UNIONS: You Gonna Gel Fired

Union Organizer Milford Allen stood for hours under a broiling sun one day early this month, handing “You Need a Union Card” leaflets to workers at the Barnesville, Ga., knitting mill of the William Carter Co., a Massachusetts-based manufacturer of children’s clothing. “This union stuff is shit,” snarled one worker as he threw his leaflet away. Said another: “I’d like it, but I can’t take it. They’d lay me off.” That night, at an organizing meeting that drew all of 24 union sympathizers (20 of them black), Allen in effect agreed. “This is a tough business,” he warned. “Some of you gonna get fired.”

Allen, 53, a stout, weathered native of Anderson, S.C., knows what he is talking about. In 15 years as an organizer, first for the Textile Workers Union of America, now for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, he has been beaten up by goon squads, harassed by police and blacklisted by scores of employers. More than once he has stared down the muzzle of a gun. He has felt the force of community as well as employer hostility. Says he: “I’ve been in campaigns where everyone’s against me —the newspapers, the bankers, the politicians. I’ve been where the ministers near ran me out of town.” The payoff: only a handful of successful organizing drives, none in the past two years.

Such frustration is the rule for Southern unionists. All eleven states of the old Confederacy have right-to-work laws that allow employees to stay out of the union in organized plants; only nine non-Southern states do. A mere 14.1% of Southern non-farmworkers are members of unions, less than half the national average.

One reason for the unions’ troubles, says Labor Economist F. Ray Marshall of the University of Texas, is that many Southern factories have been plunked down in what were once farming communities. Workers from rural backgrounds are less attuned to unionism than those in the industrial centers of the North. Racial tensions also play a role. As in Barnesville, black workers are often especially eager to sign union cards—and that puts off the whites. Then, too, many Southern workers, especially in Piedmont towns where the local textile mill is almost the only source of employment, are so happy to have industrial jobs that they do not care about the fact that those jobs pay less than similar ones in the North. (Southern nonunion textile pay averages little more than the $2.30-an-hour federal minimum wage.)

But the biggest reason for the lack of Southern unionism is fierce employer resistance, backed often by local public opinion. In much of the South, “community development” is something close to a religion. Bosses and community leaders alike fear that unions will scare off new industries that the town is trying to lure.

Potential Costs. Also, there is—at least according to bosses—a tradition of personal relationships in Southern industry that is not found in the North. Textile-mill supervisors in particular often grew up with their subordinates, went to the same schools and hail workers by their first names. Says Joe Lamer Jr., president of West Point-Pepperell, Inc., a Georgia textile maker: “I frankly don’t feel our folks see the need for a third party to represent them. We have no adversary relationship.”

Even some employers who accept dealing with unions as a routine necessity in Northern plants resist them in the South, where the lower cost of nonunion workers offers the chance of higher profits. General Motors, for example, has recently opened six nonunion plants in the South and plans to open three more. At their Delco-Remy battery plant in Fitzgerald, Ga., workers earn $4.16 an hour, or $1.21 less than union members doing the same job for Delco-Remy in Muncie, Ind. Nonetheless, early this month they voted 184 to 71 against union representation. One reason: before the vote, GM sent each worker a letter speaking of the potential costs of a strike.

The unions keep trying. Currently their biggest target is J.P. Stevens & Co., the nation’s second largest textile firm. Two rival unions, Amalgamated Clothing Workers and Textile Workers Union of America, recently merged and, with AFL-CIO backing, plan soon to kick off a nationwide boycott of Stevens products. Whether that can be any more effective than the conventional organizing drive is moot. Sighs Nick Bonanno, southeast regional director of the I.L.G.W.U.: “We’ve got so far to go down here that my grandchildren will be organizing.”