A Lesson for the Booming ‘90s in Hard-Won Union Triumph
For decades, the people who inhabit the tiny clapboard houses of this textile-mill company town were the Holy Grail of the American labor movement.
Union affiliation, which averages 13.9% across the nation, plunges to 4.2% in North Carolina, lowest in the country. This state also has America’s greatest concentration of textile jobs, and textile workers (remember “Norma Rae”?) are considered some of the most difficult to organize.
For decades Kannapolis, with six sprawling sheet and towel mills, was toughest of all. Through the Great Depression, when a general strike was sweeping other cotton mills in the South, the spinners and weavers of Kannapolis dutifully worked their looms. From 1974 to 1997, they had no fewer than four chances to vote for union representation. Each time, a majority said no. If you could organize here, labor experts said, you probably could organize anywhere.
So guess what happened in Kannapolis this summer? Turning their backs on 93 years of history, the mill hands voted narrowly for representation by the Union of Needle Trades, Industrial and Textile Employees. Even the organizers seemed thunderstruck.
If the result is approved--both sides have filed challenges--the union, UNITE, could represent more than 5,000 textile workers in the six Fieldcrest Cannon Inc. mills here. That would be the biggest union victory in the history of the American textile industry and one of the largest in manufacturing in a long time.
What’s going on? Was the vote a fluke? Or a harbinger? Is organized labor on the brink of a renaissance?
And why would wage earners vote for a union now, of all times? The economy is booming, jobs are more plentiful than in decades and analysts speak of a miraculous, technology-based “new economy” that offers unprecedented well-being with virtually no inflation. In times like these, what workers would entrust their futures to a hoary institution that had its heyday in the 1950s?
Workers Fear They Are Falling Behind
As another Labor Day passes, it may be useful to consider what made Kannapolis’ sheet and towel makers break with history.
There is a blend of factors: clever and tenacious union organizers trying to hone tactics for a new decade, a new mill owner who played fair on election day and a growing awareness of what the global economy can mean for a company town.
Here also are harried wage earners who look at today’s booming, technology-based economy and see themselves falling further and further behind.
“I’m really living paycheck to paycheck,” said Janet Patterson, a 52-year-old sheet hemmer who said she took home more money in the 1980s.
Back in 1965, Patterson related, she turned down a four-year college scholarship to come into the mills. A quick seamstress, she could earn more working for a piece rate than she could as a high school teacher on a salary. Today, though, because she is breaking in new machines, Patterson’s output has slowed. Last year she made just $26,000. She has custody of five grandchildren and is juggling paychecks, government supplements, loans and income from freelance catering jobs to make ends meet.
“I want my grandkids to be able to say they’re living, not below, but on the average of other kids,” she said. “But the cost of living keeps going higher, and when we do get a raise we don’t even get the money because our health insurance just goes up.”
Labor experts said that people like Patterson could be key to the survival of organized labor. Busy as she is, the Kannapolis grandmother not only voted for the union this summer but also rang doorbells, attended strategy sessions, even traveled to Atlanta for a regional union convention.
Karen Bronfenbrenner, a Cornell University labor specialist who has studied why organizing drives succeed or fail, said the unions with the highest success rates are those that spend considerable time and money building alliances with churches and community groups and training wageworkers like Patterson to do the bulk of the organizing.
“When it’s just a group of Northern organizers that come through like a hit-and-run flying squadron, that’s a big problem,” Bronfenbrenner said.
“Bottom-up” organizing campaigns, however, are far costlier than the traditional kind in which union staff members arrive in town, hand out leaflets at the factory gates and leave for the next factory after the election.
And for all the talk about beating the bushes for new members, Bronfenbrenner said, unions still sink most of their resources into serving existing ones.
Union Adopted New Approach
UNITE was one of the first unions to embrace the new organizing philosophy.
“That’s what’s different about the Kannapolis vote, in the South in particular,” said Leon Fink, a labor historian at the University of North Carolina. “The union stuck around. It was like the loyal opposition.”
Even so, it took years to reverse long-standing states of mind. Kannapolis had a bad experience with labor organizers in 1921, when the mills were owned by a local patriarch, James William Cannon, and the town--named for him--was run much along the lines of a feudal principality.
The mill hands were fed up with their $5-a-week wages and shabby company-built houses. The Textile Workers Union came to town and promised enough groceries to tide them through a strike. The workers walked off their jobs, only to discover that the union had no more to give them than a little cornmeal and a few sacks of potatoes.
“My grandfather worked in Cannon Mill then, and, if he hadn’t been a farmer, he wouldn’t have survived,” said Connie Dellinger, a veteran millworker who distrusts unions to this day. “A lot of them couldn’t wait for the gates to open.”
Company Town Loses Its Shelter
Today, people remember the Cannon era as a golden age. Wages were penurious, pensions laughable and houses rickety--but people had jobs and life was predictable. With the Cannon family there, Kannapolis never even had to incorporate. All services--police, garbage collection, even polio vaccines--came straight from the mill.
This cozy arrangement ended with a bang in 1982, when Los Angeles investment tycoon David H. Murdock acquired Cannon Mills in a $413-million tender offer.
The arrival of a stranger with no background in the industry unnerved Kannapolis. Murdock began replacing some of the plant’s aging equipment, raising fears about job security. The Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, one of two that later merged to form UNITE, started circulating union cards.
Murdock, appealing to the workers’ anti-union instincts, promised supportive management that would build “a successful future relationship between the company and its employees.” He denied rumors that he might sell the mill.
A substantial majority took him at his word and voted against union representation in 1985. A few months later, Murdock sold the mill to Fieldcrest Mills.
Later, it was learned that Murdock had used assets from the mill hands’ pension fund to finance a bid to take over Occidental Petroleum. When Oxy bought its stock back from him at a $60-million premium, Murdock kept the profits. Meanwhile, he had terminated the pension fund and bought annuities to finance future obligations to retirees. The California firm handling the annuities later collapsed. And in Kannapolis, where pensions had never been very big, the checks simply stopped coming.
The Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers filed suit on behalf of retirees. Murdock, while denying any wrongdoing, eventually settled for an undisclosed sum, although workers here complain to this day that full restitution never was made.
It was a textbook case of a sheltered company town suddenly being exposed to the harsh winds of big, free-market capitalism. For some, the experience was decisive.
“I just can’t imagine one person coming in and walking away with all that money,” sheet maker Kem Taylor said. As the breadwinner for a family of four--her husband is confined to a wheelchair--she moonlights as a home-care worker, and many of the elderly she visits are retirees whose pensions were gutted.
“I guess that’s why I’m gung-ho for the union,” she said. “When you see those little people sitting in their houses with only one lightbulb on because they’re afraid of the power bills, it’s pitiful.”
Morale sagged further as Fieldcrest continued Murdock’s modernization and began using contract labor to do tasks previously performed by staff.
Once again, union organizers campaigned for an election and once again they lost. But this time the margin was narrower, and they filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board, maintaining that Fieldcrest had fired and otherwise harassed pro-union employees illegally.
The board ruled in UNITE’s favor. The U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling, ordered a new election and granted UNITE unheard-of privileges. Fieldcrest’s management was ordered to read an embarrassing admission of its labor law violations in front of the assembled work force, and UNITE’s staff members were allowed entry into the mills to campaign in canteens and break rooms.
The 1987 reelection turned into a strange replay of the Murdock years. There were more rumors that the mills were about to be sold and more denials from management. Once again, a majority sided with management--and once again, just three weeks after the balloting, management announced that it had sold the mills.
Cynthia Hanes, who weighs finished sheets before they are loaded onto trucks, said that this last sale finally tipped the balance in favor of the union.
Until then, she said, her own daughter, a four-year mill veteran, would not even speak to her about unions, so much did she loathe them.
“When they sold right after we voted, she changed her mind,” Hanes said. “She’d never been lied to before.”
UNITE moved quickly. It filed charges of labor law violations and eventually won the right to conduct yet another election, the fifth in 25 years. This one was under the newest owner, Dallas’ Pillowtex Corp., which had bought the mills and made Fieldcrest Cannon one of its divisions.
Pillowtex’s chief executive, Chuck Hansen, decided not to engage in the aggressive anti-union tactics--firings, threats and surveillance--of his predecessors.
In the weeks before the vote, he simply visited the mills and told workers that he did not think they needed a union.
“I think it was the fairest election we ever had,” marveled Taylor. “The supervisors were really cool this time.”
‘Wearing the White Hats’
Though disappointed by the 2,270-to-2,102 vote in favor of a union, Hansen agreed that the election had been clean.
“It’s kind of nice to be the ones wearing the white hats,” he said.
UNITE, in its only objection to this summer’s election, asked the Labor Relations Board to disallow more than 200 ballots cast by workers regarded by the union as management-level.
Those still-uncounted ballots could reverse the election’s outcome, and Hansen is pressing the board to allow them. A final ruling could take months.
While the hearings continue, UNITE already is grooming some of Kannapolis’ most ardent union voters to travel to other textile mills around the South, spreading the message: Even in the booming 1990s, with U.S. manufacturers moving to cheap-wage countries, it still is possible to organize in a big, hostile shop. They are the proof.
