Unions in the South; a Personal View from the Bottom Part II

After just a couple of years the UAW came to town to try to organize the air conditioner manufacturing plant. It wasn't that hard for them really, the plant management had made it easy by holding pay to a bare minimum and generally treating their employees with disdain at every opportunity. Assembly line work is often tedius and nerve wracking, the smallest problem could lead to the whole line getting backed up. This particular plant's management took the approach of simply doing a lot of yelling at people and pushing them to work through breaks, lunch, and dinner to meet production line quotas.

The UAW organizers promised them better wages, better working conditions, and a sense of self-respect that the company failed to believe was necessary. After a long and painful campaign the workers finally forced the company to hold a vote amongst the employees to see if they wanted to become a union plant. Unsurprisingly, the union won an overwhelming victory and the plant became a voluntarily union plant. The state of Tennessee was a "right to work" state so even though the employees voted to allow the UAW to arbitrate labor disputes with the company on their behalf, no one was forced to join the union.

This led to a situation where some of the workers were members of the union and some were not, which led to more internal conflict amongst the workers. Most of the management within the plant never joined the union but some 80% of the hourly workers on the floor wound up dues-paying members of the UAW. Naturally, the first step after the plant organized was to negotiate wage rates for the employees under a collective bargaining agreement. Meetings with the corporate management and the UAW representatives soon bogged down in angry recriminations back and forth and it wasn't very long before the UAW was threatening a strike.

At some point in the negotiations the newly organized workers took a vote over whether to accept the extremely modest wage increase that the owners were offering. Unsurprisingly, they voted not to accept ownership's offer and voted to go on strike. A strike was something completely new for the workers and the local management of the plant. No one knew quite what to expect as the union representatives explained the new ground rules to the striking workers.

The workers were officially exempted from being on the premises of the plant itself. They could walk a picket line across the road from the plant entrance but they couldn't be on the plant property at any point without facing trespassing charges and the plant managment had made it plain that they meant to strictly enforce this rule. Furthermore, any employees arrested for trespassing would also face immediate termination along with criminal prosecution for trespassing.

It was a stacked deck against the union and the UAW officials knew it. They urged caution and peaceful picketing as they told the workers that the plant owners were looking for any reason to forcibly break the strike. This was all well and good until the plant ownership took out large ads in the local newspaper offering permanent jobs for anyone that would come across the picket lines, regardless if they were employees when the strike started.

There were a couple of uneasy days at the start as the workers angrily eyed the local managment coming in and out of the plant but for the most part all the employees; union and non-union stuck together and respected the picket line. The union members were receiving 1/3 pay directly from the UAW coffers, which took some of the sting out of not being able to work. The non-union members weren't eligible of course as they hadn't paid any dues into the strike fund of the UAW.

This was to be the rock that the strike foundered upon in just a short period. The local management managed to run a skeleton crew of workers to keep producing some product but it wasn't enough to meet their demand and everyone knew it. Within a couple of weeks the non-union member employees began to cross the picket line and go back to work. It was just a trickle of them at first but it wasn't too long before most of the non-union employees were back at work full time. This caused quite a bit of anger amongst the workers. It was a small community to start with so most everyone knew everyone else. Brothers who were in the union were soon in angry confrontations with brothers who were crossing the picket lines. Cousins, Uncles, and Aunts were soon turning on each other in very open, angry unforgiving terms.

Whole families divided into union and non-union branches and more than one family devolved into open violence against each other over this small strike in the middle of nowhere. Simmering anger on all sides soon boiled over as the plant started hiring replacement workers for those that refused to return to work. Finally, one Tuesday morning all the frustration boiled over in a wave of violent anger that turned most of the town into protagonists on one side or the other.

Some of the picketting workers blocked a carload of replacement workers trying to come in the main gate. Angry words were exchanged and the driver of the car bumped into some of the strikers as he tried to force his way through the suddenly furious crowd. Rocks were thrown, the windshield of the car broken out and the unlucky "scabs" were dragged from the car and invited to walk home. Someone managed to show enough sense to avoid a physical mauling of the unlucky strikebreakers but as anger built even higher, the management of the plant announced over a loudspeaker that the whole incident was being filmed and that they were going to press charges against everyone who had stopped the car in the first place.

This announcement served as an accelerant to a runaway fire of anger in the strikers. The building was pelted with rocks from the side of the road and the smashed up car was turned upside down in a ditch across the street and set on fire. It was quite a scene for most of the afternoon with the sheriffs department arresting people who the plant management claimed had attacked and destroyed private property.

It was an ugly scene but it got uglier when plant management produced video to show to local law enforcement who came to try to calm the situation down. Faced with video evidence of the incident, local law enforcement officers were compelled to arrest the ringleaders for trespassing and assault.