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

It took me a few nights in the pin room to get to the point where I wasn't completely overwhelmed. It took me several months to get to where I could keep a row of machines running and make the minor adjustments necessary to produce acceptable pins. It was mentally as well as physically exhausting. You were always doing one thing and keeping a close eye on two more. From the time I clocked it at night until I left it was an endless rush and constant pressure situation to keep things running. One little oversight or wrong adjustment and you were looking at literally hours of setup time to get back in operation. The operators were the lowest paid people on the floor and had the most demanding job. By the time I learned to be a good Operator I was also a pretty good Jobsetter.

The Jobsetter's job was to set the machines up and repair them when they broke down. The pin machines were ancient pieces of equipment. They had been invented in the early 1900's at the dawn of the industrial age with very little improvement or refinement since. Many of them still had foot trestles on them that had originally been the source of power needed to make them work. A foot trestle with a gearbox and a huge flywheel had been the original means of powering the machines. At some point, the foot trestles had been replaced by an electric motor that ran a belt system to turn the main flywheel and all the associated cams. This was also the source of most of our problems in the pin room.

Turning the huge flywheel by hand was how you set the machine up and adjusted the dies after replacing any of the main drive parts. This made everything function at a leisurely pace and the machines worked very well at a slow RPM. However, when you hit the start button on the electric motor it almost instantly spun up to a speed where the main dies were opening and closing so fast that you couldn't see them. Instead of a pinhead being pressed on the end of the wire every second it was pressing 10 or 15 a second depending on the type of pin and wire. Small imperfections in the wire straightening system or a tiny amount of wear on the back side of the dies that were slamming together with great force would make for large problems. The trick was to constantly make tiny adjustments to make up for wear, but until one understood how the whole process worked, it was very hard to know what or how much to adjust something.

This was all well before the age of variable speed drives and DC motors were expensive to run and to buy. Scovill had at some point opted to run the machines as fast as physics would allow and then rebuild them instead of trying to find an optimal speed that would produce pins without destroying the machine. The overwhelming emphasis on maximum production that management pushed, led to all manner of patchwork machining with shims, brass bushings, and jury rigged parts to keep things running and we were never able to completely rebuild a machine. Everything was based on getting things back running as quick as possible instead of any appreciation of long term efficiency.

Reed was something of a mechanical genius and it was his modifications to the original designs that kept the machines running at all. He was also one of the best people I ever worked for. He was completely and totally honest, had no arrogance that I could detect and was also endlessly patient with people. If you put forth effort, Reed would support you completely. I liked him immediately. It wasn't too long before I was able to understand his hand signal teaching very well. In some ways Reed could communicate more completely in the din of the pin room than he could elsewhere. I remember trying to drag information out of him at dinner and he would always be very slow to respond; whereas any hand signal question in the pin room was met with an immediate and emphatic response. It was as if he had spent so much time with the machines in the pin room that he thought better with that deafening noise all around him.

The pin room always had a huge turnover of people. Before long, I got a chance to move to first shift as a jobsetter as I was by then one of the better jobsetters on night shift. I didn't last long on day shift as the lead man was something of a prima-donna character and not very knowledgeable to boot. Within a week, I asked for a transfer back to nights to work with Reed and I stayed there the whole time I worked at Scovill. Whenever I think of Scovill today, I think of Reed patiently showing me how to grind a set of dies or adjust a grinding wheel just right to get the chamfer correct on a pin. I can almost smell the Bull of the Woods chew he always had in his mouth as he worked and see the dexterior genius of his meaty fingers delicately adjusting a shimmed die. He had such an exquisite touch with minor adjustments and miniscule fitting of unmatched parts that it was almost magical to watch him set up a machine. I became a very good jobsetter but was never in the same class as Reed and I knew it.

One of the first things I learned from working with Reed was that I didn't want to wind up a jobsetter in Scovill's pin room 25 years down the road. His health was fading from breathing the constant coating of rock dust that came from the sharpening system and ingesting solvents used in the parts cleaning process. In the 2 years I worked there, I watched him steadily go downhill with his health. Six months into my job as Scovill I enrolled in tech school taking electronics. I wanted to take electrical studies and be an electrician but the registrars at the school assured me there was a better future in electronics.

My normal routine during that time was to get up at 6 AM in order to drive the forty miles to tech school and get there by 8. I took classes until 1 in the afternoon and then drove the 35 miles north to Scovill. My shift soon turned into a 2-12 shift so that I was working 10 hours a day as I need the overtime to pay for my school. After work I drove 20 miles to my small trailer I was making payments on and dived into a couple of hours of homework from school. I seldom made it to bed before 230 or 300 in the morning. By Friday I was hanging my head out the window of my truck to stay awake driving from school to work and back home. The weekends were for catching up on sleep and I seldom did much of anything else except occasionally help my dad with work around their farm. It was a hard life, but one that I had created when I got married two days out of high school and went into debt for vehicles, property, and a trailer. I learned a lot of lessons very quickly about credit and the dedication it takes to pull yourself out of a financial hole compared to the relative ease of getting into one.

It was about this time that my first personal experience with a union occurred. One of the plating room guys told me at dinner one night that they were having an employee's meeting the next afternoon right before work at one of the pool halls downtown. When I asked what kind of meeting he just looked around kind of furtively and suggested that I should come if I was interested in improving things at the plant. I asked Reed about it soon after and he told me to be careful about who I hung around with from work. Something about the way he said it let me know it was union talk.

I had heard it before during my time there. There was always talk of improving benefits and pay and several unions were mentioned as being interested in organizing the plant employees. I also knew that the management at the plant was dead set against any kind of union and had been known to have sudden cutbacks in force whenever such talk came up. These cutbacks always included the people most heavily involved in the union talk and they were seldom called back later when the cutback ended. I simply couldn't afford to lose my job there as I was already stretched as thin as possible in several different ways.

I didn't go to that meeting or any other meetings with the union organizers. I did meet one of the UAW representatives one night after work when he was handing out literature outside the gate at the plant. He was promising big raises, better working conditions, and better benefits all at the same time. I thought that was a lot to promise from someone who actually had no official involvement in the company to start with but just listened without comment to his little speech.

A couple of weeks after the big push to organize the plant was underway the plant manager called a meeting of the whole plant right after dinner one night. This had never happened before and everyone knew what it was about; the union organizers were publicly outside the gates handing out literature and making speeches every day when we came in and every night when we left. I was of the opinion at the time that my working conditions and my wages were a matter of agreement between me and the people I worked for at Scovill. I didn't see where anyone else had any business being involved in that process. It was that simple and direct in my mind at the time. I didn't consider that we didn't really have much of a voice in working conditions or wages, that wages were held where they were because there was more labor available than demand for it. I just felt like I had the choice to work there for that wage or not. The alternative was bankruptcy and worse than that; failure. I was very determined to make it on my own and had been since I left my father's house at 18.

The plant manager didn't talk for long. He had been a worker in the plant at one time who had worked his way up to plant manager and he was a straight talker. He told us that the reason Scovill had moved to Tennessee was to get away from unions in Connecticut. He explained that our production numbers weren't as high as the company wanted and that if we voted a union in they would simply close the plant and move somewhere else. There weren't any questions after this little speech but there was a lot of grumbling about it in the days that followed.

The union supporters told everyone that it was illegal for Scovill to close the plant over a union vote. The UAW people had told them that the UAW would hire lawyers and fight such a move in court; that it was strictly illegal to close a plant under such conditions. This didn't seem logical to me but I was by no means an expert on law, whether having anything to do with unions or otherwise. I was simply a young jobsetter making a pretty decent wage and trying to improve my education at the same time.

I had already decided not to vote for the union before the plant manager's speech. I made that decision more based upon the people I knew pushing for the union vs those that were not in favor of it. I liked and respected more people that were not for the union than those who were. Reed was not for a union and that was really enough for me. He didn't trust some of the people within the plant who were working the hardest for the union to come in. I honestly don't think he or I or anyone else who voted against the union did so on much of any type of merit beside that basic judgment. We didn't know what the union could or would do but we knew how it had turned out at Amana and we knew some people we didn't trust were pushing for it from within.

When the vote was held, we all voted at the plant after dinner that night. Between the three shifts working at that time there were almost 350 people employed at Scovill in Fayetteville, Tennessee. We voted the union down by six votes. It was much closer than I would have suspected from talking to people within the plant. I later found out that most of the packaging/shipping department was for the union. They were amazed that anyone voted against it.

When the public announcement that the vote had failed was posted on the bulletin board next to the timeclock the next night I breathed a sigh of relief. I was more worried about the plant closing than anything else but I also knew how tight a spot it would put me in if it did. Talk around the plant that night was mixed between those glad it was over and those who were angry about the way it turned out. I was a little surprised how angry and certain some people were that something had been rigged in the voting system. I thought they were just being sore losers about it.

A couple of days later there was a new announcement on the bulletin board. Someone within the US Department of Labor had determined that there was enough evidence available to suggest that there might have been a problem with the way the vote was conducted to justify having another mandatory vote. This time, the Department of Labor and the UAW would be allowed to have observers at the election itself. A lot of people in the plant were very happy that night. I felt like there seemed to be something not quite above board going on, but couldn't determine which side was not playing by the rules. The whole thing made me uneasy again and all my fears about the plant closing began to come back to the surface.

The next night when I went in to work there was another notice on the bulletin board. Several people were quietly reading it as I clocked in and I thought it must be important judging by the complete lack of chatter between them. It was a notice from Scovill's Corporate office in Connecticut. It said that due to dropping production at our plant and market situations out of their control they had determined to close the plant in Fayetteville effective 3 weeks from that date. There was a schedule of amounts of severence pay per year of service that would be enclosed in our last check and a referral to the Tennessee Department of Unemployment also attached. It was all very matter of fact and final. No mention was made of a union vote.

There was a lot of talk around the plant that night about lawsuits, judges, and injunctions that the UAW was going to put in place to stop the plant from closing. As it turned out, it was just a lot of talk. The UAW organizers left town the next day and some 350 people lost their jobs during a downturn where every other major employer in the county was in the process of cutting back as well. Scovill's closing crashed the whole local economy for quite some time afterwards. The domino effect of losing that many jobs that paid a good wage permeated every industry in town in the next 6 months to a year.