Outcome of the 1969 food workers' strike and supporting role of the Black Student Movement
Davis speaks at length about the outcome of the first food workers' strike in 1969 at University of North Carolina. Although wages were raised and the university promised to pay food workers the back pay they were owed, Davis expresses some reservations about the final compromise. Again asserting that the Black Student Movement served in a supporting capacity, he talks about how they had worked to set up the "soul food cafeteria" in Manning Hall during the strike in order to ensure that the workers could survive financially.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Ashley Davis, April 12, 1974. Interview E-0062. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
Preston and them,
and Mrs. Smith and them and some guys from the
union and all and people from the University had gotten together and
they just settled on an increase, one of the things they settled on was
that they would make $1.80 an hour. Which would become minimum
wage for the people that worked in the cafeteria. And what I understand
was that this meant that somebody in Raleigh had to change w-6 for a
whole lot of other people up to $1.80 from $1.60. I
think that's the way it worked. Minimum wage. They could
unionize. So, this settled the strike. See, we weren't happy
even then, because some things had happened. First of all, and
I'm being real honest about it, all through it, as I say, we
were supportive. Being supportive is very dangerous and very bad,
because you can be supportive and you can support someone and then they
just cut you loose and flounder and you have no say so about it because
you've always just been supportive, you haven't
directed anything. We were supportive all the way through and when the
union people came in, we felt that the people here should have done like
the people at Duke did. My understanding was that at Duke, they let two
unions bid, AFSCME and another union. Offered them one better proposal
and then I don't know what they finally resolved, whether
they didn't go with a national union and just formed their
own or what, but these people didn't do this. I think that
AFSCME came in here.
- RUSSELL RYMER:
-
But they didn't come in right after the first strike.
They came in after the University had sold the
concession.
- ASHLEY DAVIS:
-
No, no, but see, they were here before that. They came in at the end of
the first strike, I might be wrong, I get confused in the years, but as
I remember, they were there at the end of the first strike, because part
of the agreement was that the University had planned to sell the
cafeteria system, even then. This was one of the considerations.
- RUSSELL RYMER:
-
This was before the first strike?
- ASHLEY DAVIS:
-
I don't know about before the strike, but I know that after
the strike, one of the considerations was that the ladies were saying
that they had heard that the University was going to sell the cafeteria
system, because they were losing money. And they wanted to get from the
University an agreement that the University would maintain whatever wage
they got from this job to the next job. And also placement in jobs from
this system to the next. This was one of the guarrantees. The University
never really…I'm trying to think if they ever gave
that guarrantee in writing. If they did, I'm sure that it was
a very tied-up promise to do it. Because the University did not want to
do it. They didn't want to do it at all. And what I wanted to
say that bothered us…when these union people came in, like I
say, we were only helping, in terms of advice, we could't
tell them what to do. And so, they went with AFSCME, I think. But
without really giving it the time that we wanted them to give to it,
really thinking about it. And we knew too,
I'll be honest, at the end of the first strike, we knew that
things weren't going to last. Inherently, there were too many
people working in the cafeteria system. It was overstaffed in this time
of mechanization. And you notice that the first company that came in,
which was SAGA, SAGA mechanized the hell out of it. In the cafeterias,
you know. You get your own soda, you push,…it reduced the
number of employees. So, when the University said that they would do
that, we had real questions the first time. And that really worried us.
We expressed, I think, on numerous occasions our fears about that to the
workers. I think the workers were very happy to get back to work. By the
way, running that cafeteria we ran, I think they said that they were
able to pay about $35 a week to every striker that was out. And
that was paid every week. See, we were able to pay. The reason that we
ran a cafeteria was that people had to live during the strike. We
started a cafeteria with the workers so that the workers could make a
living and by running the cafeteria, they made enough money that we were
able to pay every worker $35 a week. See, that was the whole
idea behind the cafeteria. To pay them so that they could stay out on
strike. That's why I say that we were supportive in terms of
bank accounts and getting them, these funds, to the workers and to pay
people off. And if special problems came up, Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Brooks
and them would take, but they were the ones that were hitting it. They
were the ones that made the decision. You see, we
didn't. They made it. We could give them advice, but like I
say, I tend to think that at the end when the settlement came, they were
so glad to settle, I think, that they really did not look at it
realistically. What really bothered me, was that it had only been, and
there had been a strike within the ranks, I should tell you, about the
Pine Room… there were people who said that the Pine Room gave
them no warning that they were going to strike. And they wanted to
strike too, and they were bitching about whether they were going to
strike because the Pine Room crew, who led the original strike said that
they weren't going to do it, it's funny that the
most conservative part of the staffnd the most radical were right there
in the same building. Upstairs was very conservative in Lenoir.
Downstairs was very radical, in the Pine Room. What happened was that
there were some real disagreements between factions. People at Chase
said that, "we didn't know." But my
understanding was that these people had talked to them. These people
were just jiving, they didn't want to set a time and do it.
So, that when the people from the Pine Room came, that meant some
conversation and some soothing of feelings between them. To get workers
to go on strike. And that kind of took a while, but we got a good number
of workers to go on.
- RUSSELL RYMER:
-
Do you think that if the BSM had had more control over it and had been
less in the background, that the strike would have
ended up differently then? Maybe they would have held out for
more concrete, or longer lasting…?
- ASHLEY DAVIS:
-
That's a possibility. I don't know that, you see. I
can only say what my thinking was, our strategy, what we saw. O.k., what
I saw and the people that I talked to saw, and what we expressed to them
was, number one, they should be wary of the union people and beware of
the things the University offered. Because of people whom we knew who
were conservative and had no like for the cafeteria people all of a
sudden find themselves available to help and do things…this
kind of thing. So, in terms of the outcome, BSM may have made more
input, I don't know…because what happens is the
question of when you make input, whether or not people like your input.
Oh yeah, let me tell you what happened, too. At the end of the strike,
Chambers found out…they got over $180,000 in back
pay, you can find out the exact figures, they went through the
records…now, those records, from my understanding were over
there and a guy from the U.S. Department of Labor was going to come
down. So, what we did, was that we wanted to stick around and watch. We
started keeping our eye on buildings where we knew records was being
kept. We wanted to see what was going on. After this was announced, we
wanted to see if there was all of a sudden going to be a big moving
program, or people going to do a little midnight work, we were very
interested in this kind of thing, you know. So, we kept an eye out for
that, and we watched where people were going and different things, and
kept an ear open and tried to find out what people
were doing and into. And to get an understanding on that. But, that was
settled, you know, and some people really got some nice-sized checks,
because they had really been cheated by the University. The agreement
was supposed to stop that split-time stuff in the middle of the day, but
what happened, you know, what I say, they went with this AFCME, or
whichever one it was, I'm not sure, but when they
went…some unions are really good, I think that some unions
don't really deal properly with the people
involved…