Organized labor finds some success in the South
Perkel notes some of organized labor's successes in the South, including its campaign to pressure the federal government to pass labor-friendly legislation and forcing progress on worker health and safety.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with George Perkel, May 27, 1986. Interview H-0281. 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
- PATRICIA RAUB:
-
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.
- GEORGE PERKEL:
-
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—
over the efforts that I've
expended, is that we were able to use the government quite effectively
in improving the lot of textile workers, in the ways that
I've just mentioned.
- PATRICIA RAUB:
-
Well, given the situation you were working against, that certainly does
seem like that's something to be proud of.
- GEORGE PERKEL:
-
Yes, I am proud of that. That has given me a great deal of
satisfaction.
