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

The strike at the air conditioner plant lasted for quite some time. It was eventually settled for a dollar amount wage increase very close to the original offer the company put forth. The plant was able to stay in production the whole time the strike was going on. Upon settlement of the strike many of the workers who had been involved in problems outside the gate were immediately and permanently terminated from their job. The union hung on in the plant, but just barely. I doubt that there is a 30% participation in the plant with the exception of the skilled trades that do the maintenance at the plant. As far as I know, they have never had another strike.

Shortly after the strike was settled, I went to work in the sewing notions plant that was just down the road from the air conditioning plant. This plant was Scovill Manufacturing. Scovill was originally from Waterbury, Connecticut. They had been in the area longer than either of the other two plants and had a pretty decent reputation for how they treated their people that worked there. There were two basic divisions within the plant, manufacturing and packaging/shipping. As I briefly touched on before, Scovill made sewing notions, basically anything that could be made from a piece of wire. We made straight pins, safety pins, bra hooks, and plastic head pins from rolls of wire. There was also a plating department which plated the pins and safety pins but it was relatively small with only a few people working in it.

I want to work at the plant for 5.80 an hour, which was 1.30 an hour more than I had been making working retail in a department store. I had worked at the department store since I was a sophomore in high school and was offered a management training program but I didn't really want to work retail to begin with; even though it was good experience and I learned a lot from my time there. Besides.... I needed all the money I could get as I was newly married and just learning the struggle of paying bills and trying to stay afloat without a good skillset or a degree.

My first job at the plant, was as an operator on a pin line. The pin lines were rows of machines that took a reel of wire and converted it at high speed into a pin. Wire went in one end of the machine and pins came out the other and that was the extent of my knowledge of the process that first night (I was working second shift 2-10 PM). My first night was quite possibly the worst job experience I ever had. Two hours in, I seriously considered walking out; it was that bad. I was, for the first time in my life, completely unable to keep up. I was used to excelling at whatever I took up but I couldn't even keep up with everything I was supposed to do. I went from fearing that they would soon fire me to hoping that they would in just a couple of hours.

The "Pin Room" where I worked was a very large floor space consisting of 12 rows of pin machines. The walls were covered with soundproofing board that was strangely covered in what looked like wire "arrows" shot into it. The inside of the walls were literally covered in these projections, looking like the coat of a huge porcupine turned inside out. The "arrows" were roughly 4-6 inches long and were brass, copper, and steel. They were actually "cutoffs" which was what the last row of machines produced. A "cutoff" was a straightened piece of wire with a very sharp point on one end. They were the raw material which was later bent and shaped into a safety pin. The first step in that process was a wire straightening and cutoff machine that cut them all to a specified length and then ran them through a grinding wheel that sharpened the end. The cutoff machines, like everything else there, ran at an extremely high rate of speed. They were literally a blur of motion pulling the wire in, cutting it to length and sharpening it before spitting it into a wooden box of just the right length. A cutoff machine could produce approximately 50 pounds of cutoffs in an hour.

The "arrows'' were cutoffs that the operator used to check for straightness. The operator would catch five or so in his hand and roll them between the fingers to see if they "wobbled". He would then look at the points with a magnifying eye loop, checking them for sharpness and shape of the point. Different pins had different chamfers on the point so he had to make sure the rapidly spinning grinding wheels were adjusted correctly. After inspection, he would dump the cutoffs back in the box; or.... he would simply launch them by bending the point back and flipping them at the soundproof walls at high speed where they would bury up in the soundproofing board. These were the porcupine projections all around the pin room.