The End of An Era

One day in the middle years of the decade we call the Sixties, I went to work at Marion Manufacturing Company. It was a textile plant that dominated the neighborhood in which I was born and grew up. I was working for $1.25 a hour, the minimum wage of the time and was trying to earn enough money to go to college for a year. On entering the weaveroom, I and all my fellow workers were greeted by blown-up photographs, at least 10 feet tall, of the shootout at the main gate of the plant which happened one October day in 1929.

It was an attempt to convince those of us working in the Sixties that the union was bad and supporting a union would lead to violence again. It was intimidation at its worse and it achieved its objective. The employees voted down union representation yet again. In North Carolina and across the South, the late 1920s and early 1930s was a period of labor strife and when coupled with the brutally savage response strikers in the coalfields of Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia suffered when trying to organize, it successfully kept unions out of the Carolinas and much of the Deep South.

Why is this important today? I'm reminded that what we see happening in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio, and surely in other Midwestern and Northeastern states, organized labor once again finds itself backed into a corner suffering savage blows from a well-muscled opponent. Like a boxer whose eyes are swelling shut with blood flowing down his face, organized labor is at the mercy of a vicious opponent determined to stamp out forever the ability of the working man and woman to have a say in working conditions, wages, benefit packages and the like.

Of course, organized labor representation in non-public unions is at an historic low. Not since the days of the sitdown strike in the 1930s has labor been so weakened. Public employee unions make up the majority of unionized America today, and it is exactly those union members coming under attack by Republican henchmen. And henchmen is exactly what you have to call the current crop of state leaders who are attacking working men and women, and who are vilifying them. Imagine, public enemy number one isn't the Wall Street numbers runner, but is a school teacher.

Most of us have forgotten the long and often bloody trail American workers have traveled since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution. As Americans left the farm and moved into the cities for employment, they fought for safer working conditions, fairer wages, and a say in determining what those conditions and pay might be. Many workers paid a dear price for that struggle. In the case of Marion and the textile workers, six were slain on the pavement of Baldwin Avenue, a street I didn't know until I was grown was named for the plant manager in 1929. Much like we name highways for successful generals in our wars, Marion honored a successful warrior who fought against the union in a small mountain town whose only industry at the time was cotton mills.

Believe me, many more than six died fighting for the union in this country. Now we are watching as their sacrifice is ground once again into the dust and public employees in Wisconsin face the possibility that what was once a proud bastion of liberal thought and practice has turned inself into, for lack of a better example, another Arizona. A state run by men and women with limited vision.