglas Knight (which finally sent him to the hospital for a “rest”) demanding that wages for non-academic employees be raised to $1.60 an hour and that Knight speak out for open housing, denounce racism, and resign his membership in a segregated country club.

Dining hail and custodial workers called a strike, and Duke students boycotted classes and the campus eating spots for two weeks. The strike ended when the university Trustees promised to formulate a plan to resolve employee grievances. Once the workers were back on the job, however, the Trustees dragged their heels until most of the students had gone home for the summer and then agreed to recognize an Employees Council as an informal bargaining agent for its custodial and clerical personnel. Thereafter the university declined to make any significant concessions to its employees or to raise pay beyond the increases already planned.

In frustration the university service employees linked up with a national labor organization, AFSCME, chosen for its reputation as a democratic union keenly interested in organizing Black workers. An election was held in January 1972; the union won it by a vote of 491 to 10, and AFSCME Local 77 was established on campus.

During this same time there was also considerable dissatisfaction among the much larger workforce at Duke’s sprawling 900 bed medical complex. Dieticians, microbiology lab technicians, and computer terminal operators had all staged brief, unauthorized walkouts at various times, and with other hospital workers they tried to form an AFSCME local of their own in 1974.

The university succeeded in delaying an election on union recognition until November 1976 and in expanding the definition of those eligible to vote to include not just the cooks, clerks, orderlies, and secretaries, whom the union was counting on to vote “Yes,” but also a large number of highly skilled employees, such as Senior Laboratory Assistants, who often hold Masters’ Degrees and were thought to be less conscious of themselves as “workers.”

The university was aided by the disarray of the local union organizing committee torn by internal political disputes and the fact that the international union lent only minimal support to the campaign. As a result AFSCME lost the election by a scant 42 ballots out of 1616 cast.

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Even given the diversity of the employees in the hospital “bargaining unit” the union organizing committee felt confident that with a more concerted effort they could win an election the next time around. Most of the wage workers at the hospital, as even the administration admitted, shared the feeling that they were inadequately rewarded and respected by their superiors. In common s ith most hospitals, it was the Duke physicians, professors, fund raisers, research directors, and specialized technicians who won the awards, gave imperious commands, were amply compensated, and got quick attention sshenever they had a problem.

The cooks, operating room attendants, X-ray technicians, and lab assistants, on the other hand, were, and are, the hospital’s second class citizens, even though many of them share the professional’s pride in contributing to patient care and are often called upon to perform extra hours of drudgery in emergencies. In a major teaching hospital like Duke, which occupies 30 buildings, sees more than 390,000 patients a year, and is aswarm with more than 2,000 doctors and students in one or another field of health care, everyone’s work is vital. Differences between the treatment given professional and service personnel are, therefore, a constant source of friction.

As a second AFSCME campaign commenced at the hospital in the summer of 1978, the union hoped to capitalize on the fact that most of the wage workers felt unfairly harassed by their supervisors, and that Blacks, who made up about 60 percent of ths hospital work force, continued to feel that the administration discriminated against them. Many employees, too, worked at the minimum wage, and there was a maximum pay level for every job classification regardless of years of service. For example, Dorothy Harris, a lab assistant and head of the union organizing committee, could only take home S6,000 in 1978 though she had worked at Duke for 17 )ears. The grievance procedure was also said to be stacked in the administration’s favor, and all of this, the union argued, lowered employee morale and diminished the quality of patient care.

Assisted by Wil Duncan, a Black organizer sent in from AFSCME’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., the Duke Medical Center campaign got underway in June 1978 with a demonstration in front of the hospital of 75 employees demanding higher wages. All was cordial, and, in fact, pleasantness characterized the relations between the administration and the employees during the first six months of the campaign. The union mustered student support, created a Duke Friends of Labor, got professors and doctors to sign AFSCME petitions, and in November 1978 was able to present the National Labor Relations Board with “green cards” signed by more than 1,000 hospital employees requesting a new union election. The date selected was February 16, 1979.

It seemed certain that no matter which side won, the campaign would arouse none of the bitterness of the 1968 student and worker protests. The university was now in the hands of President Terry Sanford who, as the moderate governor of the state in the 1960s and campus peacemaker in the 1970s, had achieved a reputation for tolerance. His administration had done nothing out of the ordinary to resist previous union efforts on campus, and it stated that relations with Duke’s two existing unions, AFSCME Local 77 and a smaller local of Operating Engineers, had been “very good.”

But the university, it turned out, regarded the union drive at the hospital with greater trepidation than anyone imagined. An additional hospital wing, costing $92 million, was under construction, and many new employees would be required to staff it; it was no time to permit a union, which was bound to demand substantial wage increases, to become established at the Medical Center. At least two months before the union election, Duke quietly hired the Chicagobased anti-union consulting firm, Modern Management Methods, or “3M.” Each “3M” consultant is paid from $500 to $700 per day, and as many as five of these agents were believed to be on campus at one time during the climax of the campaign. It is impossible, however, to report exactly what the Chicago firm cost the university because Duke repeatedly refused to disclose this information during the campaign. (And after the campaign was over, no responsible official at Duke was willing to discuss the matter in any depth.)

Modern Management Methods exemplifies the new wave of American union-busting. Gone are the axehandles, the goons, and the blacklists – the agents of “3M” and kindred consulting firms wear three-piece suits, boast college degrees, and avoid ever being seen outside the personnel offices of whatever company, or university, has paid for their services.

They operate very much behind the scenes in the labor conflict, so it is impossible to render a detailed account of their performance at Duke. Their known activities, however, all seem to be impeccably legal and highly effective. Duke was attracted to the firm because “3M” specializes in fighting hospital unions, their methods are quite sophisticated, and because they shun the press like a farmer avoids fire ants. Almost every non-union corporation in the South employs some type of labor consultant, but few can afford “3M.”

The principal tactic of Modern Management Methods, the Duke union said, was to turn all department supervisors into full-blooded organizers against AFSCME by

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interviewing each supervisor, gauging his or her feelings about the union, and making it clear that management expected their full support for its anti-union program. These meetings were not threatening (a supervisor at Duke described her “3M” interviewer as “one of the tallest, most gorgeous Black men who ever walked the streets,” and a supervisor at a Boston hospital where “3M” was active said she felt as though she were “being seduced” throughout her interview) and were designed to ally the supervisors in a common cause with the upper echelons of management. Then came seminars where the supervisors learned what they might or might not do, under existing labor law, to influence their employees. In the latter stages of the campaign the supervisors became the eyes, ears and voice of management as far as the workers were concerned. The union claimed that the supervisors kept track of the wavering sentiments of each worker in their unit, vigorously espoused management’s line, and were made to feel personally responsible for how each of the workers in his or her department voted on election day.

Duke’s executives described the “3M” program differently. They were “communications experts,” said Richard Jackson, head of personnel at the Medical Center. “Their function was to educate our supervisors in the best ways to communicate to the employees the many good things that Duke was doing and to counter, by legal means, the arguments of the union.” Duke had hired these “outside experts,” he told me, in response to the fact that AFSCME had assigned outside organizers to the campaign.

The impact of the “3M” strategy was immediate. Before their arrival debates for and against AFSCME had been conducted fairly freely in the Medical Center corridors, but the hospital’s friendly climate quickly turned sour when the neutrality of the supervisors evaporated. Employees became fearful of discussing the union on the job and began to worry about how secure their jobs would be if they were identified as AFSCME supporters. Friends of years standing became distrustful of one another. A secretary who had worked 19 years at Duke and was known to favor AFSCME said, “During this union campaign people would not walk down the hall with me. We’d be walking and they would say, “I’d better go down this way so people won’t see us together. We’d be standing in the bathroom talking – not even union talk – and one of the girls would say, “Would you mind waiting just a few minutes, I don’t want to be seen walking out with you.” You know, there’s a strange kind of fear here. I can’t understand it, because I don’t have it, but I think it’s a fear that Duke has put there.”

AFSCME tried vainly to make a winning issue out of Duke’s employment of “3M.” “Is your pay raise being used to hire these Chicago union-busters?” the union asked. But it could never get any hard facts about what the consultants were up to or how much they were being paid. The “3M” agents stayed in the background as far as possible. When one of them inadvertently stumbled upon a TV news crew doing a story on the AFSCME campaign, he was filmed rushing down the hall trying to avoid the camera. The aura of secrecy surrounding “3M’s” mission on campus actually seems to have worked in the administration’s favor because it added to the anxiety of some employees that they were being watched.

So that everyone would know exactly where the administration stood, a daily barrage of letters and “3M”-designed leaflets poured out to the employees insisting that AFSCME was an alien force that would disrupt the previously congenial relations between the workers and Duke’s management. The personnel department repeatedly stressed the possibility that employees might even lose existing benefits and pay if they voted in the union. Much of this literature reached the employees through their hospital mailboxes, a channel of communication denied to AFSCME. Duke went so far as to assert, inaccurately, that if the hospital workers voted for AFSCME they would be forced to join the Blackdominated Local 77. It is unclear why the university pressed this point, but union sympathizers felt it was a play on the racial fears of White hospital workers.

Even President Sanford underwent a curious transformation. He had previously been considered a friend of labor for stands he had taken as governor, but now he wrote a lengthy letter to the faculty urging it to oppose AFSCME on the grounds that wage increases for the hospital workers might compete with faculty salaries and that a hospital union would inevitably result in a strike to the detriment of patient care.

The second charge went to the real heart of the matter because the union was contending that only the hospital workers, and not management, truly cared about the welfare of the patients, and that a better paid and happier work force, not the ever more expensive medical hardware in which the hospital preferred to invest, was the key to improved health care. AFSCME backers also maintained that strikes were unlikely, and that even if one did occur the hospital workers would not desert sick patients. Sanford’s letter had the effect, however, of chilling faculty debate about the union and serving notice that his administration was from top to bottom unalterably opposed to the notion that the hospital workers should organize.

Toward the end of the campaign the pressure began to build. “In the beginning the momentum was on our side,”

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one of the hospital employees said, “then people started getting nervous when 3M came in using a lot of scare tactics. They starting having meetings every single day with the supervisors, and, Oh Lord!, the rumors they were spreading around were unreal. Supervisors told the people that if they went with the union they might lose their job whenever someone with more seniority wanted it. They were told that the first thing the union will do is go on strike, and you’ll never get another job, and you won’t get unemployment, and you won’t get food stamps. A lot of employees bought that. I mean, who would want the kind of a union 3M was describing. We were trying to present the union as a progressive force in the workplace, but we simply couldn’t get out the word as effectively as 3M. People were scared to death, just scared to death. People would come up to me and say, l think this is a good thing, but I can’t talk to you.’ Or Don’t call me, don’t come by me.’ They inspired incredible amounts of tear.”

Duke’s tactics worked. On February 16 the hospital workers voted 995 to 761 to reject representation by AFSCME. Not even the administration claimed that the outcome could be interpreted as a vote of confidence in the university. Rather it may fairly be concluded that Duke’s employees, who dwell in a state where the major history of unionism is one of defeat, were easily persuaded that they risked losing their livelihood if they defied the university. Duke insists that it won the contest by appealing to the intellect of its employees, but a great portion of the university’s anti-union literature played on the natural insecurities of the loly and on the pessimism common to Southern workers which teaches that they shall never have the power to win a bigger share of the pie.

The Medical Center’s constant warning to its employees was that “in the give and take process of collective bargaining, no one can predict the outcome. It is a gamble; you could gain or you can lose wages and benefits you now have.” Such tactics and worse are, of course, the standard fare of many North Carolina corporations devoted to making profits, but they seem somehow less tolerable when put forth by a wealthy, charitable institution devoted to “the eternal union of knowledge and religion as set forth in the teachings and character of Jesus Christ.”

Perhaps the time is past when this distinction meant anything. One month after AFSCME’s defeat Terry Sanford re-emphasized the mercantile aspect of Duke’s institutional character when he told the press that “working as a citizen of Durham personally and as president of its major corporate citizen,” he would take an active role in seeking new industry for the city. One might speculate that he will seek hardest that industry which shares Duke’s labor philosophy. In light of the fact that Duke University is one of the shrines of the New South (some think the New South was actually invented there) it is only natural to wonder how much hope for laboring people is contained in the dawning of this new age.

Tony Dunbar is a free-lance writer living in Western North Carolina.

Chiquita Boycott

By Staff

Vol. 1, No. 9, 1979, pp. 8

The United Farm Workers Union (UFW)has called for a boycott of Chiquita bananas. Farmworkers in the southewestern U.S. are on strike agains a number of lettuce growers, including Sunharvest and Chiquita bananas. The bananas, with their familiar trade name, have been chosen as the boycott target. A boycott with national impact will help persuade Sunharvest/United Brands to negotiate in good faith with the union.

The main issue in the strike is wages. The employers insist on no more than a 7 percent wage increase, looking to Carter’s wage guidelines to support their position. The farmworkers point out, however, that the price for a crate of lettuce has gone up 110 percent in the last year, and that for employers to stick to 7 percent wage guidelines with these kinds of price increases is ludicrous. Also, wage guidelines do not apply to those who earn less than $4.00 an hour. Many farmworkers do earn less than $4.00 hourly. The current minimum wage in UFW lettuce contracts is $3.70; their proposed increase is to $5.25.

Local work is starting around the boycott. Potential future activities include the forming of delegations to approach grocery stores, inform them of the boycott, and ask that they not stock Chiquita bananas. Funds also need to be raised to send to the Imperial Valley in California. More than 3000 farmworkers are in the fourth month of their strike. Money raised will go to the strike fund that supports the workers and their families. Anyone interested in this work can contact Norma Chandler at 763-0183.

Reprinted from the Circuit Rider, Atlanta, Georgia.

Battle of Newport News

By Phil Wilayto

Vol. 1, No. 9, 1979, pp. 9-13, 23

The Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company stretches along the northern bank of the James River like a long, narrow industrial city. For over two miles, this largest workplace in Virginia occupies the shore with its docks and piers, warehouses and worksheds, cranes and trucks and roads and parking lots, dominating the landscape and the minds and bodies of its 22,000 employees. The noise is constant, the hustle and bustle never ceases, as military and commercial ships are designed, constructed, and repaired by the largest privately-owned shipyard in the world.

But for 11 weeks this past winter and early spring, the yard was silent. Not a crane moved, not a ship was being built, as some 14,000 members of the United Steelworkers of America fought to win recognition for their union.

“We need a union,” electrician Ronnie Webs, Jr., said during the first days of the strike. “There’s a lot of safety hazards in that yard. The scaffolding we work on is dangerous. There’s no ventilation in the paint areas. We need a grievance procedure.”

“We’re fighting for more benefits,” said Kay Hale, welder and one of the three to four hundred female bluecollar workers in the yard. “We need a decent pension and a retirement plan. I’m a coal miner’s daughter and I believe in unions.”

“The discrimination’s real bad,” said John Devane, a Black crane hook-up man who is classified as a clerk, a lower-paying job title. Close to 40 percent of the yard’s work force is Black. “All the Blacks in my department work outside and all the Whites work inside. The company made one Black guy train a White guy to be his supervisor. I think the Steelworkers will make a difference.”

“It’s time for people to stand up for justice on the job,” added Charles Hawkins, a rigger for eight years. “We need to stand up in Virginia and do what’s necessary to improve ourselves and our community.”

And the Newport News shipyard needs a great deal of improvement. Founded over 50 years ago as a local family concern, it has grown into a giant behemoth that has left all consideration of health and safety far behind. The stories on the picketline tell it all: the broken bones, burnt

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hands, welding flashes, the sometimes fatal falls from unsafe scaffolding – not to mention the company violations of safety procedures in handling asbestos, violations that have resulted in scores of law-suits demanding disability compensation.

For 40 years, workers at the yard had been “represented” by a classic company union called the Penninsula Shipbuilders Association, the PSA. Essentially a rehash of the old governmentsponsored Employee Representation Plan councils, the PSA held no membership meetings, no election of shop stewards, had no safety clause in its “contract” and offered no real representation at all. And yet, backed by the might of the company and the influence of local politicians, the PSA had been able three times to turn back organizing challenges by bona-fide unions.

The sixties brought a number of changes to the yard, some of them good, some not so good. On the plus side, in 1965 a group of Black workers filed a civil rights suit against the company charging discrimination in hiring, firing, promotions, work assignments, and on-the-job discipline. The suit, which was opposed by the White members of the PSA’s governing board, resulted in promotions for over 3,000 Black employees and openings in the apprenticeship training program.

While the immediate gains were important, probably the suit’s greatest significance was the basis it laid for racial unity in the yard, a unity that showed itself a short to years later when the yard’s only pre-1979 strike erupted.

But while the workers’ potential strength was growing, so was the company’s. In 1969 the yard was bought out by the Tenneco Corporation, a multi-national giant based in Houston, Texas. The 19th largest company in America,with holdings all over the world, including South Africa, Tenneco’s empire is based in chemicals, agriculture, and machinery.

As with other U.S. corporations, Tenneco’s profits have been soaring, with 1978 being the single most profitable year in the company’s history. Undaunted by the hatred it has earned from farmworkers in the Southwest or by its recent convictions on charges of widespread corporate bribery, the Tenneco executives, directors, and stockbrokers have looked to the Newport News shipyard with its many defense-industry-related contracts as a stable source of profits. The largest, single, unorganized work force in the country, located in a “right-towork” Southern state with a brazonly pro-big business governor, the shipyard has been seen as an investment in high profits, low wages, and human degradation.

Tenneco only miscalculated in one area: the desire of these Southern workers to be organized.

In late 1976, a small group of shipyard workers, led by some of the Black leaders of the 1965 civil rights suit, asked the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) to start an organizing campaign at the yard.

In many ways, the choice was a good one. With 1,400,000 members and a $127 million strike fund, the USWA is the largest single union in the AFL-CIO, securely concentrated in basic steel, aluminum, copper, containers, steel fabricating – and shipbuilding. Its history of militant struggle runs deep, going back to the days when volunteer organizers from John L. Lewis’ United Mine Workers first began organizing in the steel, auto, and rubber industries, organizing campaigns that grew to become the historic battles of the 30s and resulted in the establishment of true industrial unions.

But in the years since the last great strikes of the late 40s, practically the entire leadership of the U.S. labor movement has grown soft and conservative, and it’s only been in the last few years that an awakening rank-and-file militancy has been able to break through an encrusted bureaucracy, flexing its muscles in struggles like the 197778 miners strike, the ’78 postal workers strike, and the ’78 Norfolk and Western railroad strike.

In Newport News, Virginia, the same economic and social pressures bear down on shipyard workers as affect every other group of workers in the country – daily worsening inflation, the lack of any long-term financial security, unsafe working conditions racial and sexual discrimination, and, above all, the lack of a sense of simple human dignity. By the late 70s, the shipyard workers were ready for a change. Eventually, some 14,000 workers signed up with Local 8888, making it the largest local in the Steelworkers union.

In December of 1978, in the largest single union local meeting in the history of the U.S. Labor movement, the members of Local 8888 voted almost unanimously to authorize a strike. On January 31, a year to the day after the original election victory, Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Co. was shut down tight. Local 8888 was out on strike against Tenneco’s unfair labor practice of refusing to abide by the decision of the Labor Board.

The morning of January 31 was a cold, overcast day, the day of the winter’s first snowfall. As the hour of dawn approached outside the yard’s 50th St. gate on Washington Avenue, hundreds of picketing Steelworkers kept up a series of noisy, spirited chants:

“88 – Shut the Gate!”

“What time is it?”

STEELWORKER TIME!”

Across the street, an equal number of undecided workers massed on the sidewalk, lunch buckets in hand, sizing up the situation. Punch-in time was fast approaching and decision had to he made soon. All along

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the shipyard, outside the 17 gates of the yard, the scene was the same, as the legendary “individualistic Southern worker” weighed the alternatives – reliance on the cold paternalism of a corporate giant, or union solidarity.

And in between the two sides were the cops. Besides the company’s barbed wire, water cannons, and special SWAT-style guard team, the union was facing the armed might of the state: the shipyard area detachment of the Newport News police department had been beefed up: Virginia governor Dalton had promised to send in the State Police. The National Guard was on a six-hour alert. Everywhere you looked were riot helmets, the long four-foot batons, growling, snapping dogs, and police cars. And behind this physical power was the legal weight of the so-called “right-to-work” laws. Like 19 other states, most of them in the South, Virginia law forbids the closed union shop, allowing workers to receive the benefits of being represented by a union without having to join and support that union. Before the strike was to end, this “right-to-scab” law was to earn as much hatred as the state police, a group alternately known as the “Gestapo” and “Dalton’s Dogs”.

Outside the gates on that first morning of the strike, the two sides of workers squared off, the taunts and pleas were exchanged, and Tenneco held its breath until one side finally wavered, hesitated, and then broke altogether, as hundreds of cheering yard workers surged across Washington Street to join the picket lines.

The battle was on.

Those first days of the strike were glorious ones. The solidarity was complete, the pride in being a union member as-up-front and on display as the blue and white Steelworker caps all the strikers wore. Black and white, men and women, old and young, these sons and daughters of Virginian and Carolinian farming families were standing together against their own special giant.

“We are together,” a middle-aged Black man declared one evening outside the 50th St. gate. “The first time one of these state police touches one of our people, be they Black or White, that’s when you’re going to see trouble.”

“My parents could have prevented us having to go through this moment here today,” an older White man said quietly, “but they failed, as their parents failed before them, and so on back through the line. But today, for once, the White and the Black are out here together. It’s a new beginning, and it’s going to spread from Newport News down throughout the South. But first we have to win it here.”

“You see that yard down there?” a young Black worker asked. “You can’t hear nothing. Nothing’s moving. We did that. Now I know what power is – you can’t build ships with a pencil.”

The significance of the strike wasn’t lost on the High Priests of Big Business. From the local press to the national media like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the refrain was the same: “A test case for labor” “A challenge to Southern industry”: “a fight to unionize the South”.

And not only the mouth-pieces of the corporate empire-builders recognized this fact. From the shops and factories in the surrounding Tidewater area, right across the country and up into the lofty citadels of the labor bureaucracy, every union member in the country could see that this struggle was, as one of the local daily papers put it, “the biggest test of labor since World War II”. It was a challenge to open up the largely unorganized South, a challenge to the run-away shops from the North, a challenge to the “right-to-work” laws – and a challenge to the national offensive by Big Business against all of labor.

In the first weeks of the strike, the yard was 85 to 90 percent shut down, with most of the skilled trades departments solidly out. Although the local press had been predicting mass violence on the picket lines, the union’s leadership’s strategy was to avoid any open fighting with the scabs. However, this didn’t stop scores and eventually hundreds of individual, off-theline incidents of tire slashings, sugar-in-the-gas-tank, and anti-scab fisticuffs, as union members fought to protect their jobs and their union.

Nor did it stop the police from harassing the picket lines.

From the very first days of the strike, the arrests started piling up, most of them for alleged violations of the “right-to-work” laws. One striker was busted for pointing his finger at a scab. Another was taken in for throwing a cigarette near a scab’s car. Local 8888’s president Wayne Crosby was arrested for the simple act of walking past one of the gates with a picket sign.

The issue of police involvement in the strike was to become a major issue in the battle. The AFLCIO Central Labor Councils in the area passed resolutions demanding that local police departments forbid their members to moon-light as security guards for the yard. State AFLCIO president Julian Carper demanded that governor John Dalton pull his state police out of the area. And all along the picket lines, the strikers themselves got a concrete lesson in the role of the police in labor disputes.

“I grew up here in Newport News,” 8888 treasurer Kelly Coleman said, “I fought in Vietnam and had an uncle on the police force. I used to really respect the cops, but no more. After seeing the way they’ve been treating our people, I just don’t give a damn for them anymore.”

On February 24, the union made an attempt to broaden the base of support for the strike. The call went out to all Virginia labor unions to come to Newport News

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for a solidarity march.

And they came. They came from Tidewater, Richmond, Lynchburg, the Southside, Arlington, Roanoke, and Waynesboro. Plumbers, carpenters, mill workers, teachers, nurses, boilermakers, shipyard workers, factory hands, merchant marine sailors, telephone workers, retail store clerks, all came with signs identifying their unions and declaring their solidarity with the Newport News strikers. Some 5,000 trade unionists and their supporters stretched over 20 blocks along Washington Street, marching past the shipyard’s fortified gates, chanting, “88 – Shut the Gate!” Many of the marchers wore bright yellow buttons distributed by the Center for United Labor Action that read, “Stop Union-Busting in the South”. Walking along the line of march, the power of labor could he almost physically felt, as picketing Steelworkers reached out to shake hands with their comrades in the labor movement.

And then it was back to the picket lines. Slowly but inevitably the days and nights passed, in cold, in rain and snow, the occasional arrest, the taunts and jeers at the scabs. Standing around the fire barrels and Salamanders, holding cups of coffee and sandwiches brought by the union’s mobile canteen, the conversation moved easily between the banal and the sublime, the passing and the historic. Bull sessions about the company turned into debates on the value of keeping alive parasites like the Rockefellers and the Gettys. Comparisons, were made between the strike and the mass uprisings taking place in the streets of Iran. Consciousness of taking part in an historic strike led to talks of other strikes, of the 30s, of the great labor battles of 100 years ago. The strike became a social classroom and the strikers were wrenching their lessons directly from the concrete reality around them.

As the time for the Circuit Court decision on Tenneco’s legal objections approached, the union leadership made a new appeal for labor support. This time there was to he a National Day of Solidarity in which trade unionists from around the country would come to Newport News to declare their support for the Steelworker struggle. The date was set, Hampton Coliseum was rented, and the call went out.

But there were some problems. USWA president Lloyd McBride had just made a statement at a Miami press conference that the union might have made a “tactical blunder” in agreeing that the strike was part of a struggle to organize the South, that this might have helped galvanize Southern corporations against the Steelworkers and encouraged them to support Tenneco. The National Day of Solidarity came off, but it was held on a Friday afternoon, when most workers are still at work.

Half-way through the rally, the court decision came down. McBride announced the results from the coliseum stage: the trial judge had thrown out all but one of the company’s objections, all but the question of “chainvoting,” an obscure and antiquated means of rigging elections in which one person controls a succession of votes by having a single blank ballot snuck out of the voting booth, marking it, and passing it along to the next voter. That voter deposits the marked ballot in the booth and sneaks out another blank ballot to be marked by the leader, who passes it along to a third voter, and so on down the “chain”. It’s a throw-back to the days of illiterate Southern sharecroppers and foreign-language Northern immigrants, people who wouldn’t know how the ballots were being marked. In today’s literate work force, the scheme has no relevance, but this was the single issue that the courts sent back to the NLRB for review.

And so it went, as the days dragged on, as strike benefits ate into the union’s treasury, as the number of workers crossing the picket lines gradually increased 10 percent to IS percent; 20 percent to 25 percent. The skilled trades held solid, but the prospect of further court delays stretched out to the horizon like a lonesome, corporation-owned railroad track.

And Tenneco had help. Besides the la the cops and

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courts, the governor, and the media, the giant from Houston had other allies as well. The single largest customer of Newport News Shipyard is the U.S. Navy. Submarines, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, service vessels of every kind – new construction, rehaul jobs, in every way Newport News is essential to the Navy, and the Navy knows it.

Throughout the course of the strike, the Navy paid the shipyard a total of $302 million, in the form of cost overrun settlements, timing the payments to come at critical moments in the strike. And these outright grants to the company’s strike fund weren’t the only means of help. Navy officials sat down with the yard executives and drew up priority lists for military work, which contracts had to he taken care of right away and which could be put off for awhile. Then there were the continuing lease payments for yard property use, and the physical and psychological presence of Navy ships and personnel remaining in the yards during the course of the strike.

And yet nowhere was this federal support for Tenneco mentioned by the union. As the Navy, the Labor Board, and the weight of Carter’s “wage guidelines” decrees all lined up on the company’s side, the center of the company’s opposition shifted to Washington, but the center of the union’s resistance remained in Newport News.

The workers became restless, and the picketline strategies changed. With 30 to 40 percent of the yard’s work force now crossing the lines, Local 8888 began to beef up its presence at the gates. A Women’s Auxiliary was formed and wives, daughters, and friends of strikers began marching as a group. On April 2, some 300 Steelworkers gathered outside the North Yard’s 68th St. gate, standing five to six solid in rows on either side of the gate. As the procession of scabs approached, flying bottles joined the taunts and jeers that were thrown at the strikebreakers. The cops were obviously tense and apprehensive as the crowd turned its attention to them as well as to the scabs. But the day passed without serious incident.

Finally, the Steelworkers’ Pittsburgh headquarters made a decision: the strike would be “suspended” until the legal delays were over. Immediately, Tenneco made an announcement. Returning strikers would be made to sign a waiver of all their rights to their former jobs, to seniority, and to any possible claims for back pay from the company. They would also be made to report to the personnel office, sign in, and wait to be called back, an obvious attempt to weed out the most active union supporters.

The workers balked. On April 13, over 6,000 Steelworkers attended a mass meeting at the coliseum at which staff organizer Jack Hower attempted to explain the Pittsburgh decision, It didn’t go over.

“We couldn’t go back under the company’s conditions,” one rank-and-file activist said. “If we were going back, it had to be together, with our heads up high. There was a lot of dissension at the meeting until this one guy, a Black guy, got up and made a motion that the union send a telegram to Tenneco saying they had to drop the conditions or we wouldn’t go back. Everybody went for that idea and the motion passed unamimously.”

And so the telegram was sent. Half of Tenneco’s reply came the following Monday morning, April 16, when company officials announced there would be no change in policy. The other half of the answer came a few hours later.

About 10:00 a.m., over a hundred state and local police gathered on Washington Avenue, formed themselves into a phalanx block, and began sweeping down the street. They pushed and clubbed and beat picketers away from the gates, broke into restaurants and drove customers and owners alike into the streets, and chased individual strikers down alleys and across parking lots.

“It was incredible,” one man told this reporter. “It was like that show the Holocaust’, with the Gestapo

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rounding up the Jews. I never thought it could happen in America.”

The attack didn’t stop there. Twice the strikers tried to regroup and march back down to Washington Street, twice they were repulsed. Finally, the cops approached the union’s strike headquarters itself. Scores of strikers were milling around outside the building as the police came up, yelling at the Steelworkers to get off the street. Then, as the strikers were attempting to get inside their building, the cops attacked again.

Clubbing their way inside, the police broke one man’s arm, threw another through a window and then beat him as he lay in the broken glass, and beat up the 14-year-old daughter of a striker. After clearing out the downstairs lobby, the cops then tried to storm up the stairs to reach the union offices on the third floor, but they were met in the narrow staircase by a solid mass of Steelworkers. With chairs and fire extinguishers, the union members, Black and White, men and women, prevented the cops from taking their headquarters and eventually drove them from the building.

In all, over 60 Steelworkers were injured, some 40 of them requiring hospitalization, and over 70 were arrested, including organizer Jack Hower.

Even the news media could not ignore this one. The local papers carried bloody pictures of crowds of cops beating individual strikers. The TV crews filmed a young Black woman being taken out of strike headquarters on a stretcher. The NAACP announced it would handle court suits for the strikers charging police brutality. Local 8888 began a petition campaign demanding the removal of the Newport News Chief of Police.

Two days later, Tenneco backed down, saying that strikers would not have to sign a waiver of their rights in order to return to work. USWA District Director Bruce Thrasher refused to accept this reversal until it was communicated directly to the union, and a few days later the company reportedly contacted the local’s lawyers.

On April 22, a small crowd of strikers held a “last hurrah” at one of the shipyard gates, the picket lines were disbanded, and the historic strike of Local 8888 was “suspended.”

A few days later, the labor board judge made his decision: the company’s charge of chain-voting was “without merit,” the Steelworker election victory and certification were valid, and the labor board’s order to Tenneco to sit down and bargain was reaffirmed.

The company announced it would file “exceptions” to this finding to the full board in Washington. Meanwhile, the yard had already announced that it was suspending all strikers who had been arrested in connection with the strike, a total of close to 200 union members, including Local 8888’s president Wayne Crosby and treasurer Kelly Coleman. The union has since promised that it would fight all such suspensions and would continue to financially support the suspended workers.

Estimates for a full labor board decision on the company’s new “exceptions” vary from a few months on up, and union spokesperson Bill Edwards has said that a company decision to appeal the full Board’s decision to Richmond might well result in the strike being activated again.

Meanwhile, the union is continuing to function. A new lease has been signed for the strike headquarters, more volunteer organizers are being recruited, and steward training sessions are being organized.

“No, we didn’t win recognition for the union,” one rank-and-filer said as he prepared to head back to work,”and we didn’t win a contract. Not yet, anyway. But we showed the company that we would stand up for our rights, that we were ready to fight. We didn’t win what we went out for, but we aren’t broken, either. We’re regrouping, we’ll be back, and we’ll get our union.”

A union shop steward and newspaper reporter in the Tidewater, Virginia, area, Phil Wilayto is a member of the Center for United Labor Action which was active in building support for the Steelworker strike in Newport News. He is the author of the song “Organize the South,” used in the Steelworkers strike movie and played at the statewide and national solidarity rallies.

The Business of Blacks In the Mississippi Delta

By Robert Anderson, Jr.

Vol. 2, No. 3, 1979, pp. 15-19

On a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1967, two White physicians who were conducting a survey for the Field Foundation came to Belzoni, Mississippi, and spent three hours talking to Black families. Their findings on this visit and on visits to similar places in rural Mississippi would later help awaken the nation to the fact of hunger and malnutrition in the United States and would trigger legislation leading to an expanded food stamp program and maternal and infant feeding program.

The doctors wrote, “In sum, we saw children who are hungry and who are sick – children for whom hunger is a daily fact of life and sickness, in many forms, an inevitability. We do not want to quibble over words, but ‘malnutrition’ is not quite what we found; the boys and girls we saw were hungry – weak, in pain, sick, their lives are being shortened; they are, in fact, visibly and predictably losing their health, their spirits, their energy. They are suffering from hunger and disease and… they are dying from them – which is exactly what ‘starvation’ means.”

At the time of the doctors’ visit, much of rural Mississippi was still a harsh, unyielding racist society, little changed by the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In its racial attitudes Belzoni itself was known as one of the state’s most rigid towns. A local Black leader had been shot to death by White vigilantes only a few years before. As the doctors proceeded on that Sunday from one Black home to another, the chief of police followed behind them in his car, and a small crowd of unfriendly Whites gathered across the street. The afternoon ended without incident, yet the presence of the police was plainly intended to intimidate, and a sense of fear was pervasive.

The pace of life has not changed much in Beizoni in the twelve years since that episode, and some local practices also remain unchanged. Because the town boundaries have been drawn so as to exclude Black neighborhoods, Blacks cannot vote in local elections and have no claim on city services. But there has nevertheless been a decided change in atmosphere. The town’s schools are integrated and Blacks and moderate Whites do not live with a day-to-day consciousness of racial tension. The Black population of Belzoni enjoys an additional sense of security (and pride) in the support it receives from (and gives to) the local Mississippi Action for Community Education (MACE).

MACE, a strong, versatile organization headquartered in Greenville, originated in the civil rights movement. A MACE representative, in fact, helped guide the visiting doctors on their 1967 trip to Belzoni and other Mississippi localities. The founders of the organization described their purpose as being “an institutional means to realize the social and economic rights that civil rights protest activities and legislation could not.”

Paramount among the founders’ goals was community organization in an eleven county area of the Mississippi Delta. The area is predominantly rural and agricultural, and its population is widely dispersed. The major crop is cotton, but soybeans and rice are also grown. The production of beef cattle has also emerged in recent years as a mor undertaking. Technological advances in agriculture, however – particularly mechanization of cotton farming over the past 20 years – have brought about a loss of almost 300,000 farm jobs in Mississippi, 40 percent of the total number of jobs

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available in 1950. The majority of those thrown out of work have been Black, and most of them had worked as sharecroppers on cotton plantations. One result of the loss of jobs has been a great exodus of Blacks from the Delta.

Unemployment rates today in the 11 Delta counties exceed national and state averages. For males in the state the rate is around 9 percent; for females it is 13 percent. In the MACE Delta counties the rate is 12 percent for males and 20 percent for females. Some 75 percent of the area’s unemployed males and 80 percent of the unemployed females are Black.

Census figures further reveal the extent of poverty in the Delta. In Madison County, 61.1 percent of the families live below the poverty level; in Humphreys County, the figure is 77.4 percent. The measure of poverty in other counties ranges between these two figures. Mean family income in Madison County is $2,252; in Humphreys County it is $1,686. In Madison County, 34.7 percent of the families receive public assistance; in Humphreys County, 50 percent.

For organizational purposes, MACE divides the Delta counties into two categories – the six core counties, in which MACE works full time, and the five technical assistance counties. In the latter, MACE provides only limited technical assistance. Its reasons for the limitation of its efforts include rivalries with local organizations in some counties and lack of receptivity to community organizing in others. Each of the 11 counties elects two representatives to the MACE board of directors. MACE has approximately 23,000 members, who pay annual dues of $5 each.

New MACE field workers take part in a 30 day training program at the organization’s headquarters, followed by a two-month trial period in the field. They are instructed in the rules and regulations for filing for public assistance, food stamps, Social Security benefits, and Medicare and Medicaid. They are also taught how to file complaints with public agencies and how to conduct public meetings.

Field workers serve MACE members in several ways. In 1976, for example, MACE workers in Holmes County and the staff at Greenville won a major victory by achieving equal public services for Blacks. The precedent for such equalization had been set in a landmark decision in 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled that a pattern of discrimination against Blacks existed in the town of Shaw, Mississippi, because Blacks did not enjoy equality with Whites in the provision of street paving, street lighting, and other public facilities and services.

Little had been achieved in Shaw itself sincethe decision because no organized follow-up effort at the local level was made. But in Lexington, a town of some 3,000 in Holmes County, the local MACE chapter, led by Howard Bailey, chairman of MACE’s board, undertook a detailed civic survey. MACE members determined where Whites and Blacks lived, and they acquired a map showing how city services, including water and sewage facilities, were distributed. Their comparison of the distribution with housing patterns showed discrimination against Blacks. Assisted by MACE attorneys, the local group filed suit, asking for equalization.

Since the suit was filed, more than $1.3 million in services have been provided to Lexington’s Black neighborhoods. Indeed, the attitude of local officials has changed from a resistance to cooperation in the equalization effort, in large part because MACE attorneys have helped the officials prepare applications for federal aid to help the city pay for additional services. In Belzoni, similar citizen action generated by MACE field workers is currently directed toward trying to bring about redrawing of the town boundary lines that exclude Black residents. Altogether, MACE has generated $11 million in equalization services.

One highly visible MACE program has been the construction of a 76 unit housing project, including a social center complete with recreational facilities, in the small town of Flora. Begun in 1974 and completed in 1976, the project is small by the standards of more prosperous localities. In the Delta, however, any decent new housing for the poor is more than welcome. (In all of MACE’s Delta counties, the percentage of housing that lacks plumbing far exceeds the state rate of 22

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percent. In one county it is 60 percent.)

To qualify for admission to the Flora project, a family cannot have an income above that which would make them eligible for public housing. In addition, the family must either live in substandard housing or be headed by a person 62 years of age or older or by a handicapped person. Rents range from $172 to $239 a month, but tenants are eligible for federal rent supplements. Under provisions governing such supplements, each family must pay 25 percent of its income to live in the project, but if that amount is not enough to pay the rent, the federal government will pay directly to the developer up to 70 percent of the rent owed by the family.

MACE’s most extensive work consists of economic development and the creation of jobs for Black Delta residents. This work is carried forward by the Delta Foundation, which MACE established in June 1969 as a non-profit, tax-exempt community development corporation. It has many of the same board members as MACE, and its chairman, Charles Bannerman, is also chief executive officer of MACE.

Bannerman is the dominant personality in both organizations. A native New Yorker, he came to MACE in 1968 after two years in Washington as director of technical assistance for the Citizens’ Crusade Against Poverty. After working four years as associate director, he succeeded to the directorship held by Edward Brown, a community organizer who had been the driving force behind the creation of MACE. In furthering MACE’s economic development activities, Bannerman has displayed the energy and managerial adroitness of a highly successful business executive in a growing corporation.

Although the Delta Foundation is a nonprofitorganization, it has two wholly owned subsidiaries, Delta Enterprises and the Delta Development and Management Corporation, which are profit-making enterprises. Delta Enterprises is the holding company for three businesses: Fine Vines, in Greenville, which manufactures denim jeans; Electro Controls, in Canton, a manufacturer of switches used in aircraft instruments; and Mid-South Stamping Company, in Sardis, which produces metal parts for a variety of industrial purposes.

Delta’s Fine Vines denim manufacturing plant in downtown Greenville is a bustling enterprise today, but at the beginning it was plagued by production problems. Most of the workers came from farm backgrounds, with no experience at all in industry, and they had to be trained from scratch. Production in the first year or two of operations fell far short of expectations. The plant had been scheduled to produce 200 pairs of jeans daily, but by the end of the first year of operations, it was producing only 320 pairs a week and quality control was difficult to maintain. One reason, according to the plan manager, was that the inspectors, unused to management responsibilities, were reluctant to report the poor work done by their friends and neighbors.

During this period, too, organizers from the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union persuaded workers in the plant to petition the National Labor Relations Board for a union election. Delta officials had to make a hard decision. Union representation would mean higher wages and greater fringe benefits at a time when the struggling business was losing $25,000 a month. Yet because of the organization’s avowed social orientation, its self-image and its reputation among its consituency would be tarnished by opposition to the union. Delta nonetheless decided to oppose unionization, on the ground that the plant had been created to provide training and jobs for disadvantaged people, and not primarily to maximize profits. Negotiations lasted six months. Many Delta officials, like management officials in more profit-oriented companies, resented having union organizers coming into their shop and, in their view, telling them how to run their business. This resentment was fed further by the fact that the organizers were White and, according to these officials, had not previously demonstrated much interest in the general welfare of Blacks.

Opposition to the union created a split in Delta’s managerial ranks, which, of course, consist in large measure of people who are especially sympathetic to the needs of the poor. Indeed, one highranking policy maker resigned, denouncing

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Fine Vines as a “business for business” venture. In July 1972, a majority of the workers voted for union representation. Employees are still represented by the union, and today there is little evidence of open friction between management and union.

Improvements at Fine Vines are evident. Production is up to 850 dozen pairs of jeans per week. The company’s gross receipts for 1977 were $3 million. Quality control now is such that the plant is able to fulfill contracts with major retailers such as J.C. Penney.

Sam Moncure, who became director of the plant in 1976, is optimistic about the future, even though finding adequate plant supervisors still seems to be a problem At the same time, he notes the presence of several employees who, he feels, have considerable supervisory potential and, with proper training, could prove to be an important element in the plant’s future success. Moncure is a White Virginian with a wide background in apparel manufacturing management. He is dedicated to making the plant a profitable venture that can continue to provide employment for Fine Vines’ 105 workers.

Robert Tewes, general manager of Delta Enterprises, is also manager of Delta’s most recently acquired business, Electro Controls, in Canton, which manufactures reed switches for aircraft instruments. Delta decided to acquire the company because electronics is considered a growth industry and because, unlike many electronic products, the Electro Controls switches are fairly simple to produce and employees can be easily trained in the process. In-plant training lasts from eight to ten weeks, with an investment of approximately $1,200 per employee.

The company employs 60 people. It was acquired from Hathaway Instruments in the fall of 1974 and was originally capitalized at $850,000. Its main problems, according to Tewes, are developing greater sales volume, establishing cost controls, and keeping up with technology. The company has sales representatives in many cities in the United States and in Europe. It has contracts with major aircraft instrument companies and with RCA, Westinghouse, and Chevrolet.

Tewes, in his mid-forties, is an industrial engineer who was hired by Delta in 1971 through a management employment firm. His previous job had been production superintendent for the Cummins Engine Corporation in Indiana. He was attracted to the job with Delta in large measure by the organization’s social concerns. “I represent a marriage of two worlds,” he says, “social responsibility, doing something that isn’t totally for profit, combined with the textbook way of doing business.” Tewes played a major role in negotiations for acquisition of Electro Controls, Fine Vines, and Mid-South Stamping Company.

Mid-South Stamping, located at Sardis, 120 miles north of Greenville, was acquired by Delta in October 1971 for $150,000. The company manufactures small metal parts for industrial purposes. In 1974, it acquired Delta Fan Company of Jackson, Mississippi, a manufacturer of residential and commercial attic exhaust fans. Later that year it purchased Century of Memphis, Inc., a manufacturer of folding attic staircases. The acquisitions were a natural extension of MidSouth’s operations since the company was already producing metal hardware for folding staircases.

In its early days, Mid-South faltered. Many of the markets it had hoped to develop did not materialize. Its equipment was out of date and in poor operating condition. But Delta nursed it along because it felt that the initial problems could be overcome and because Mid-South was Delta’s first industrial enterprise outside the Greenville area.

The first step in reversing the decline was the hiring of a new manager, John Patterson, a middle-aged executive with an extensive background in metal parts manufacturing. Immediately before joining Mid-South he had been vice president of a metal stamping company that had annual sales of $12 million. Under Patterson, Mid-South losses began to go down, and the company was able to purchase new equipment. Through sound management and a great deal of hard work and patience, the company survived. Today it employs some 30 workers.

The Delta Foundation’s agricultural enterprise, the Leflore County Area Cooperative, has grown dramatically since it was chartered in 1971 and began operations on 160 acres. MACE provided capital of $20,000 and helped obtain loans for the venture from the Southern Cooperative Development Fund and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Today the

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co-op has 3,000 acres of rice and soybeans under cultivation. MACE describes the co-op as the largest black agricultural production venture in the country.

The co-op’s growth, however, has come about with less than $40,000 in equity capital, and it has had to borrow money to continue operations. Such borrowing is common practice in agricultural finance, but Leflore’s debt-to-equity ratio at the end of 1976 stood at 24-to-1. This high ratio means there is limited capital for expansion. To attract more capital, therefore, the co-op is planning to change to a corporation. “There is a rapidly growing awareness among sophisticated investors such as insurance companies and pension funds of the long-run return on investments in Southern agricultural land, particularly rich Delta land,” says Scott Daugherty, assistant director of the Delta Foundation.

Delta has provided loans to many businesses that could not otherwise have found credit. For the most part these have been small businesses, such as gasoline stations and grocery stores. One major beneficiary, however, is a Black-owned FM radio station, WBAD, in Greenville, which received $30,000 from Delta. WBAD has the highest listener rating of the area’s six stations. Its programming features rock, blues, and classical music.

WBAD is owned and directed by William Jackson, a native of Greenville who has worked in the broadcast industry for more than two decades. In 1972 Jackson was an announcer for the station, which was then White-owned but was nevertheless the only station that featured programming geared to a Black audience. Jackson had developed a following among Black listeners in the area, and when the station’s owners decided to sell, he and a partner came to the Delta Foundation for investment backing. Delta agreed because the station would be Black-owned, because it had shown its money-making potential (in 1972 it had a net income of $42,000), and because it could serve as a forum for publicizing Black community activities.

By big-city standards the station is not physically imposing. It is housed in a small cementblock structure far off the highway in what was once a cotton field. But to the Black residents of the Greenville area, it is a voice with which they deeply identify. The station currently has on file an application for AM broadcasting, which will enable it to reach more listeners and attract more advertising revenue.

As the Delta Foundation expanded it increasingly sensed a need for better-trained managers. It therefore established a management-training center in 1977. The center prepares selected current employees and other candidates for management positions within the foundation’s companies and elsewhere. The center was planned with the help of academic experts and active businessmen who designed a work-study program to develop middle-management skills for employees with limited experience. The program serves two ends. It increases the efficiency of Delta’s management and it provides advancement opportunities for individual employees. A certain hope for the future is evident in the spirit of these farming workers and community organizers.

But organizations such as MACE and Delta Foundation realize that they cannot alone do the job of reversing historic migration patterns by making small farms and business enterprises more viable. Specific policy changes are needed. The Commission on the Future of the South, which was made up for the most part of leading Southern businessmen put it this way: “The South can continue to depopulate the countryside or, through civic enterprise, private decisions, and public encouragement, we can locate jobs where people are instead of moving people to the city. Making it possible for young people to stay home, we could distribute prosperity and reinforce the vitality of dying places.”

Such words could have just as well been spoken by Charles Bannerman or Robert Tewes whose organizations and businesses have demonstrated that cooperative movements among poor people can function well in a climate in which basic civil rights are protected – and in a manner no more revolutionary than, say, a meeting of the board of the Chase Manhattan Bank.

Workers’ Compensation Systems

By Southerners for Economic Justice

Vol. 2, No. 5, 1980, pp. 26-27

Workers’ compensation systems across the country have fallen short of real worker compensation and often come closer to employer compensation, according to a report of the Southerners for Economic Justice. Originated only partly in response to the increased dangers workers were facing in the industrializing workplace of the early 1900s, the laws were also the result of industry’s need to rationalize and predict production costs. Current analyses show that over the years compensation programs have served the needs of employers far better than workers and that workers are in fact carrying a double burden the physical and psychological risks of the workplace and the economic costs when those risks become reality. The South, in particular, falls short of adequate and just compensation in several important ways.

In 1972, each state’s compensation system was evaluated by the National Commission on State Workman’s Compensation Laws. Even though members of the Commission were picked from agencies like insurance companies and the AMA, their analysis labelled workers’ compensation “inadequate and inequitable”. The Commission published a list of 19 minimum requirements that should be met by each state. To date, no state has met even the minimum requirements.

From the beginning, the compensation system set a twoto seven-day waiting period for filing a claim. Under the system if the injured worker is off the job for less than the prescribed waiting period, he is not compensated for lost wages. Most Southern workers lose a full week’s wages before they are eligible for reimbursement. In 1978, eight out of ten Southern states had a waiting period of seven days, compared to 14 out of 40 for the rest of the country.

Reimbursement, when it comes, is only a portion of the pre-injury wage. In 1978, the maximum percent of pre-injury wage to be given as compensation was 66 2/3 in all Southern states except Florida, where it was 60 percent. Compensation systems tend to undercompensate for lost earnings, while not taking inflation or the worker’s future earning potential into account at all. With prices rising at a yearly rate of over 10 percent, fixed benefits soon lose much of their buying power. All states set maximum limits on weekly wage benefits (based on the state’s average weekly wage), so the pre-injury wage percentage is irrelevant after a point. The maximum weekly wage benefit in 1978 in all 10 Southern states averaged $133.65, as compared to $202.94 for the rest of the country.

Another way this system shortchanges the worker is by using private insurance companies, which add profit to the expenses paid by workers. Private insurance companies’ expenses and profits absorb from 40 to 50 percent of the cash flow from premiums. In the 10 Southern states, all insurance carriers are private. When you compare the state-run companies with the private ones, you can see just how much the workers stand to lose For example, Ohio, where a state-run insurance scheme is required, has some of the lowest premium rates for industry, and yet delivers 100 percent of the state’s average weekly wage ($241) as the maximum weekly wage benefit. On the other hand, South Carolina, the state in the South whose figure comes closest to Ohio’s, requires low premiums for industry – in fact it ranks third nationally and yet delivers only $185 or two thirds of the state’s average weekly wage.

A widespread and serious problem in Southern compensation laws is the lack of

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any wording in the statutes that would keep an employer from firing workers who have filed workers’ compensation claims. Of the 10 Southern states, only one has any prohibition of such retaliatory firing. In Arkansas, the offense is a misdemeanor with a fine up to $100 or imprisonment up to six months. In all the years of its jurisdiction, the Workmen’s Compensation Commission in Arkansas has not levied this penalty once. A claims examiner told a reporter that to do so would in fact be discriminatory – the incidence of retaliatory firing is so commonplace that to penalize a few offenders would constitute discrimination. The machinery for tracking down all the offenders simply doesn’t exist. In some Southern states, legislatures are being pushed to address the problem of retaliatory firings, but the movement is far from being widespread and the victories so far have been qualified ones!

A final inadequacy in workers’ compensation schemes is in the area of occupational disease. Benefits awarded nationally to occupational disease victims total a mere 1.35 percent. The Southern picture is even gloomier with 35,000 victims of brown lung disease in the U.S. totally and permanently disabled, and with a mere handful receiving compensation, the inequity is startling. (Since 1975, more than 800 disabled brown lung disease victims have filed claims for Workers’ Compensation in the Carolinas; only 167 have collected any benefits. Whereas less than 2 percent of Workers’ Compensation claims in North Carolina are challenged by the employer, over 80 percent of the brown lung claims are challenged.) Delaying tactics of insurance companies subject workers and their families to long hard court battles – with delays of three or more years not uncomnon. Workers have often settled out of court for inadequate amounts just to survive financially.

The rapid industrialization that has taken place in the South in the last 30 years has meant increasing numbers of Southern workers are being exposed to workplace hazards. With State Chambers of Commerce enticing industry into the region with promises of lowered compensation costs, Southern workers’ health and safety are in particular jeopardy. If workers’ needs and rights are met fairly, the whole community benefits. If, on the other hand, their rights to adequate and just protection from workplace dangers are sacrificed for the greater profits of industry, the whole community suffers.

Just recently the National Labor Relations Board handed down a ground-breaking decision in the area of workers’ compensation. In Krispy Kreme Doughnut Corp. (1 l-CA-7792; 245 NLRB No. 135), the full Board ruled that the employer had violated the National Labor Relations Act by firing a worker who had filed a workers’ compensation claim. The Board’s action sustained the earlier decision issued by Administrative Law Judge Joel A. Harmatz on April 17, 1979, in Winston-Salem N.C.

Labor law specialists agree that the decision marks a turning point in worker protection from retaliatory firing. Anyone who has been fired for filing a workers’ compensation claim should contact his/her regional NLRB office.

Released by Southerners for Economic Justice, 1931 Laurel Ave., Knoxville, Tennessee 37916