The Labor Day story I never heard...

[onager]

Recently I visited my home state of South Carolina - the Upstate/Piedmont. I left there long ago, courtesy of that fine educational institution the USMC, and have lived in Los Angeles ever since. Well, except for the past 4 years I lived and worked in Egypt, but that's another story.

I went to visit my closest friend back there in SC, who had recently uncovered a fascinating old 16mm film. It was shot in 1938 in a local cotton mill village.

That means a town wholly owned by a company, which was very common at the time in South Carolina.

Lots of footage of smiling, happy workers going to and from the mill...

The textile workers' strike of 1934 was the largest strike in United States history at the time, involving 400,000 textile workers from New England, the Mid-Atlantic states and the U.S. Southern states, lasting twenty-two days. The strike's ultimate failure and the union's defeat left the Southeastern United States an unorganized and anti-union region for the next 50 years.

My friend's father was a textile engineer, and he had a saying: "Everything we ever had came from the mill."

Textile workers across the region, from worsted workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts and silk weavers in Paterson, New Jersey, to cotton millhands in Greenville, South Carolina, engaged in hundreds of isolated strikes, even though there were thousands of unemployed workers ready to take their places.

And this friend and I, when we were in high school, both worked a mill owned by J.P. Stevens. We "doffed" cloth in the Weave Room. The Weave Room was a redneck Dante's inferno. The cotton threads must have humidity to retain the right amount of "stretch," so live steam constantly poured from pipes in the ceiling. That meant it was impossible to have air conditioning. And the noise of several hundred looms running constantly was deafening.

Even with all that, we had it better than the folks in the Carding Room, who breathed invisible cotton fibers during their shift. Many years later, the experts would discover white-lung disease.

Every week we were treated to NLRB posters informing us that we had the right to form a union. And every week, J.P. Stevens put up bigger posters telling us why we didn't need a union.

Governor Blackwood of South Carolina...called out the National Guard with orders to shoot to kill any picketers who tried to enter the mills. Governor Ehringhaus of North Carolina followed suit on September 5 (1934)...

Six picketers were shot to death and more than twenty other picketers wounded, most shot in the back as they were fleeing the picketline, in Honea Path, South Carolina on September 6.

I had relatives who worked in that Honea Path mill and retired from it. But nobody ever mentioned THAT little incident.

Anti-union sentiment in the South kept wages low for decades, but also acted as a catalyst for development later when industries moved there from the North and Midwest because of lower costs.

Employers resisted integrating textile mills; when they were forced to do so by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, researchers found that African Americans were accepted overall by other employees, although they continued to face discrimination in job training and advancement. By the time this occurred, many jobs in the textile industry were already moving overseas, a trend that accelerated in the 1980s.

All quotes from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_workers_strike_(1934)

[RandomThoughts]

1. I have been watching TV, like most people for years.

I have not seen very many stories of worker issues.

Many of the union struggles of the past could easily be made into movies or history shows, they even have high degrees of things producers like, story lines, strong characters, and achieving things. But they also have a non corporate message. So a few people think we should not see them on TV, I think it should be about what happened and why, not about what a few people want most people to think.

[cap]

2. 3,000 people died in the next town over from my grandparents

grandma was a silk weaver.

Solidarity Forever!

[fasttense]

3. I've talked to people who made it through college on the wages they

earned at the Mills in South Carolina. Now, the mills are all gone and closed up. Many of the towns around them have turned to ghost towns. Moving the mills to poverty areas in foreign nations that abuse their workers was just another Union busting technique.

It's funny though, you hear these former mill workers, who have small pensions or who used their wages as stepping stones for bigger careers, and you would think the mills are still there. They are always going around saying "I worked my way through college." "I didn't have any help in getting ahead."

Now, the kids around here move out as quickly as they can or take minimum wage jobs and wonder why they can't seem to save for college.

"Free" trade is only free for CEOs. The rest of us pay a terrible price.

[bananas]

4. k&r nt

[no_hypocrisy]

5. The owners of the silk mills in the Paterson opted to close their plants rather than

pay their workers one penny more an hour.

The city has never recovered.

[AwakeAtLast]

6. Can someone tell me a real difference

between a town wholly owned by a company and socialism?

"Lots of footage of smiling, happy workers going to and from the mill..."

Sounds like what Repukes use as proof when they cry that it's 'propaganda'.

:shrug:

[lunatica]

7. I'll tell you what I think the difference is

If the town is the employer then the banks belong to the employer too. That's called owing the company store for everything. They pay you, but then they charge you for services they provide. So in reality the money they put into your pocket gets recycled back to them. True Social programs are those where you get the benefit of your taxes, not the government getting the benefits at your expense. You pay taxes but the benefits of those taxes are recycled back to you and everyone else.

It depends on who the biggest beneficiary is.

[Lars39]

9. It means you pay whatever the company store and bank want you to pay.

It means you lose your job and your house if you step a foot out of line.

[StarfarerBill]

10. The difference between a company town and a socialist town is...

...that in the former the company owns the town and everything in it, including the workers; in the latter the workers own everything including the workplaces, but the workers themselves are free.

[pnorman]

8. Use this URL instead

"The textile industry, once concentrated in New England with outposts in New Jersey and Philadelphia, had started moving South in the 1880s. By 1933 Southern mills produced more than seventy percent of cotton and woolen textiles in more modern mills, drawing on the pool of dispossessed farmers and laborers willing to work for roughly forty percent less than their Northern counterparts. As was the rest of economic life, the textile industry was strictly segregated and drew only from white workers in the Piedmont. Before 1965, after passage of the Civil Rights Act broke the color line in hiring, less than 2% of textile workers were African American."
http://tinyurl.com/642sdq

"...drawing on the pool of dispossessed farmers and laborers willing to work for roughly forty percent less than their Northern counterparts. "

pnorman