[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

… and got everybody singing. Loran Cook was quite a singer. She really put out some good music.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, she was probably, in terms of people that went from one place to another, she … we asked her to do a lot of that because she's very good a leading groups and very sincere and all that. She had a real feeling, you know, for what was involved. She's quite a person.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

She did most of the travelling and most of the speaking in New York and Washington. She's very sincere.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah. Now, the other young lady, I don't know if you've met her or not, Flossie …

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

Flossie Gibson?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

The Gibsons are in Chicago.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah, she is in Chicago, at Ed Collins office, our Mid-West director. And she was a good song leader. Did you meet the young fellow

---

Page 2

who led songs?

DAN McCURRY:

Evanson.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

What?

DAN McCURRY:

We heard the name, but I don't …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah. He was excellent.

DAN McCURRY:

My impression is that …

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

We were surprised that we didn't hear more about Flossie Gibson than we did. You know, when I talked talked to Mr. Collins, he mentioned her as being one of the persons that the union considered as one of its best organizers. Of course, the fact that she is in Chicago now …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

I would say in any enterprise that springs up, there are people that have things that they are very good at and I think that Flossie wasn't active early … people turn up at different times, and she really became significant after the strike began. I'm sure that she voted for the union, I think that she was there during the campaign, but she wasn't on the negotiating committee, she became very important when we started singing union songs on the gate.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

And during that period, Mrs. unknown was travelling around, I believe.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, she was travelling around, but she was a picket captain. Which meant that all during the strike, she would have been at the same place, not necessarily at the same time. We had … I'm sure that Ted Benton told you, he has a capacity to structure the activities of the strike quite expertly and one of the keys to his structure is the picket captain. They become very, very important people. You know, the Bible talks about people who were leaders of ten and those who were leaders of a hundred and then leaders of a thousand and so on. Well, our picket captains were leaders, basically, of twenty and they had a book and they would take attendance and it was very important routine activity, because it enabled us to keep the picket lines adequately manned over a long

---

Page 3

period of time. And this was especially important in Andrews, due to the fact of the geography of that plant … which I'm sure you saw.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

We did get a tour of the plant.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, the outside of the plant was more interesting to us during the strike than the inside and there are an awful lot of gates:

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

Eleven or so?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah, something like that. It's not like a plant with one big driveway and two people can picket. We had to have physically a fairly large number of people, to have a presence so to speak, on various sides of the plant.

DAN McCURRY:

We did drive around the plant and I remember two things that came to my mind. Well, no, we didn't drive all the way around it, can you drive all the way around it?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

It's hard to, because it's bunched up against the railroad track.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

unknown

DAN McCURRY:

… those gates … I sat in front and an old song came to mind … a song called "Twelve Gates to the City."

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Oh yeah.

DAN McCURRY:

Which …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

I guess that the twelfth gate would have to be the one in Lane. I assume that you went down to the other plant.

DAN McCURRY:

Unfortunately, we didn't get down there. There were meetings going on all the time and we couldn't manage it and…

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, that's one of the unusual aspects of the strike, that we had two physical locations simultaneously in organizing a strike. And Lane, since it was twenty miles away, really had to be handled in a parallel

---

Page 4

fashion. When we had a commissary in Andrews … we had a commissary in Lane and if we had certain standards for helping people with their financial problems in Andrews, we had to provide the same yardstick in the other location. The groups of people acted quite differently, simply because Andrews was, so to speak, more cosmopolitan of the two situations. And the people from Andrews seemed to come from a greater distance and they didn't … well, there were more variations in the strike groups in Andrews. In Lane, there were almost no whites. There were seventeen white employees out of 230 when the strike began and black employees there, 90% of them would have been under thirty. Most of them were cleancut, peppy, young, black ladies (unknown). It was a sewing plant and so, they sort of formed a social center in the Lane strike headquarters, which interestingly enough, was a black Masonic lodge hall right accross the highway from the plant. They stuck together pretty well.

DAN McCURRY:

There was … [unclear] … in Lane … a black mortician, I think it was and … tried to …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Before the election?

DAN McCURRY:

Before the election. I guess that it would be before the election.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, we were, I didn't get involved until we got over that hump. During the strike, we were concerned about whether the company would be able to get significant black leadership in the community to take a stand against the strike. Or encourage people to scab. The community, the black leadership pretty well stayed, I think, on the union side, although there were maybe a couple of deviations, but they were more from people a long way away, you know, like twenty-five miles from there there would be a little center and somebody would start coming in over the picket lines and then he

---

Page 5

or she made it, and then there might be some more feed-in. It was that kind of situation. The black community leadership in Georgetown and Jamestown and in that area, I think was pretty much pro-union.

DAN McCURRY:

It's interesting to compare the differences in the workers at the Lane plant and the Andrews plant… [unclear] What were the reasons for the difference in the makeup of the plants?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, of course, the reason for the difference was the age of the plants. The Andrews plant of Oneida, I think had been there since '54 or '55 possibly.

DAN McCURRY:

… unknown

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Could be.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

… unknown

SCOTT HOYMAN:

And we had some people supporting the union who … and a couple of other people

DAN McCURRY:

… unknown

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah. But Lane was a satellite development and I don't think that it had started until three or four years ago, maybe four or five, I don't know. So, this accounted for a lot of difference. When the original plant started, I don't think that they were hiring too many blacks. It was all white, or basically white. And the second plant, I think, the labor shortage had started to have some impact and Civil Rights Title Seven was there and they were hiring a lot more blacks in both plants. In fact, the composition of the Andrews plant changed racially to quite an extent between the time the ILG had the election and bargaining rights and strikes, and the time when we came down. There were a lot more white workers percentage wise in Andrews than by 1971.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

We have been wondering a lot about ILG and what was left after they left and exactly how it happened that they left. We have talked to several people that were working there at the time, but still haven't heard exactly … [unclear]

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, the fact that they got knocked out of the box and the fact that we haven't been, shouldn't be interpreted as a reflection on the ILG. They had a series of experiences, I guess, which happened to us in other locations and it just became very difficult. As I understand the history, they had a series ofone year contracts about bargaining rights, I think they finally represented the company in Utica, New York.

DAN McCURRY:

… unknown

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah. And the Devereaux family came South with the move. That bargaining rights in Andrews and they signed a series of contracts and they went bad, they had fairly good fringes for that period of time and they had check-off and they had arbitration. They had from the company the same benefits, the practical issues that became issues of our strike. And for whatever reason, at some point, the company decided to take them on. I've heard that the issue might have been the extension of a contract to a new plant in Collman, Alabama that the company put up. I don't know. There is a reference on the issue of subcontracting. And this kind of a plant, which is basically sewing, subcontracting is a very big important issue in that type of operation. They had a strike, it was sort of the reverse of ourse, I believe, in terms of the season. I think that it started in the summer and ended in the winter. The company tried to take them into federal court as … over a so-called breach of contract. They were unable to do that, they lost the case and the union filed some

---

Page 7

successful charges over the discrimination about the record against returning strikers, including Richard Cook. Those cases the company fought all the way to the circuit court and it took a couple of years. You may have already seen those decisions. One interesting thing is that the company, after the ILG made the decision not to sign any sort of a contract, the company, I think, at the end of the strike, took a position where they wouldn't have given them a check-off and probably some other things. And it was during that strike that the company first retained Bill Smith, an attorney from Columbia. There was a coincidence about the Labor Board representation. The Labor Board attorney in the proceedings at that time, was a man, who by the time our campaign and strike came along, had joined Bill Smith…

DAN McCURRY:

In Don Smith's law firm up in Florida?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

… unknown

SCOTT HOYMAN:

He represented the National Labor Relations Board.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

Oh.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

In action directed against the company and that kind of thing has happened to us a few times in other locations. We had a circuit court case back in '49 or '50 in regard to a plant in Union Point and the Labor Board attorney that argued the case at this circuit court was named and he later became a partner of the most famous company firm, law firm in Florida… [unclear] But I guess the issues they faced were basically the issues that we faced. There was a lot of similarity, except their confrontation came after they had had a series of one year contracts and ours came without our having that much foothold.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

So, they were out for several months … [unclear] and then the company refused the check-off. Is that …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

That's my understanding, I'd hate for you to cite that, because I really don't know. E.C. Keherr is now their AFL-CIO civil rights committee representative in the area… and he has been very helpful to us, but I never had a chance to sit down with him and go over the thing blow by blow.

DAN McCURRY:

About this time that you are talking about, the company … did things that it said it would … one of the additional things … to give one year contracts… hadn't been there very long … just signed to them at one point … the dissipation of three year contracts …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

… unknown

DAN McCURRY:

… unknown

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Going back into the organizing?

DAN McCURRY:

… unknown

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, we had a series of very heartily contested campaigns in Wellman Industries, which was 35 miles north north of Andrews and they were directed by Harold McIver, who was the southern organizer and director for the IUD and he is fairly active in the Stevens drive now, going full blast in the Carolinas and he got involved in the Wellman campaign and [unclear] We only had … [Remainder of this side of the tape inaudible due to the poor technical quality of the tape]

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

SCOTT HOYMAN:

… one of the negatives was that the company was represented by this guy Bill Smith. And Smith is an old adversary of mine. I spent off and on, about four years dealing with him for another plant. It's

---

Page 9

a branch plant of the Ray Vestis Manhattan Company in north Charleston, an abestos and rubber plant. And we spent from 1966 to 1970 and went through, we won an election in '66, we went for two years, they refused to continue bargaining, we had a new election, we felt that was the fastest way to get them back to the bargaining table, we won it by the skin of our teeth, challenged ballots and I then came back into bargaining as negotiator for the union and we bargained for a whole year and … well, it's a long, it's another story, a fairly long story. But the fact that Smith turned out to be the company lawyer didn't make me feel especially happy. And in Garco, we sort of ultimately got a contract before he left the scene, but we improved the contract after the company sort of dropped. And in this case, we got a contract when the company overruled.

DAN McCURRY:

Could you talk about how a man like Smith can make a difference in negotiating?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, there's a formula in negotiations. For beating the union or wearing the union out and it's very simple. It's a proposal which usually says no to check-off or dues and no on arbitration of grievances. And then when you push those companies, they'll concede the right to strike. We refer to this as the "Blakeney Formula." Whiteford Blakeney is a lawyer in Charlotte who is the Stevens counsel. He has been since 1963 and in that period of time, the last ten years, I guess, I have bumped into clients of his in negotiations for three or four companies. And the formula is always the same. Well, Smith imitates that formula to a greater or lesser extent, in both Garco and Oneida, he would not agree to the check-off and in both cases, he did agree to arbitration. And he offered us in both cases what I would call a highly restrictive contract, in terms of workers rights in the plant. Such as, senority rights and he likes

---

Page 10

to make proposals like "no bumping." Well, in the South, where we often have contracts of low wages, relatively low wages, we make a big thing out of seniority, because people take a real satisfaction being able to control their own physical place in a plant, particularly in a plant with three shifts. And then, seniority may mean that you go to work in the daylight, instead of going to work at midnight. And choice of machines, choice of jobs, it's a very important part of bargaining. And his view on that would be highly restrictive. So, this is the formula and in essense, what you do is to insist on a contract proposal which is very unsatisfactory and the union has about three choices. We have the choice of refusing the proposal and striking. We have the choice of accepting the proposal after long negotiations, but finding ourselves unable to make the union work to furnish satisfaction to those people. The members. And then the third choice is a stalemate, to continue bargaining. And that could go on for four years. So, in Oneida, we began the negotiations in February of '72. Roper, Benton and myself were involved at different times and it ended up with Benton and myself and we made a decision down there to strike the company. That is the second big decision.

DAN McCURRY:

Once you won the election, you mean.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah. The first big decision from our point of view is do we go after them. The second is what do we do when we get them and we engage in bargaining for about a year, less than a year. Before… about six or eight months before we made a decision that if we could, we would ask the people to strike. And we then staff the plant out real good. One or two people and then another one or two staff people. And Washington, Hope and Benton were the three people in there for some long period of time. And

---

Page 11

then we counted noses and made the estimates and talked to the committee about what they thought that we could do …

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

The committee of workers, you mean?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah. The negotiating committee. And we had an excellent committee. They were tough. Dorothy Gleason, who comes from the ILG, and …

DAN McCURRY:

Chick Cook?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah, the cutter, Richard Cook, they are tough. And black people on the committee, Loran Pope, I would rate her as a very important person. They hadn't had the same experience with the ILG, but they knew what they wanted. So, that was how we made that decision. The major decision for an international union to make is to embark on a strike of this kind in this part of the country.

DAN McCURRY:

What kind of a financial burden did you assume for that strike?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, we have a strike fund. The strike fund provides in what are called organizing strikes, that's a little misnomer, because we had the plant, we had the bargaining rights, but "organizing strike" in this sense doesn't mean a recognition strike. We've got one of those going on right now, Crossville, Tennessee. Benton, I'm sure, mentioned that.

DAN McCURRY:

We've been invited to go over there and … [Laughter] and the organized leader over there …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah, that's quite a thing. But this is really a first contract strike, that's what I call it. It's different than other kinds of strikes a union supports, because those strikes are from people who pay union dues. Now, we've had four or five of those kinds of strikes this year in my region. But they would be people who had an investment in the union, if we want to look at things book-keeping wise, and therefore are getting some of that

---

Page 12

money back, so to speak. That's the way it looks. Here, the union was staking who had never paid a penny of union dues, in fact, the first union dues down there, I guess, to get to the local were turned over to us in the last few weeks. They began paying dues in August.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

Outlaw strike.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah. Sure, and that was with the check-off. The contract was signed in July and we didn't want to ask anybody to pay dues after a six month strike until they had a few paychecks under their belt so that they knew what money was like.

DAN McCURRY:

Yeah.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

So, we turned in the check-off cards in August and I guess that they have by now have had some deductions from their paychecks. The company takes a while to get those things started.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

Were the election of union officers before or after the strike?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

After. We don't usually set up a … we ran the strike in terms of union structure with a committee and it was, as I said, an exceedingly good committee. And picket captains. We had the negotiating committee, which was large. I guess that it went ten or twelve people, because we were representing two plants, and then we have picket captains in both locations. And it turned out to be a good structure. And then we had a commissary committee. Well, you've probably heard about these committees. At any rate, going back to the decisions… financial liability would be considerable.

DAN McCURRY:

How much did you have to assume for the whole …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

I would think between $300,000 and $400,000. This is only in terms of direct financial assistance. I'm not talking about salaries, I'm not talking about staff salaries, I'm not talking about time. This was a major effort by the Textile Workers Union.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

This three or four hundred thousand dollars, was that out of the strike fund that you had already, or does that include some of the contributions from other locals?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

No, this is international union treasury.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

So, there must have been considerable expense beyond that.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

There was a lot of money given by different local unions. There was a lot of money given by other international unions and locals. Well, there were substantial amounts. And then we have money given by individuals. But the boycott activities, which accompanied the strike, at this point, you are getting beyond decisions that I would make. These would be decisions by the international union, basically by the general president, Sol Stetin. And it's a very interesting thing, as a new president of the union, he had only been in office since June of '72, he adopted a very aggressive policy in pursuing this target, once we had made the decision on a leader. That we were going to take them on. And it fortunately paid off, we won. The international union put in more energy in pursuing the boycott activity than in any previous strike that I have had any connection with… back to probably Henderson, North Carolina in 1958 to '60.

DAN McCURRY:

I remember that one well.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

So …

DAN McCURRY:

Let me just ask you … this was pretty well a cheif priority for this 1972-73, it was '71 really, campaign, to spend around $600,000 for a strike at a plant of this size. Were there any other efforts of that strength, you know, that the international could not.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Not during that period, no. Particularly within a region. We go from North Carolina … at that time we went from North Carolina to

---

Page 14

Texas, since then we have started the Southwest division, which takes in Mississippi and so on in there and leaves for this region four very important states. The Carolinas, Tennessee and Alabama. There are some other states, Florida and so on, but within our capabilities here, you have to have priorites and this was the priority. We postponed other things so that they wouldn't get in the way. We had another situation. We seriously debated whether to have two strikes of this kind and we made the decision that we shouldn't.

DAN McCURRY:

That also must be a tough decision.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah, it is, because you are dealing with people. You are asking one group, you know, to wait. And that's a hell of a thing to suggest to people. You don't know what the effect of delaying is. Delaying is almost always helpful to the company, not the union. So, it is important.

DAN McCURRY:

We were talking about other kinds of decisions that you would make.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Oh, scads. One of the interesting things of operating a union or taking part in a union is the fact that a union depends more, I would think that it depends more on the character of its representatives than almost any other organization that I can think of. And if you want to accomplish certain results, you think very hard about who is going to be what. Some people are good for some things and some are good for others. And one of the key decisions in this is staffing … and I don't want this to be interpreted as critical of other people involved in the situation, but there are two people who are very, very important during the strike itself. The first one is Benton and the second one was Bush. And Bush… Benton had run two previous strikes. One of then was in Magnet Mills in Clinton, Tennessee and that strike lasted for twenty-four months. And after six months or so, the company closed down the mill. It was a buy by the name of Burd from New York City.

DAN McCURRY:

B-U-R-R?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

B-U-R-D. A very unusual person. And it was a small plant, well, it

---

Page 15

was less than 500 people. We lost that one, but we wouldn't take the picket lines down, because we didn't want him to start the plant up as a non-union plant, which he would have done. So, after Benton went through that one … Benton comes out of the hosiery union and the hosiery union before it merged with TWUA, had gotten down to a size and financial commission which did not permit them to engage in strikes. So, when they merged with us, this was like Christmas.

DAN McCURRY:

… unknown

SCOTT HOYMAN:

No, it was …

DAN McCURRY:

Oh, I see … [unclear]

SCOTT HOYMAN:

They then had the traditional weapon and I must say that they use it. At any rate, Benton went through the Kayser-Roth strike in Dayton, Tennessee. That was a very difficult strike, it was entirely different from the Clinton strike, and one of the aftermaths of that strike was that the union was sued and there is now circuit court judgement against us on appeal to the Supreme Court for damages in excess of a million dollars. So, it was a fairly big decision to pick someone from that situation, he was in charge of that strike, and assign him to Oneida. And it's an interesting thing. In the Oneida situation, the things that we were sued for in Dayton did not happen. In fact, the company didn't even get an injunction against us. And in Dayton, we had injunctions coming out our ears and all kinds of arrests and everything else. And so, Benton deserves a lot of credit for reflecting the difference that we were trying, as he felt that we had to have in the conduct of that strike. That was another important decision. The style of strike. And I'm not saying that this was good or bad. It was just the only kind we could have.

DAN McCURRY:

Let me just say that as we talked to people down there, the style of strike that you picked seemed particularly appropriate. It's very good

---

Page 16

to come back in so far after the strike and try to get a reflection of the kind of spirit there and that style that you picked has kept the strength up. Hoyman: Well, there would be a lot of disagreement, I guess, on that subject in the labor movement. But I think in that case, in this case, it was our only alternative, and fortunately, it went well. Although, there were a lot of complaints. We had black union people coming from Charleston and from Georgetown who said that, "this ain't the way to run the railroad." And we had a couple of confrontations over this. One of which, at a mass meeting, I made the offer that if the folks wanted to vote for some other union to take over the strike and the other union would pick up the bill and furnish responsible direction to the strike, the Textile Workers Union would respect that decision. And nobody jumped up and so I guess that we retained direction of the strike and we also kept paying the bills. But that issue, that challenge, or however you want to phrase it, that question which arose as to who should determine this kind of strategy and make these kinds of decisions was over that precise question: Were we going to try to preserve a very peaceful atmosphere. And we felt that we didn't have any choices. I'll tell you one effect that it had. I really confronted the company with an unusual problem. You know, usually the company keeps talking about the violence and the disorder and the dynamiting and homes being shot into and judges respond to that and I guess even the sherrif said that there wasn't any base for talking like that.

DAN McCURRY:

They talk about that in terms of the steel strike in Georgetown the week before that, as the sherrif and then that being one of the effects of it.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah, when you see that film, I understand you can …

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

SCOTT HOYMAN:

… so, staffing was important, and Benton and Bush. Benton aroused a lot of antagonism. That's probably a strong word. There was a lot of internal criticism.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

Within the union?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Within a group of the strikers, within the committee, among the folks. And Bush had been in two other short strikes in the last two years. He's originally from the steelworkers union out of Manchester, Tennessee and he's a relatively young guy, he's only 37 or 38 and we wanted someone who would develop into a good strike man and Bush got chosen. So, he sort of served an apprenticeship in Andrews. He's in charge of the strike at unknown. He's a very good picket line man. He's very abrasive in his comments on the picket line and gets down there and has a bull horn and some kind of exhibit that he uses to make fun of the scabs and whoever his targets are.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

We heard a number of things about him.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah. Crying towel and a piece of cheese for the "rats", you know all the symbolism that it takes to keep things hopping. He's pretty good at that.

DAN McCURRY:

Could I just ask about that decision?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Sure.

DAN McCURRY:

I was very impressed with how Benton talked about when the strike was going on, but what other ways could he have run the strike? What other decisions could have been made?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, it's exactly like any kind of a contest. You are only going to have so many dollars coming in. That's number one. Number two, really number one, you've only got so many strikers. This is the scarcest resource

---

Page 18

in a strike. You can never increase the number of strikers. The only way that you are going to have more strikers is if some scabs see the light and come back out of the plant after they are hired and you agree to let them join the strike. Now, that's a decision you've got to be careful on. So, we only had a limited number of strikers, and we only had a limited number of dollars. And the question is, "How do you put these things together?" And you've only got a limited number of time. The strike can't last forever. You win or lose on the last day, you don't win or lose on any other day. So, it's a question of, it might be an endurance contest, it might be like a war, like a race, a long, long race and you've got to husband your resources and at the same time, you have to maintain militant posture and you have to do what you can to upset whatever plans the company may have toward resuming production or selling their product, or whatever. And the hardest group of people to put together in a strike is a newly organized group, because they don't trust each other. There aren't any interconnections. The only thing they've gone through is an organizing campaign and in an organizing campaing, although you may get fired, you win it by a secret ballot. Now, if nobody knows who you are for, it doesn't take an awful lot of courage, although it seems to in some instances, to mark a secret ballot, if you really believe that it is secret. But in a strike, oh boy. It is an entirely different thing. Your whole job future, the community relations and your family, you know, it's all up for grabs. It's a big risk for the individual. Now, in this kind of strike, for example, where you shut down Chrysler, you know, nobody expects Chrysler to go out of business or to decertify the UAW, it would be inconcievable. Like the 50th state leaving, disappearing. Everybody knows what to expect. So, it's not like a strike where you are bargaining by striking for more or less money or more or less compulsive overtime. This is a win or lose, do or

---

Page 19

die, be there or disappear. It's literally a strike for the survival for establishment of the union. So, you have to balance … the whole issue of violence. That's probably the biggest choice that we made. And violence is a difficult commodity. You know, the union doesn't say, "We're going to have a violent strike." They'd be crazy. But there may be individuals on strike whose nature is to pursue this kind of an answer when confronted by a problem. The guy who on Saturday night has a few beers and if you disagree with him, well then, part of the recreation is to go outside and settle it, you know. It's kind of a sport.

DAN McCURRY:

unknown and I talked about that.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

And we have people like that in any group. There are people like that on the company side, there are people like that among the scabs. And so, the question is what to do about it and what kind of policies you advocate and what you don't and what you prohibit and what you don't talk about or say anything about and so there are all kinds of levels. And most things that happen, you don't know ahead of time. You hear a vague report, and maybe something happened, you know. So, this is a big problem and in long strikes, in 1973 in a state that has very little labor organization and is unfriendly to organized labor, it is a very difficult thing to allow violence to develop even without a policy of, any policy of promoting it, but to allow it to develop and still avoid being penalized possibly in many different ways. So, that was another sequence, and Benton was responsible for carrying out that kind of policy and Bush and any staff rep in there, Washington, Pope and then the committee. You've got to depend on the committee people to agree. You've got to convince them of what strategy you are going to follow and you've got to make it believable and you hope that they will agree and will wholeheartedly cooperate. If they

---

Page 20

don't, you are in trouble.

DAN McCURRY:

Does the tactics, the decision that you have gone through … they worked at Oneida. I'm sure that it is a situation kind of thing. Do you think that it would work as you look toward other big campaigns, the Stevens campaign or whatever the … you take these things a little bit different. That's one thing I'm wondering, if that is a lesson that you have learned now, it works successfully and … [unclear]

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, I am frankly not enthusiastic about the tactical effect of violence. I don't personally believe in it and regardless of my personal beliefs, I don't see it as an appropriate union policy. I was telling the people over at Crossville, I guess it was, the other Saturday night it was. "If you get drunk on a Saturday night and you fight and you go up before the judge, if anything happens, it's like $25 you know. It's not expensive. But if that was a picket line and you were a union guy, you are not talking about $25, you are talking about how many years you are going to go up and how many thousands of dollars the union is going to be sued for. And so, there are double standards and it is ver difficult for us to beat them and to survive. So, I would suppose that we would explore that and I differe with some. There are a lot of other union people, I suppose that you might call me old school, possibly would agree with that. And possibly some of the new left people might not agree with that. So, I don't know.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

Now that you have won the strike at Oneida, what do you see that strike doing for the rest of the region in terms of organizing?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, the significance of the Oneida strike, and this is-one of the reasons why the international backed it, was that it is in the middle of a cluster of companies. Wellman is one. Little Georgetown Textile with only seventy people is another. We are in bargaining there. It is on

---

Page 21

the outskirts of Andrews. The Santee River Wool Combing plant in Jamestown, which is twenty miles from Andrews. We had an election there two years ago and we are still waiting to be certified and I think that we will be. And so, there are some plants in a similar situation farther away. We can't afford to get beaten in those situations. We can't afford to walk away from them. We only have two choices, either to strike and win, hopefully, or just stay in it, persist and that is a deliberate decision by the union of long standing, which I certainly prescribe to, that any company where we win the election is not going to get rid of us. One way or the other we are going to be there. If we don't have enough strength to strike, we'll keep on doing one thing or another to stay alive and hopefully get strong enough. And the effect of the strike on Wellman and on Georgetown Textile and on Santee River Wool Combing, both as to the management and as to the people in the plants, is quite significant. And we are going to, because we are in a circle there, we've got three or four thousand potential TWUA members, plus the unorganized plants. I'm not even talking about them, I'm talking about those campaigns where we have already had elections. So, Benton is staying right there. He's not going anywhere. He's going to look after the other plants that I'm talking about in Charleston, it's largely black, half black and in Andrews and also keep in touch with the people in Wellman and Santee River Wool Combing. So, it has a very important effect. And the other thing is, we've got a company in there that is debating which way they will go. It has a very important effect then. So, you know, you don't talk about strikes too much in the average organizing campaign, you can't avoid it really if the company raises the issue, but the company usually likes to talk about strikes, corruption of the union, violence, union bossism, those three or four issues. But I think this helps other textile companies

---

Page 22

that aren't already decided and makes them consider the alternative of trying to work out a reasonable agreement. And we hope that the Oneida Company, once they sign a contract, our interest in regard to them becomes very, very different. We hope that they won't go broke. We hope that they can put everybody to work and they make a good product and because the interest of the people that we represent actually depends on our ability to negotiatee for them a share in the company's profits. In '71, the company lost money. It's not a big company and they lost money, in '72 they made money. And I think that one reason that they settled in July, 1973 was because they were losing money, obviously, and this is a great year to be making underwear. It's just a great year and they sell to a lot of big chain stores and I'm sure that the strike was turning their year into a loss. And I will be very much interested in their 1973 financial statement when it comes out in February of '74.

DAN McCURRY:

I have two questions: Why would grape dealer be making underwear, and number two, how can a company like Devereaux make money, take the '71 year … [unclear] … '72?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, I'm not an expert. But, they are making money now because everybody is under a high level employment. There is quite a bit of available buying power. The textile industries are a good example. The unemployment levels in North and South Carolina are 1½, 2½ for example. In Charlotte, in some of these textile towns, the unemployment level gets down to 1.3. It gets down as low as it can go and there is a terrific labor shortage. And this is why those companies are moving down into the black coastal plain of North and South Carolina, because there is still those counties. That county down there had very bad poverty. But all those people are being sucked up by

---

Page 23

these new plants there. So, underwear, you know, is a consumer product that varies a lot with good times and bad. And, believe it or not, I would class it as relatively good times for the average working person, and they are selling an awful lot of underwear. Why they made money one year and lost it the next, or rather lost it in '71 and made it in '72, that is not entirely clear. We watch their financial reports carefully. They started a couple of enterprises that didn't work. The Collman, Alabama plant doesn't make underwear for them, which is another important factor. They make children's and girls, something like that, sportswear. And they … some of that stuff is cut. Richard may have talked about that. And that's a different kind of market. But they started a couple of stores and they started some other little offshoot business, and I think that those chickens came home to roost in '71. And then one of the hard things in a company this size, which is very small, you know, compared to almost any significant company, is the quality of management. And that is very uneven. A relatively small family owned company. You can get very good, or you can get mediocre or it can get terrible. And personalities become much more important in little companies than larger companies. Frank Hertz and Smith, are the lawyers, are the two people whom I would charge with the responsibility for the strike. And this nice old gentleman, called him the undertaker type. Frank Woods, who is the secretary-treasurer, financial officer of the company and who at one point then became the executive vice-president, and now, there is a new guy who came in named Martin. There has been a change, and that change coincided with the end of the strike. So, there was a corporate decision of sorts, the details of which were not entirely familiar. But Mr. H ertz is no longer the top production man, Martin will be. And Hertz, I understand, has been demoted to a division

---

Page 24

of the Andrews plant. So, the quality of people might have had something to do with the '71 - '72 development.

DAN McCURRY:

… [unclear] … you talked about the reason that the strike was finally settled was when the company overrulled How did that happen?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, I'm speculating. Because nobody on our side of the table usually knows what happens, just like they don't know exactly how we make decisions. And the people who say that they have all the answers is usually a committee guy, or somebody in the plant who will tell you that, "we know exactly what happened." Well, that's what they think happened. Sometimes, they are absolutely right, sometimes it's just in their minds. So, I'm talking about what I would guess, based on little scraps of information of one kind or another. I think that they company was led to believe by the lawyer and by the production manager, the top people in the company were led to believe that first, people wouldn't come out. And secondly, when the people did come out, they were led to believe wouldn't stay out. And if either of those things had been true, the company's strategy would have been correct, but they were wrong. And then, the company may have thought, I think that Smith probably thought this, … in the Garco situation, the plant management was very paternalistic and the wages and benefits were very high. They are dealing in an entirely different market and product, including defense contracts and stuff for the Navy in Charleston and asbestos is a high price product, you know. And it has a sharp impact on people's life expectancy and for a lot of different reasons, the wage scale there was good, and those people never struck. There was a ten day strike that I didn't have anything to do with. And that was the pattern that Smith was used to in

---

Page 25

dealing with textiles, TWUA. And I think that he got fooled.

DAN McCURRY:

… [unclear] … a speech every two weeks or so, pull the employees off feet work and get them together there in …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

unknown

DAN McCURRY:

Yes, we've got a tape account, half an hour.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah. I heard that.

DAN McCURRY:

You heard that thing?

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

… [unclear] …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah, a captive audience so to speak. What we call a captive audience, the climax of a company's anti-union election campaign.

DAN McCURRY:

His perception of what was possible there seemed as screwed as it possibly could be and as talked … [unclear] …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

So, at any rate I think … [unclear] … and hopefully, other people in the company maybe even at the beginning had a different view, but they said, "Why try?" I'm not sure, because I am told by people in our union who were in New York state, that they company was exceedingly hard to deal with. We tried it and … [unclear] … they had even worked out an arrangement with the ILG, because the ILG had a lot of knitting, to let the ILG assume the bargaining rights, you know, that sort of story …

[TAPE 2, SIDE B]

DAN McCURRY:

The reason that I asked that question is that we often run up against the name "Parsons", a banker there in town that was on the board of directors, so it seems to be at least the Jamestown plant and the Andrews plant and I'm not sure what other plants and the way that his bank took to unknown along with the welfare committee there and … [unclear] …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, I heard about him. We tried to talk to him. I think that some of the staff people did maybe, without any … or at least they sent

---

Page 26

him word, to use a good Southern expression, and I don't think that we got any response. He was also the Democratic county chairman and we were interested whether that would help. And we were looking for an intermediary. Because it is a very peculiar thing. One of Smith's characteristics is that he never uses the mediation services. And he refused to allow an federal mediators to come into the negotiations. And one of the little things that happened, it wasn't little in retrospect, it was pretty important. There was an assistant Commissioner of Labor for South Carolina. Who is an attorney and he is very new in his job and he not a professional in the field of industrial relations. He's from New York. He lived in Columbia as a young practicing lawyer and now he is maybe 45 or so, I will think of his name in a minute. He imposed himself on the company. And at the very end of the strike, the first time that he ever really got in, and he got Mr. Smith to agree, and if you had sat in on the negotiations, you would have seen him. It's a very demeaning posture. And incidentally, it shows the arrogance of these company people, company attorneys, to say that to a guy who was the spokesman, practically speaking, for the Governor of South Carolina. And he got into themeeting, and he sat in two meetings, I believe it was, and then he had a lot to say between the meetings, to the parties and he was actually influential in winning a way of changing the scores. You should have his name …

DAN McCURRY:

Yeah, I've got it … [unclear] …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

… R. Fusco.

DAN McCURRY:

Is the family around in South Carolina?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

There may be, I don't know. My impression was that he came from New York and I think that his wife is a South Carolinian. He ran for the

---

Page 27

legislature, I believe and was then appointed by the governor, the current governor, West, as an Assistant Commissioner of Labor. And he is a very practical guy. He doesn't understand the issues, but he is so direct in his questions that he will pick up a lot of expertise if he remains in his present job for awhile. Because he will … he says, "I'm not a mediator, I'm an adjitator." He adjitates the parties to … [Laughter] which is a good idea. So, he was influential in saying that, you know, "You guys have got to settle this… [unclear] … In most difficult negotiations, you are able to find a third party who can talk frankly to each side separately, sometimes even jointly, or you able to have someone maybe at a higher level in the organization contact somebody … bargaining between a company and a union is exactly like diplomacy, whether you like it or don't like it, it's exactly like relations between two countries. And they have all the suspicions, lack of knowledge, attitudes, vehicles, devises, practically, I think that it is a very close analysis. And usually, there are informal channels. One of the frustrating things is that you can't find any informal channels, and this company did not present us with any informal channels. I am sure that they did it at the specific direction of this attorney. He wanted all the threads going through his fingers. In fact, at the beginning of the negotiations, he tells the company people in both locations, "Don't talk in the negotiations. I'll do the talking." So, I deliberately asked questions and he's not great on technical things, he doesn't know anything about the payroll, or incentive systems, or how to sew, you know … so, I would ask questions that he couldn't answer and I would look at these other guys, you know, to try and get them into the act. If they never talk, you know, they think that you are an enemy. You want to get them talking … it's one of those things, it's like telling jokes. General Secretary-Treasurer of the union, who is now retired, John

---

Page 28

Chupka, once helped me settle a strike against Burlington Industries. And they are the biggest and we only represented 1300 people and it was like an elephant and a fly, you know, in terms of … and his contributions was that he told jokes to two management guys and he did it very deliberately and very intelligently and kept on telling jokes until they had to start to laugh a little bit. And it took several days and he would keep on telling these jokes. They would fall flat and he finally made them act like human beings. And if we hadn't gotten to that stage, I don't think that we would ever have settled the strike. It was just rigidity of personal conduct.

DAN McCURRY:

What about Erntz (unknown) You laid a lot of responsibility at his doorstep.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Urtz. U-R-T-Z. Frank Urtz. He's a very unusual person and I don't like to make a lot of derogatory statements about people. He would… he didn't like negotiations. It was very uncomfortable for him to be in that position and he was supposed to be in all the meetings. I think that he kept bringing the excuses up to the company as to why he shouldn't have to be there, particularly after the strike begin and he became the subject, sort of the main target of the union. And he would sit over, maybe he would face away from the committee and maybe everybody else on the company side would be up here and he would be maybe back. Or after a while, when the strike got to be two months old or more, it was very difficult to get him to say anything. It was obvious that he was uncomfortable and maybe he then figured that his original strategy was not working the way he hoped it would in terms of people not striking.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

How important was the animosity against him personally in bringing people out on the strike? And another question about Mr. Urntz, several people mentioned that they thought that the company had kept Urtz in that

---

Page 29

position to keep the union away as long as they possibly could.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, I don't underestimate Mr. Urtz. I think that he is an highly intelligent man. He was very brusque. You know, there is a style of bosses in industries related to the garment industry which is very tough. And quick and hard and unpolished. And Urtz could be all of those things if he wanted to. On the other hand, you know, he was a smart man and some of his tactis in the campaign were not stupid tactics, you know. He was not an easy person to beat. He used these things that we may think are silly, like the analogy of the family, "this was all family." Well, that happens to be a pretty doggone effective tactic. And the strikers wouldn't admit and the union people wouldn't admit to being members of the family, but it worked for an awful lot of people for quite a long while, because you know, particularly, southern whites transfer family concepts to owners and managers and you can talk about the "code of the hills." Well, there's a code of personal relationships and responsibilities between, in the old style textile communities, between a worker and a man that lives in the white house on the hill and runs the plant. And so, the family analogy is sort of an attempt to project that kind of an image. The father may spank you, but he will also feed you and direct you in what to do, but he will also look after you. I guess the reaction to Urtz in retrospect, I'm sure, must be very big and the people are talking.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

Oh, it certainly is.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

But it wasn't all that clear at the beginning. There were a lot of people who disliked him.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

He's been made an object of ridicule and …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

And people say that he is sort of hiding himself at the mill now and afraid to be seen, partly because he has been demoted and partly because he is too proud. But they apparently sort of enjoy looking at him and making him feel uncomfortable.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

That's too bad. Well, there was a report at the end of the strike that … the company was going to … after a period of time, you know, companies don't like to yield obvious changes. They like to do it by stages. And there was a report that he was sort of going to become a trouble shooter, or go on the road as a technical consultant to sales or whatever, be phased out of the Andrews scene. I don't know whether that will come true or not.

DAN McCURRY:

Talking about tactics and results, two things. One is that they did move over to Georgetown. Seemingly a stupid thing to do about six years ago when they moved, out of the Andrews community, because that community is so small. If he had stayed there, at one point he would have been much greater than he is now. But you talked about tactics that he was able to use successfully, or that companies are able to use successfully. What were some of those that had some effect?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, the company absorbed, I think, most of the ILGWU leadership. Tisdale, a little British woman who is the personnel officer for the company now, was an ILG member. The former president of the local, the woman … I don't know whether you bumped into her or not … she was the number one person on the ILGWU organizing campaign. The ILG organizers gave her the cards and she said, "When we need you, we'll send for you." And she signed up the whole plant. That woman was on the company side in our campaign. Now, the interesting thing is that a lot of companies would have fired or gotten rid of every strong ILG leader

---

Page 31

and this company, for better or for worse, maybe because they just didn't want to do that, didn't get rid of them. Not all, or even many of them, as far as I can tell. I wasn't in the position, but they did absorb a lot of them and it was basically, with the exception of two or three people, it was … [unclear] … Now, that's not unusual. When you had a hard fought campaign and you come back to the same plant in two years or so, or even next year. Those people may say, "Well, we did our share. Now, let's see what the rest of them will do and let somebody else have a chance to stick their necks out. Other company tactis, I think would be even normal strategies. Smith directs the mechanics of those organizing campaigns and he's not especially good at it. They had the normal kind of written propaganda. "The union can't do anything for you, why bring in a third party? There may be strikes and violence. Ask the union what happened in …" I don't recall the specific propaganda, but I imagine they had references to the Henderson strike, or the strike that we had a few years ago in Albemarle, North Carolina against unknown. If you are going to stay around, Harold McIver would probably have a file, maybe you can even get it if he is not there, because he has got the flu right now. We might have a file that you might want to look at on the organizing, from the organizing period. And they promised them a pension plan. The pension became a fairly significant issue. They mentioned it before the election and then they forgot about it and then at the height of negotiations, after eight months, reproposed it, ten cents for pension per hour. And then the company came back and they complained, Smith complained, "Why are you waiting so long on this important issue?" "Well, we just got to it." Well, then they came back and they offered a

---

Page 32

pension and we critisized their offer, you know, it was terrible. And they imporved it a little bit. They were mixed up about the proposal … wage increases … they talked about wages some. But their benefits, which were left over from the ILG were better than some other plants in the area after having been unchanged for six years.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

What exactly did ILG's existence there prove?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

I'm not entirely clear about that, I don't know. It was current enough so that when we did make a decision to go in, there wasn't any formal cut-off of their bargaining. Now, one way to stop bargaining is to let it die, you know, inactivity and if you don't exercise your bargaining rights, you don't keep them. So, one thing we did, when the people said that they wanted to organize, we sent word to the ILG and they sent up a staff rep and we had a staff rep. Roper. This was when Roper was still in organizing and we met, they met with the people and they let the staff people know which union they would like to come back in and help them. The ILG said that "if they would like you folks to help them, fine. More power to you." … [unclear] … contruction and weighing in the interests of the people in settling that issue. It happens once in a while at the beginning of an organizing campaign.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

… [unclear] …

DAN McCURRY:

One of the things that we are not very clear on is when this all began. You talked about the staff people coming down and … [unclear] and meeting with some of the old ILGWU people there, Cook and so forth.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Right.

DAN McCURRY:

But now when it came to a decision of this magnitude, who was going

---

Page 33

to make the attempt to organize again, who and how were people representing the plant chosen, selected, or however.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Anybody who would come. Anybody that had enough guts to show up.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

Who all showed up at first?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

I don't know. As I said, I think that R.L. was the man who was present at that meeting and I believe Roper and I think that he at that point was working for Harold McIver as an organizer and he didn't stay there through the election. It was Washington … you didn't get a chance to talk with him?

DAN McCURRY:

Well, we're going to.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Are you going over there?

DAN McCURRY:

We hope so.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, o.k., there was him and …

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

… [unclear] …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Oh, you're going to Crossville, well, that's great.

DAN McCURRY:

… [unclear] …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, Washington was a black guy out of Mills and he's sort of an old style cotton mill type when he started, but he is pretty sophisticated. He's become more polished and he's developing, and Pope I think, were the two guys and really interested in the organizing. They would be worth talking to because they have stayed, Washington stayed in that area for three years before the strike started. I'm not counting that time. He went through a couple of Wellman campaigns and this campaign and I think that he was also on Santee, So, these two guys were part of four winning elections in a row. For the Textile Workers Union. That was a string of wins down there largely based on blacks, black but yes votes and that is a pretty fantastic string. Now, unfortunately, none of these outfits

---

Page 34

roll over and play dead when it comes to negotiating time, you know. So, we spent a lot more energy after the election, except in Wellman. In Wellman, the company is still fighting our certification, but those two guys, who are very different, you know, really brag among the TWUA organizers for their long string of wins, you know, and they became sort of a rabbit's foot for those people around there, you know, they are the winners. This was up until the time that the strike started, and then everything enters a different kind of ball game and now they are still winners, you know.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

In talking about those places where they had voted for the union but you still had difficulty in negotiating with the company. You said that there are some types of things that you can do to keep the union there and once you are there you're not going to go away. What sort of things can you do when you don't have the financial support to strike but you want to keep your presence?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, one thing you do, well, obviously, where you are in this kind of situation, you've got to set up good communications with the people. Now, that's a very hard thing for a union. You never have enough staff to go around, so you are always wanting to take someone from one place and start something else. It depends on what your value system is. Now, usually you measure production by election wins and that conflicts with what we are talking about. Because these are really finishing up things, really the best definition of organizing is the number of new dues payers under contract in the plant. The whole process that Andrews has now gone through. O.K., but you have got to establish credibility with people and you've got to keep it. You never cut corners,

---

Page 35

and you never promise them what you can't forsee and you never underestimate difficulties. And you never take short run, immoral solutions. And so the psychology of those kind of places, again usually it needs a different kind of guy than an organizer. An organizer is ideally a very impatient, impetuous, emotional guy who can lose an election and then he goes to another place a hundred miles away and then he can start all over again in a new group of things and put them together and hopefully win this time. And they have to be people who are upset with status quo situations and when you get into a real long pull, it's a little different. You've got to be able to last with all kinds of disappointments or delays. So, that's one thing and you've got to gear people to that.

[TAPE 2, SIDE B]

SCOTT HOYMAN:

… so, if you tell them what's going to happen and you say, "Well, this isn't good," or "Here's what we would like to do, but we didn't get that much." Well, then they'll start standing up. People can face a lot of adversity if you treat them as adults. Now, there are tactics that you use to prevent the company from having an election, for example. You've got the presumption of bargaining rights for a year. That's what you get with certification. Now, when the year is up, the company has a shot at you, if they want it. If you've got them involved in unfair labor practices, you can't have an election (even) if you want one where you have charges pending against the company. The Board won't hold an election without "laboratory conditions." Well, if you are …

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

That means that you are pretty sure that you will win, if you withold an election.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, once you win the election, there's no advantage to you, usually, in having another one. It's just like having won a hundred dollars, why put it back on the line where you might lose it. Winning a second time doesn't help you any. It just gives you what you had when you won the first time. So, you want to preserve your bargaining rights. You use unfair labor practices. That's a way of doing that. You get into a strike, one of the key events of the Oneida strike, we had just filed charges against them. The first charges we filed in July about bargaining, not about the election. The frist charges, negotiations began in January and February of '72. The first charge was filed in July. We got a decision on those charges and a hearing in October and they were still pending when the strike began. We ultimately won those, but this did not make the strike, which began on January 15, 1973, a "unfair labor practice strike." An unfair labor practice strike has to be a strike that began or was converted into a ULP strike because the bad things the company did made the workers want to shut it down as a protest and so, we filed some more charges. And these related to the bargaining and everything else that we thought were violations and the Board issued a complaint. But the complaint recognized there was a strike but didn't say that it was a ULP strike. And we got the Board in June to issue an amendment to the complaint. The amendment was that certain activity, matter of fact, it was some of Urtz's letters. He put out two letters at the very beginning of the strike. One was on the 16th of January, I think, and one on the 24th. And those letters the Board held to be an attempt at presenting the company's

---

Page 37

bargaining to the workers in an attempt to bypass the union, to convince the workers that the company's offer was good. And they held that that converted the strike. Getting that strike converted into an ULP strike mans an awfully lot. It means that anyone at the end of the strike, no matter how many scabs are in there, has got a right to get their jobs back. Their own jobs unless they are guilty of some kind of misconduct or unless there just aren't … maybe some bad thing happened to the company and there just aren't that many jobs left. But if there is a scarcity of jobs, the strikers take the jobs and the people hired since the strike began, the strikebreakers, have to be laid off. That's one way to stay in business.

DAN McCURRY:

But in this case they tell me that there are a third to a fourth of scabs who are still in the plant.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Oh yeah. That's true. We were running very close at the end of the strike. The company had hired a lot of people.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

One of the things that really made it for you is the fact that they were getting a lot of their material back for defects and so forth.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah, that's right. But … so, use of Unfair Labor Practices is significant as a survival tactic and then you've got to be ingenious in negotiations. Negotiating this kind of a contract is entirely different from any other kind of a negotiation. You take positions not in regard to economics necessarily, but in regard to other matters. Its effect on people, its effect on the Labor Board cases, you know, it's like signals in bridge. I don't play bridge, but you know, it's a language, it's a form of symbols and so on. And then, there are a lot of

---

Page 38

tactics. Some places we use short strikes. Where you have a big situation or a small situation and you are so weak that you don't know what's going to happen, maybe you will say to everybody, "Let's stop off one day." I've don't that. And you may want to try to step it up, but successive short strikes become unprotected. That's not considered legitimate.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

How long were you prepared to stay out at Oneida?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

I don't know the answer to that question.

DAN McCURRY:

It's a tough issue to deal with.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

A lot of people said that they weren't going back until there was a contract.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, that's what people on a strike should say. But that isn't what determines the length of a strike. Those are the good people whom you were talking to. You know, you've got all kinds of things going on, as you can imagine. One rule of thumb in strikes, general strikes, not special kinds, is when they get to be 50%, take a hard look at it. In other words, when 50%, the employment in plant, no matter where it comes from, whether it comes from the original group of people or whether it comes from replacements, strikebreakers, when it gets up to half of the pre-strike employment, you are getting into very deep water. One advantage that we had in this strike, it takes thirteen weeks to train a sewer. Now we had a lot of textile operations that are very skilled and we have some that aren't skilled. Sewing is technically a garment, you know, an operation associated with a garment plant rather than in textiles, but we've got other textile operations where you can be trained in a short period of time. We've got some that take a year to learn, loom fixing, how to mechanically adjust a weaving machine. But it was very helpful to us going in there in that it took thirteen weeks and you figure out the

---

Page 39

duration of the strike from that point of view, the duration of the strike was time enough to train two sewers on the same machine. Two crops, if you think of it in those terms.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

They had a limited number of training machines.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

No, that's a sewing machine, so they had a lot of sewing machines.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

I think that it is in knitting where they have smaller machines that they train on.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Knitting, yeah, machines are scarce and one worker runs several. Circular or flat knit and they probably use instructors and they probably train them on the first shift, or they may even have a training room, I don't know.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

… [unclear] …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, it's a different kind of work, because she would be instructing.

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

She has been wanting for years to … [unclear] … and send her back to training, I think that the knitting department …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah, well, they could do that. These companies are, you know, their whole piece rate system shows up in that sewing. It is a tough system. They keep track of piece rate. Before the strike, the minimum was $1.60 and they gave us a list of people and how many people on the piece rate were not making $1.60. Now, they can't pay them less, so, they get involved in something called "make-up pay." And they don't like that. They are paying for work not produced. And you take a company like Allied Chemical or U.S. Steele or something, they begin people at $2.50 you know, and train them for however long it takes, but this is part of this very tight, penny-pinching deal. The hosiery industry and the apparel industry are characterized by these …

CAROLYN ASHBAUGH:

Low profit margin?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah. Very tight. And they can go broke and it is their money, and you know. They bid on things at a tenth of a cent a dozen, the piece rates are set at four decimal places. It's a very stingy kind of …

DAN McCURRY:

I think it's time to stop, don't you. [Laughter]

SCOTT HOYMAN:

… the Board holds the elections and they also run the unfair labor practices, so they get involved in that. Now, the only way that the Board gets into this is through 885 type charges and hell, there are a lot of unions that don't even know what an 885 is. Well, they know what it is, but there isn't any systematic record kept, that I know about, where a union has been certified and is unable to get a significant contract to stay alive. And I'm telling you that the smart anti-union lawyers and the die-hard companies using this device more successfully than any other part of the whole process …