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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview H-0281, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
George Perkel began his career as an economist on the National War Labor Board during World War II, after which he took his expertise to the Textile Workers Union of America. However, this interview does not focus on Perkel's experiences; instead, it distills Perkel's research, giving him an opportunity to describe his conclusions about unions in the South. Perkel seeks to explain unions' lack of strength in southern states, citing factors such as a mill town culture that made textile workers suspicious of organizers and resistant to outside influence, legislation intended to protect the right to organize that lost its teeth, and effective opposition from political and industrial interests. This dense, rich interview is a primer on the failure of unionization in the South, with a nod to some of the movement's successes in the region. It will make an excellent starting point for scholars interested in mill labor and the role of unions in the South.
George Perkel evaluates the failure of unions in the post-World War II South.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
I really haven't had a chance to talk to anyone who's been very closely involved with labor yet.
I see. Have you done some reading, though?
Yes, I've done some reading. I do know kind of general things, in terms of the fact that there's been a lot of jobs lost in the last ten years or so in the industry, and some of the people I've talked to haven't been as concerned about that as I think maybe workers are, since they see more productivity through automation. Their argument sort of is, well, it's better to have some work than none at all. Which, I suppose, is absolutely true. But it still seems like there's probably some people that are getting lost, with no job, in the meantime.
That's certainly true.
I wondered if you might start by telling me how you happened to start doing what you've been doing.
Well, I got into the labor field back in 1943. I was an economist in Washington, working for the Commerce Department. My interest in labor started as I grew up, as a youth, in the 1930s, concerned with the New Deal and the wave of organization that took place in the 30s. And, being a member of a family with a socialist background, I was interested in unionism as a means of social protest and social change.
Was your family from New York?
Yes—well, my parents came from Russia. They emigrated in the early part
of the century, in 1910 or 20 period. In fact, before 1910. So, I was
born in 1919, and unionism and socialism was a conversation topic as I
grew up. And I naturally inclined toward unionism and socialism. So
that's what moved me in that direction. My early employment, then, for
the government was, as I say, as an economist, and I was interested in
using my knowledge and abilities to promote organization of workers. So,
the National War Labor Board was in its early stages of development at
that time—a federal agency—and I got a job with them in 1943 as an
analyst, analyzing the issues involved in labor disputes. The National
War Labor Board was responsible for settling labor disputes to avoid
interference with production for the war. And it also was concerned with
what is known as a wage stabilization program, which was a government
program related
That must have been a fascinating job.
Yes, it was very interesting. It was very taxing, because there were these difficult problems presented of trying to find out, penetrate the enormous amount of material that was coming in from both unions and employers trying to defend their position, and, as a government employee, trying to analyze and see what the truth of the matter was. So, it was very interesting and informative and prepared me for work in the union field after the war. In 1947, I became an economist. I got a job with the Textile Workers Union of America, at their headquarters in New York, as an economist in their research department. So that gave me further opportunity to participate directly in the labor struggles of the '40s and thereafter.
So what that, then, what you were doing when you retired?
Well, I had one two-year period when I took another job
That's quite a long career in the Union.
Yes. Most of it was in the research department. I started as an economist, and then I became assistant director, and then director of the department. From '63 to '76, I was director of research for the Union. And then I became interested in occupational safety and health as an issue for the Union, and I became Director of Occupational Safety and Health from '76 to my retirement.
What kinds of things were you doing research on?
Well, two areas, primarily. One was collective bargaining, that is, supporting the union's efforts to get higher wages and benefits for textile workers in collective bargaining. And that involved economic research, financial analysis, industrial economics studies. So that's one broad area of economic analysis that was used for collective bargaining purposes.
You mean you were trying to figure out, maybe, how much you thought a company could afford to raise wages and things?
That was one way of looking at it. Usually, though, it was trying to give the workers and the Union leaders as much information and analysis as to what was going on in the industry that would affect the ability of industry to pay higher wages. And, also, once a decision had been made on how much of an increase to ask in bargaining, then supporting those proposals with economic analyses, to support the Union officials and to impress the employers on what we knew about their ability to pay and to try to get them to reach an agreement. And then, during some parts of that period, arbitrations were fairly common on wage issues, and so my work consisted of representing the Union at the arbitration hearings, presenting economic analyses in support of our position and arguing the case. So that's one broad area, collective bargaining.
The other broad area is organization of workers. The Union, throughout
its history, was in an organizing stage, because, unlike most of the
other major unions, we did not succeed, in an early period, in
organizing the bulk of the industry. We never organized more than—well,
in the North, we organized the bulk of the industry, fifty, sixty,
seventy percent. But, during the period from the '20s to the '50s, there
was a mass movement, from North to South, of the industry. And, so, by
the 1950s, ninety percent of the industry was located in the South. So,
while we were substantially organized in the North, that represented
less
Why do you attribute such a low percentage?
Well, that's a long answer, and, if you like, I can spend several minutes discussing that.
I don't mind, if you don't mind.
OK. In order to appreciate our difficulties in organizing Southern
textile workers, I think you have to concern yourself with the
characteristics of the various people who played a part in that process.
And, we'll start with the workers. First, in talking about worker
characteristics, you have to understand something about the culture of
mill towns. Most of the textile workers historically have lived in very
small communities or rural areas, generally in mill villages, where the
employer—until the '40s, at least—the employer owned the homes, he owned
the utilities, he dominated the churches and schools and all the other
local institutions. The predominant cultural milieu was one of strong
paternalism on the part of the employer being the powerful, dominant
interest, and the employees having a strong sense of inferiority, both
to the
We've interviewed some people that really, I think, express that—
So you're familiar with that. I won't elaborate on it. By the way, Dale
Newman wrote a good piece in Labor History in '78,
which you may have seen.
No, I haven't.
Well, I recommend you look at it.
N-E-W-M-A-N?
N-E-W-M-A-N. Labor History in 1978.
OK, I'll take a look at it.
Which is a field study, including much interviewing, which I think you'll
find interesting. It emphasizes the parochial nature of the communities,
the attitudes that workers had, living in the rural isolation that they
did. The traditional nature of their attitudes, their acceptance
Well, certainly, there's lots of cases of times when workers did try to organize and just didn't get anywhere. So I guess some of that was kind of realistic on their part.
That's true, but the type of activities that historically textile workers engaged in tended to be the kind of explosion of hostility at their terrible plight rather than a sustained activity to establish a continuing organization.
That's an interesting distinction.
Yes, well, if you look at the various strikes that took place in the
South in the '20s, you see that there tends to be strong protest
feeling, strong and violent activity, that gets dissipated after a short
time because the people lacked a sustained base or basis for sustained
organization. They could get angry and explode, but that didn't
generally lead
Now another series of factors that affected worker characteristics, more
or less in the same direction, of producing downtrodden, inactive
people, was the nature of the work itself in the textile mill. Have you
seen Blauner's Alienation and Freedom? [Robert
Blauner, Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Worker and His
Industry (Chicago: 1964)]
I've taken a look at it, yes.
Well, the chapter on the textile industry is very good, and it will give
you details on how the work is organized and what effect it has on the
psychology of the people who were engaged in it. The control of their
lives by the machine, and the close supervision by the foremen, or what
they called overseers, the routine nature of the work and its repetitive
character, the lack of autonomy that people have on the job, where
everything is controlled for them and they're told what to do, the
insecurity that they felt because of the frequent layoffs, the ups and
downs in the textile cycle, causing frequent layoffs of people and low
wages, which resulted in a very low standard of living, an insecure
standard of living. The occupational structure being very
compressed—there are very few opportunities for advancement to more
skilled jobs; there are very few skilled jobs in the textile mill. So,
all of these conditions tended to
Still another factor that has to be given consideration in dealing with workers in the textile industry is the unusually large proportion of the work force that is female. The type of work and the type of situation that prevails in textile communities is to take advantage of the availability of young women and employ them in routine, nonskilled tasks. And more than forty percent of the work force in textiles has historically been female. Females, for a number of historical reasons, have been harder to organize and have tended not to be as active in their own behalf as men, in the industrial situation. They tend to feel, or have tended to feel, that work was not their dominant concern, they were housekeepers, housewives, and mothers as well as workers and rather than devote themselves, as men might, who are concerned with their job as their main source of livelihood, women have tended not to be active in labor organizations.
Now, of course, all of these considerations that I've just been
discussing have been changing over time.
Do you think that the textile companies continue to exert anywhere near the same kind of political power in a town or locality that they did, say, before World War Two? You no longer have the mill towns any more, but do you think they're still very strong politically?
Yes, I do. I think there has been a change. With few exceptions, they don't just run everything in the town, dictate everything. But they do have the predominance of power in most textile areas. The fact that textile mills are concentrated in certain areas makes the influence of the employer much greater than if they were spread out throughout the region. But the fact that they concentrated in certain areas gives them great political power in those areas.
Well, that sort of brings me into the—I've been talking about worker
characteristics—but, I think, in order to understand why we have so much
difficulty organizing textile workers, we have to appreciate something
about the characteristics of textile employers as well. And, as you
probably are aware, historically, textile employers in the South have
been regarded as public benefactors, rather than as simply employers.
They're the people who brought jobs to the poorest agricultural South,
and they were regarded by the community leaders and by people generally
as benefactors. And they set up these one-industry towns or
company-dominated areas and part of the benefits that they received from
that was almost complete control of local government. The attitude, or
mind-set that has resulted from that historical situation is a strong
sense among textile employers, even those who may not have come from the
South, that they are entitled to be the king-pin in the industrial and
geographic area. Many of them still retain the paternalistic idea of
being responsible for their people, their hands, as they call them, and
there's an authoritarian, top-down communication system that has
departed many non-textile industries but still is characteristic of the
textile industry. The control of worker lives which had historically
been a part of the mill village sociology still continues in the sense
that the mill management feels that he has a right to know not only what
his worker does on the job but outside of work, and he and his
supervisors concern themselves with what happens
I've heard it said that companies really don't particularly want workers who have gotten much education, particularly a whole high school education. I think someone spoke with a mill owner down in South Carolina who said we'd just as soon have people who hadn't finished high school.
I think that's true. I think the nature of the work is such, being generally routine and repetitive, that employers think that people with higher education would not make good employees for these jobs, and so they do welcome uneducated people, and I think this is one reason why blacks have been so successful in getting into the industry in recent years. To the extent that blacks have low education levels and they interfere with their ability to get jobs that require higher skills and higher education. But that is not a problem in textiles.
Has that helped, though, in terms of trying to get workers to organize any? I think there have been some studies that have said that blacks have been more receptive.
Yes, blacks have been much more amenable to the call of the Union than whites in the textile industry. That certainly has been true, and the successful efforts in the case of J.P. Stevens Company certainly was largely due to the fact that a substantial proportion of the workforce in those mills were black.
One other factor that should be mentioned to understand employer attitudes towards organization and toward the whole process of organization is the strong hostility that predominates, even stronger than in non-textile employers, hostility toward government interference. The notion of anybody coming in and telling the boss what to do is generally unwelcome in industry, but, in textiles, it's anathema. It's a matter of pride and almost family feeling that the boss is in charge and nobody can tell him what he can do and what he can't do. And this, of course, affects the whole process of organization because main protection of the right to organize is afforded by the federal legislation on that. And the employer hostility toward government interference plays an important role, even aside from economic and other considerations, in engendering a very strong anti-union bias among employers in the industry.
Then I should mention some of the economic factors that affect employer
attitudes toward unions. Textiles have been and still are a largely
competitive industry, so that labor cost is extremely important to the
employer, much more so
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
It's a sick industry. It's suffered from overcapacity, from wide fluctuations in prices, and so this has been another strong spur for employers to keep the unions out.
Ok. So, I've talked about the workers and the employers. Next I want to talk about the government's role. As I mentioned, the federal government has, since 1935, been responsible, supposedly, for guaranteeing the right of workers to exercise their organization proclivities, to bargain collectively. And that was a promise that was given in the Wagner Act and during the early days, in the '30s, and even into the '40s, that promise was fairly well fulfilled in that the government engaged in what I consider a highly unusual, effective administration of the law to compel employers to, to prevent employers from coercing workers and to prevent them from discouraging organization and so, in most mass-production industries, workers did take advantage of these opportunities afforded by the Wagner Act and succeed in getting organized.
That wasn't really true, though, of the textile industry, was it?
No, it wasn't true in textiles and, as I say, I hope that what I've said about the characteristics of the workers and the employers might give you some introduction to why it wasn't true in textiles.
If we go past the first ten years of the Wagner Act, and we come to the
postwar period, we have a new development affecting federal legislation,
namely, the Taft-Hartley Act. Which was then followed a few years later
by another act, whose name escapes me, that also amended the provisions
of the Labor Management Act. Both of these acts tended to weaken the
enforcement of the right to organize. Then the findings of the
investigation of corruption in certain unions and the complaints about
worker activity in organizing campaigns resulted in a reversal in the
federal legislation really. It's not quite realized, but the enforcement
of the right to organize pretty well became a dead letter in the postwar
period. For one thing, the Taft-Hartley Act amendments started it. And,
secondly, employers realized that there were no effective teeth in the
Act. All that the Act does is make an investigation and if it finds that
the Act has been violated, all it can do is tell the employers that they
have to stop violating it, and if they've deprived anybody of their
employment, they have to pay them back pay. This is hardly an incentive
for employers to accept the law. Because back pay represents a miniscule
proportion of the amount that they generally can save by keeping the
union out. So, economically, it pays for them to violate the law, pay
I guess this is a little off the subject, but for groups that have gotten organized, outside of the South, are they able to stay organized, even in the face of these changing laws?
By and large, they're able to stay organized, but their ability to
bargain collectively in an effective manner is gradually and rapidly
eroding because employers are—well, starting with the most celebrated
case, in 1981, when President Reagan broke the air-traffic control
strike, employers have come to realize that, if they're determined
enough, and if they're willing to take a strike, they can
All right, now. Let's go on to the next factor that—part of the picture of explaining the difficulties of organizing, which we touched on earlier, namely, state and local governments. In the South, especially in textile areas, the local governments have been predominately dominated by textile interests. Sheriffs and other armed people have been used many times to put down worker efforts to organize. Even though it doesn't happen as often now as it used to, it's still something that the people who work in the mills are aware of. They know how the sheriff's department people feel and what the score is, so to speak, in their community, and they know how the community power people feel about unions. And this has an intimidating effect upon textile workers when they try to organize. Not just the knowledge but the fact that, every once in a while, the power of the community is exercised to put down their efforts. And the employers use these incidents effectively, through the media and education, to let everybody know where the power is, where it stands, and how it stands.
So, all of these factors contribute to the sense of
Yes, I do.
Well, if you've studied that at all, you know it was sort of like the United States in Grenada—we were the Grenadians. So you had a situation where several hundred thousand workers had gotten the message that they needed a strike and they went out on strike and you had an organization like the Grenadian government trying to run the strike against the state of Georgia, and the militia, and the textile employers. So the disparity in resources was ludicrous and, certainly, the results were inevitable. Similarly, in every major struggle to organize textile workers, it's a David-Goliath proposition.
Obviously, I've given you my own point of view and I try to look at
things from more than one side and I've always been somewhat critical of
the Textile Union in its efforts to organize. It's always seemed to me
that we must be doing something wrong to be so unsuccessful. And I think
there's some truth in that, in that it's possible, certainly possible,
that if we had sized up the problem differently, if we had done things
differently, we might have had more success. But I do think, in
retrospect, that—speaking as objectively as I can—that the overwhelming
objective situation was so much on the side of defeat, calling for
defeat, that even if we were many times as smart as we were, many times
as more dedicated, and even had many more times as much money as we had,
we couldn't have won. The odds against
It certainly does. I know some of these broad trends, but I haven't heard them in this kind of detail that you're giving me.
Let me also throw in a few other thoughts on the Union's performance. The
Textile Union has been an unusually high-performance organization, in
the sense that, even though we were never one of the major unions,
because of the nature of the task that we faced, of organizing one of
the most down-trodden groups of workers in the country, it was a natural
magnet and attraction to people who were devoted to that task and who
were interested in that task to come to us and join with us. So we had
an unusually well-motivated and effective group of people trying to
organize. And, not only did we have that, but we were constantly seeking
new approaches. Unlike many organizations who don't succeed, we didn't
settle back and say, well, we can't do it. It's impossible. We were
constantly trying new approaches to organizing. We were one of the first
to use opinion polling to try to find out more systematically and
scientifically what our problems
Do you have the results of those kinds of polls still available?
Yes, they're in our archives, sure. I'll give you the name of the person who would be familiar with it—his name is Kier Jorgansen. We made some opinion polls in the Fieldcrest mills back in the '40s. I think those were probably the first ones ever attempted in organizing situations. And we've had a number since then. We've constantly been testing ourselves, examining ourselves, to see what we're doing wrong, what we could be doing that we weren't doing, how we could recruit better people, among the organizers, how we could train them better—we've had very strenuous efforts to train organizers much before organizer training ever had any currency in other unions. We really have worked hard at it, and so I think, if there anything to be said about the nature of the Union as contributing to the failure, I'm sure it can be said, but it was not for lack of trying different things that we didn't find the answer.
Was there anything about it that you felt you'd actually accomplished—I don't know if this is an embarrassing question. It seems like such a long time of so much failure.
Well, there was a sense of satisfaction, even in the face of failures,
because fairly early in the Union's history, people saw that it was
going to be a tough job and, in order to accomplish anything, they would
have to apply leverage as much as possible to augment the little power
that they had. This was done primarily through trying to work through
the federal government, to achieve more than we could simply on our own.
The Fair Labor Standards Act was the first of the laws that were used.
Well, even before that, the National Recovery Act, the activities of the
NRA committees, were used to try to build worker protection more
effectively than we could through our own efforts. The War Labor Board
was a government agency that we used to accomplish more than we could by
ourselves. The Fair Labor Standards Act, the Minimum Wage hearings and
commissions that were set up periodically afterwards were all used to
achieve higher wages for textile workers, more security for textile
workers, and, most recently, the Occupational Safety and Health Act of
1970 was used pretty effectively to gain important protections for
textile workers in the health field. The whole problem of byssinosis,
the cotton dust desease, was something that the Union, being a minority
union, couldn't deal with on its own and had to leverage its power by
using the government to establish standards and to enforce standards to
protect textile workers from disease. So, much of the satisfaction that
we feel—at least, I feel—
Well, given the situation you were working against, that certainly does seem like that's something to be proud of.
Yes, I am proud of that. That has given me a great deal of satisfaction.
There's also the role of the state, too, isn't there, in sort of really encouraging non-unionized, low-wage industries into the South, and discouraging industries that already have unions from entering the area?
Yes, the state has certainly been an ally in the South to the textile employers. You probably have seen the studies that were done eight or ten years ago on the fact that the higher-wage industries are not encouraged to locate in North Carolina, but the low-wage industries are. As a deliberate response to the textile employers' fears that higher-wage industries would endanger the protective status of the labor market.
That does seem to be softening some recently.
Yes, well, I suspect—I haven't studied it recently, but
How do you protect yourself in that kind of situation?
Well, there is no good answer to that question. Ultimately, it comes to you have to move on a national basis to move politically to improve the government's economic role. You can't keep people from becoming unemployed because of new technology. But you can have government programs to stimulate new jobs and to train people and, if necessary, provide temporary employment for people.
That's an idea which may not come any time soon.
No, the time period is one of retrogression. We're in a period where there are no answers in terms of the short run because the people who control the government are not receptive. They're doing all right, and it doesn't bother them that a lot of people aren't doing all right. President Reagan probably believes that people who don't have enough food are ignorant of how they can get it. He may believe it, or if he doesn't believe it, it's still acceptable to him and to the people who are dominant in our times. They feel that it's the basic proposition of Adam Smith and the free market will take care of everything. So, to talk of what the government now will do is sort of wasteful because the government now will do nothing. The only hope is to change the people who are in the government.
Well, I agree with you. Do you think that there may, even in the somewhat near future, be any more programs to try to help displaced workers, just in terms of retraining programs? I don't think that's probably going to be the answer, but it might help some.
I don't see any immediate prospect for government intervention in the
economic process as needed to protect those who are injured by the
economic process. I don't see any immediate prospect. Of course, a
person like Mario Cuomo or a member of the more liberal sector of the
national
Yes, I agree with you. What kind of impact do you think all the talk about the influx of imports is having on textile workers themselves? Just, more jobs being lost?
Well, the problem of imports is really one of the most intractable in our society that I know of, and textile workers have been losing jobs, as a result of increasing imports, for many years. And I think they will continue to. I'm not aware of any real solution to that problem. It's one of a long-range, continuing problem that can only be solved in the long range by people being rehabilitated, reeducated, retrained, so that they do become eligible for other work. The textile industry has been shrinking for thirty or forty years, and I believe it will continue to do so, partly as a result of increasing imports. So, workers who are displaced really don't have a future in the textile industry. It's a tragedy, but they have to face it and try to find other livelihoods.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
Either jobs become available through expansion locally, or people find
jobs where they are expanding, not locally.
I gather that's likely to have a pretty bad impact also on agriculture in North Carolina, since there are so many farmers and farm wives who have managed to keep their farms going through part-time work in factories, or even full-time work in factories.
Yes, they will really suffer.
I can't think of anything else specifically that I wanted to ask you. Can you think of anything else you'd like to tell me?
Well, we touched briefly in the fact that the changing composition of the textile workforce, particularly the big increase in the black population, has had an important effect on the ability to organize textile workers, and I think that probably will continue to be a factor, and so that, over time, the probability is that a larger proportion of the textile workforce will be organized. So much for that point.
Another point is I've always had in the back of my mind a feeling that
something is wrong about the way in which the whole process of workers'
getting organized operates in the United States. The structure of
organizing was pretty well
Does the employer know who's voting for and who's voting against?
No, it's a secret ballot, but the employer and his agents try to find
out—and generally do find out—how the workers feel, how each worker
feels. So, even though it's supposed to be a secret ballot, in a
democratic process, the will of the majority is effectively frustrated
by employer coercion, even though the law prohibits employer coercion.
The fact is, that that's the prevailing practice. So that, obviously, is
something drastically wrong. But the second thing that's drastically
wrong is, even if you assume that the people who voted in response to
coercion, even if you assume they don't want a union, therefore, there
is a majority that doesn't want a union, what about the minority, what
about the rights of the minority? It seems to me if thirty, forty,
whatever percent of the workforce wants a
I think that exhausts my thoughts for today.
I thought of one other question, if you don't mind. What kind of reception have union organizers got? I know it probably varies, and it's been fairly hostile from place to place, but could you be any more specific on that?
From whom?
From the textile companies.
Oh, the textile companies? I would say textile companies have been over on the extreme end of the antiunion, hostile companies. As I said earlier, managers, and people generally, feel that unions are something they don't want right now, but textile employers feel much more rabidly about it. They not only don't want it but they are willing to fight to their last dollar to keep it out. And they're willing to close plants more readily than most other industries. It's a matter of pride, it's a matter of personal dignity, almost, to keep the union out. So there is a variety of approaches that employers have taken. Some, of course, have used naked violence. Many have. But others have developed very sophisticated techniques for keeping the union out. Do you want me to dwell on that further?
No. I just was wondering. I appreciate you talking to me at such length.
END OF INTERVIEW