
          The Union Comes to Dooly County
          By Ransom, DaveDave Ransom
          Vol. 6, No. 5, 1984, pp. 17-18
          
          "We made history!" rejoiced Bettie Lloyd, after she and the
forty-seven other workers at Rosewood Nursing Home in Byromville,
Georgia--predominantly black, mostly women--voted this summer
two-to-one to unionize.
          She was right. By voting to become a chapter in SEIU Local 579,
they were leading the way in rural south Georgia, where employers have
made it clear that their distaste for unions is as strong as their
appetite for low wages.
          Byromville is a small town in Dooly County, a farm county of some
eleven thousand people. The town's main industries are a cotton gin, a
fertilizer plant, a packing house--and the nursing home.
          When local 579 staff members from Atlanta leafletted workers at the
nursing home last February, they got a flurry of interested phone
calls.
          The Rosewood workers described arbitrary firings, low staffing,
lack of respect, and incredibly low wages, remembers Peter French, the
staff member who helped them organize.
          The pay at Rosewood is the lowest of the three homes operated by
Beverly Enterprises that Local 579 has organized in Georgia. Workers
with ten or fifteen years at the home are making less than $3.65 an
hour, says French. "We're talking long-term poverty."
          Since many of the women have children to feed, and are sometimes
alone in doing so, they often must hold second jobs. Some families
pick fruit or work in the packing sheds during peach season "to make
ends meet."
          A particularly difficult supervisor made things worse. "We figured
we had to get something in to help us out," says Jessie Bell Spivey,
now chief union steward at the home.
          But home workers were equally concerned about the patients. There
wasn't enough linen, they told French. Not enough clothing. Not enough
food--breakfasts without eggs, dinners without meat.
          "I enjoy working with old people--they really need us," says
Mrs. Spivey, a fourteen-year veteran at the home who began working the
night shift years ago so she could get her children off to school in
the mornings.
          But the home's administration, she said, stood between the workers
and doing a good job.
          The patients at Rosewood come from all across Georgia. But many are
from the small towns in Dooly County, and some have been members of
the congregations of the churches that home workers attend. Beverly
gets the lion's share of its income from federal Medicaid payments for
these people's care, including high ax-executive salaries and a good
profit.
          In effect, the good people of Dooly County are paying federal
income taxes to support their old folks--only to 

have Beverly skim off
their profits, leaving the old folks with meatless dinners and paying
poverty wages to the people who take care of them.
          When Rosewood workers began looking at the union as an answer to
their problems, the home's management didn't take kindly to it. Twice
administrators drove slowly by union meetings--held at one worker's
house trailer on a dead-end road. And they began giving supporters a
hard time on the job.
          When the workers' organizing committee began handing out leaflets,
Jessie Bell Spivey was one of the first to stand by the door with
them. Two days later the home found a pretext to fire her. She thinks
they believed she was the "main, head leader" and that getting rid of
her would throw fear into other supporters and weaken the the
drive.
          "But they didn't give up," she says, proudly, "They got stronger."
The firing just strengthened their conviction that management was
going to keep messing with them until they stood up against them,
united.
          Spivey is active in her church and the local women's club as well
as the Dooly County chapter of the NAACP. Her husband is Byromville's
only black city council member. She is known to be a good,
conscientious worker. So her firing also strengthened community
support for the Rosewood workers, from whites as well as blacks.
          Support for the workers' drive to organize was shown at a meeting
they held at a local church. With hymns and prayers they sought the
path to justice, rising to recount their mistreatment and their
grievances.
          George Winters, the principal of the local grade school, who
remembered working as an orderly at the home, was there to give his
support. The Rev. James Orange of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference(SCLC) reminded them that south Georgia workers need to
stick together more than anywhere else because of the animosity
towards blacks getting organized.
          The ministers of two local Baptist churches and Roscoe Keaton, head
of the county NAACP chapter, also pledged their support.
          Casting their ballots secretly in an election supervised by federal
authorities, the Rosewood workers--nurse's aides, orderlies, dietary,
laundry, and maintenance workers--voted to join the union thirty-one
to fifteen. Then they held a joyous victory celebration.
          Additionally, Beverly investigated and reinstated Jessie Bell
Spivey, with back pay. Despite their vote, many workers didn't believe
it would actually happen. "When I went back, people acted like they
were crazy," says Mrs. Spivey. That's when she said to herself,
"There's something to it, I know there's something to it."
          For Rosewood workers, voting for the union is only the first step
towards achieving that "something." Next--and perhaps even more
difficult--is winning a legal contract with Beverly that outlines
wages, benefits, working conditions.
          But Local 579 President Herman Lewis, who credits a "very strong"
organizing committee with the election win, thinks that their strength
can also win a contract.
          Tell Beverly one thing, says Mrs. Spivey: "Do unto others as you
wish them to do unto you." If management can live by that rule, she
says, they will earn the goodwill of their workers and all--including
patients--will benefit.
          
            Dave Ransom is editor of Service
Employee.
            Editor's note: The two-year long campaign of the Service Employees
International Union (SEIU) and the United Food and Commercial Workers
(UFCW) against the nation's largest nursing-home chain, Beverly
Enterprises, came to an end in March of this year with the signing of
a precedent-setting agreement. Beverly, a company that disdained
collective bargaining and had attempted to break SEIU unions wherever
possible, has been brought to the bargaining table. The agreement ends
Beverly's strong antiunion campaign and pledges it to negotiate
contracts in nursing homes where the union has won an election. As the
nation's largest union of health_care workers, SEIU is getting on with
the task of organizing the tens of thousands of low-paid Beverly
workers who need a union contract. The March, 1984 agreement has
bolstered efforts in the North and West where the SEIU already had
many strong locals. In addition, an organizing campaign is underway in
the South, where Beverly Enterprises has dozens of nursing
homes.
          
        
