Unions in the South; a View from the Bottom Part VI

Now, almost forty years later I can still feel the sting of that reversal. I was making almost 12 dollars an hour at Scovill when that plant closed. It was hard, dangerous, dirty work but it paid well enough and I had a sense of pride in what I did. I was good at setting up pin machines and I was one of the few people around who was. People who have never worked a production job like that have no idea how hard it can be. It was hot in the pin room all the time, usually 80 degrees or so even at night. You were constantly coated with grease, lubricating oil, and the ever present rock dust from the sharpening wheels. At least once a week I managed to run a pin deeply into my hand or finger trying to unjam a machine. It wasn't unusual to run one of the stainless plastic head pins all the way through your hand and the puncture wounds they left always got infected from the oil and grease on the pins. I still have numerous scars on my hands from losing parts of knuckles working the heavy die holders in and out around the sharp edged of the slides they were mounted in.

A lot of the senior people at Scovill never found another job. The markets was terrible at the time and nobody really wanted to hire people who had been mixed up in a union dispute. I soon found that everyone who had worked at Scovill was suspected of being a union organizer, even though at least half the plant had voted against a union. It pretty much ruled out your ability to go to work in any of the other plants in town. The air conditioning plant had steadily weeded out most of its union population and they weren't going to take a chance on hiring someone who might help reverse that situation. The wire manufacturer simply never hired anyone with the faintest tinge of union about them.

I wound up having to sell most of what I owned at a loss and move back in with my parents for a while when I ran so low of money that I couldn't afford a weekly motel bill. Still, my troubles were nothing compared to most. Reed never found another job of any support at all. He worked for the county running heavy equipment at the dump part time for a while but he was simply physically unable to crawl up in a bulldozer cab after a short while. His wind was always terrible at Scovill as he could hardly catch his breath after walking upstairs to the lunch room.

He died less than two years later, just before the bank foreclosed on his home that he had built with his own two hands some twenty years before. Someone told me that he wife died shortly afterwards in the county run home for the elderly. It was the last hurrah for the UAW in Fayetteville. I don't remember even hearing of them trying to organize any of the small plants that rotated through there for the next 30 years.

I harrassed an electrical contractor until he hired me as an electrician's helper a few weeks after the plant closed. He paid me 3.50 an hour to start and put me to work cleaning the fall-in dirt out of a 10 foot deep primary ditch in the middle of August for 2 days to see if I would quit or not. The ditch was bad, but it was nothing compared to that first night in the pin room. At least I knew what I was supposed to be doing in the ditch.

In a strange way, I owe my career since Scovill to the UAW. I don't know what would have happened if Scovill hadn't shut down when it did. I was going to tech school for electronics but I would have had to take a considerable pay cut to go to work for an electronics firm as well, and I simply couldn't afford to do that without swallowing my pride and starting over. Unfortunately, a lot of people who worked there weren't able to start over. I doubt they see anything at all in the way of a positive result of their attempt to organize Scovill.