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 generally win it. So, even though workers may retain their
union, they have come to realize that, in the particular environment
that they live, their unions don't have the power that they thought they
had, and that they used to have. So, while some fourteen-fifteen million
workers are still organized, in the basic industries, they have
gradually lost effective power.
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
powerlessness and dependancy that textile workers tend to feel. That
brings us to the final actor in this drama, the Union. What have been
the factors that influenced the Union's ability to succeed in
organizing, aside from what we've been talking about, namely, the people
involved. The Union, like any union, is dependant upon its ability to
organize to exist as a force in the community. The money that it needs
to pay its employees is garnered from its organized members. So it's
kind of a vicious circle. If you can't organize, you can't have much
money to hire organizers. The Federation—the AFL-CIO, and the Industrial
Union Department, the national federations have done what they could to
assist textile unions to organize. There've been a number of efforts
stimulated by national programs—the Operation Dixie in the early postwar
period, the J.P.Stevens campaign which was more than just the Textile
Workers Union campaign, there was one other major one—well, in the '30s,
the 1934 Textile Strike. They were all nationally-supported efforts to
organize textile workers, and they all suffered from the fact that
there's an inadequacy of resources on the part of organized labor to
deal with the tremendous problems that exist among the unorganized
workers of the country. The resources available to the Textile Union,
and to the AFL-CIO, were very small, in comparison with the task
involved. It's most graphically indicated by the 1934 Strike, I don't
know if you have any familiarity with it.