THE STONEWALL AT STEVENS

...A dozen governors or state legislatures have supported boycott resolutions, some after hearing former workers at the textile giant...

...And in the process the company has lent its name to the lexicon of a revised labor movement that now sees renewed promise of a breakthrough in the Sunbelt states...

...They let me go...

...When it came loose I just fell down on those $1 March 1978:196 rollers and caught my hand . . . that's when I lost 'era (the fingers).:' He may have been lucky...

...Older brown lung victims and younger workers fired because of union activity or disabling accidents have taken to the circuit .that once was the turf of striking farmworkers...

...Stevens knows nothing about compensation, rehabilitation, concern...

...Anyone familiar with .the social anthropology of the South knows of the one-company-town syndrome, and the impact which it has in the cultural and social life of the community, logical ripple-like effects of economic and political dominance...

...They told me they didn't need me...

...Court of Appeals, finding Stevens in contempt for continued labor violations and calling it the most notorious scofflaw in the field of labor law...

...Stevens Company that dominates the life of the community, but 19-year-old Richard has already had a career at the mill, and is considered unemployable...

...One labor editorialist made this analogy: "If we enforced the murder statutes the way we enforce the Wagner Act, the dead would pile up in the s t r e e t s . . . and killers would be instructed, patiently, to please go out there and try not to kill again...

...activity...

...That decision followed an earlier one by the Board .to seek a nationwide injunction against Stevens to force the giant firm "to stop interfering with the rights of workers to organize-andto bargain collectively under terms of the National Labor Relations Act...

...The looms are all that count, the machinery," says Mildred Whitley, who worked for Stevens for 26 years until she requested a lighter job after a mastectomy operation...

...Yet within its inventory, Stevens has no categories for the health and safety of its workers, or their well-being...

...Now, however, the long period of underemployment and unemployment that has locked most of ~he industrial states into a deadly economic embrace for the past decade is being felt even in the Sunbelt, where black working people reflect the national averages of joblessness...

...Renaissance" cities such as New Orleans and Atlanta are Potemkin Villages of the New South, with an exterior of flashy superdomes and Hyatt Houselike complexes, while literally thousands of unemployed black youths roam streets rarely seen by out-of-town visitors to conventions and to sporting events...

...LABOR IN THE SOUTH THE STONEISH H T STEVENS Richard Gregory is a "nice-looking boy" who occupies most of his days in front of one of the drugstores in Roanoke Rapids, a North Carolina town of some 13,000 people...

...Steelworkers and other union members have succeeded in removing many of the product lines from department stores in Pittsburgh and other cities...

...But the influx of industrial union members into the political life of a conservative Southern state is bound to have impact on the Atlantic coastline...

...The Carter administration has endorsed the legislation, already passed by the House and up for consideration in the Senate this month...

...He had been working on the machine only about a week when the accident took place...

...They too go on the "heap...

...If union organizers are seen by conservatives behind the billboards of textile and manufacturing towns throughout the Sunbelt, then others are not awaRing any favorable climate that reform of the Wagner Act might bring to organizing, including a speeding up the process of contesting the results of representation elections...

...Princeton University students gathered 2,000 signatures on a petition asking the university to stop buying Stevens products...

...The boycott may make a dent in the Stevens profit line, but as with other consumer actions it is more likely to dramatize the plight of its adversaries and gain some action in the legislative sector...

...This is the ultimate hope for Stevens workers, organized and unorganized, + and for hundreds of thousands of other white and blue collar workers in the Sunbelt economy who have little prospect of unionism today...

...The reform legislation would provide both union and employer access to full records prior to union representation elections, a mandatory injunction preventing firing of employees during an organizing effort, backpay for those discharged because of union activity and new rules and judicial review procedures which will not mean indefinite delays following representation elections...

...Tenneco, a multi-million-dollar Houston-based conglomerate which owns the yard, is no less committed to discouraging unions than J. P. Stevens...

...Other J. p. Stevens workers have "given their all" to the textile giant, experienced other mishaps or contracted the teadly brown lung disease from breathing lint and cotton dust...

...Stevens has become somewhat of an anachronism to the New South, even an embarrassment to some Southern politicians who have participated in the cultural and social change that came with black political emergence...

...You soon see why...

...This had followed a ruling by the U.S...

...And the National Labor Relations Board and a series of federal courts appear to agree, making rulings that would seemingly have demolished any other company seeking to operate outside of the .law when dealing with collective bargaining...

...J. P. Stevens becomes a classic part of this structure, and it's no accident that its plants are located in some of the last bastions of Dixiecrat ideology, particularly the Carolinas...

...They told me to go ask for welfare and laid me off," she told a Senate Subcommittee investigating Stevens's continued violations of the Labor Act, more than any other company in American labor relations history...

...There is work at most of the seven local plants of the J.P...

...Textile mills need willing hands, but not those without fingers...

...The contempt which Stevens has exhibited to both its employees and the labor law which it has so easily flaunted has at least served as a symbolic rallying point for a fightback campaign...

...For instance, according .to the NLRB, there has been a 900-percent increase since 1947 in unfair labor practice cases that get all the way to the five-member board...

...With Cesar Chavez having called off the eight-year-old boycott against table grapes, the consumer boycott organized by the Amalgamated against Stevens now becomes a focal point of protest...

...The company uses every dirty trick in the book to stop its employees from choosing or joining a union and, as a federal appeals court found, "it interfered with, restrained and coerced its employees.., flagrantly, cynically and unlawfully...

...RUSSELL W. GIBBONS (Russell W. Gibbons is a labor editor and writer based in Pittsburgh...

...They fire your whole family...

...The Stevens case with the Labor Relations Act has demonstrated that repeated violations mean only that a company fighting unionism has a legal staff familiar with loopholes, but to AFL-CIO lobbyists it has been the best of defense exhibits in its case to toughen the legal penalifies against employers who thwart union drives as a matter of policy...

...Each year more than 15,000 unfair labor practice charges are filed, and employers appear to have as muoh respect for the law as does any practicing hooker in a big city convention and tourist district...

...Bad faith" negotiating decisions are commonplace in the suits and counter-suits brought in post-election court tests, but last December an administrative judge of the NLR~B summed up the company's approach to negotiations with its employees at Roanoke Rapids as having " . . . all the tractabilitY and open-mindedness of Sherman at the outskirts of Atlanta...

...The 3,500 workers at the Stevens mills in Roanoke Rapids voted for the Amalgamated Clothing and Tex.tile Workers Union of America almost four years ago---and are still unable to obtain a contract with the company...

...The same employers usually cheat on federal wage and hour standards the same as they scofflaw the Wagner Act...

...The metaphoric assault can he forgiven with the experiences of hundreds of union organizers in the South in recent decades, who have secured signatures on union cards in an atmosphere resembling a political underground, taken them to representatives of a federal agency who supervised a representation election, and then observed as corporate lawyers chaUenged the result, many times effectively denying union contracts for years after the vote...

...In February at the huge shipbuilding facility at Newport News, Virginia, the Steelworkers won an election which provides representation rights for more than 19,000 shipyard workers, defeating a company union that had been entrenched for more than 30 years...

...Through the same defiance of the law, low-wage factories with sweatshop conditions continue to exist, largely in Southern states where there is little, if any, state industrial accident compensation or unemployment ben...

...It is a billion-dollar, multinational corporation with a palatial-skyscraper headquarters in New York City and a string of more than 80 plants and some 45,000 employees, making it the second biggest name in textiles in the United States...

...In the cheering section are other Sou+thern employers, without high-priced legal counsel, who see Stevens as the bulwark against the worker share of 'the economic pie that they have been consuming in the developing Sunbelt states...

...In an unusual alliance of the moderate and "respectable" Right with the fringe operators and neo-conservatives who constitute the "New Right," conservative opposition to the reform bill suggests the alarm which the Sunbelt and old-line business coalitions see in revamping the act...

...Sheets, towels, carpets, draperies, blankets and table linens that carry the J. P. Stevens name or known retail brand names have been the object of consumer-oriented campaigns...

...Labor lobbyists maintain that the Labor Reform bill backed by file Carter administration will do litttle more than translate into reality the promise of the Wagner Act now on the books, contending that the Act is today more openly flouted than any other existing piece of federal legislation...

...i just fell down on those rollers and caught my hand," he explains, "and lost my fingers...

...I was pullin' the carpet...

...All of this means little to Richard Gregory, on the scrap heap in a textile town at 19...

...accusing finger at a callous and indifferent employer--for J.P...

...31 March 1978:198...

...It's simple economics," says a Virginia "labor consultant" who has 'Stevens as a client: "They figure that it is cheaper in both the short run and the long run to retain people like myself, contest, file appeals and tie everything up in the bureaucracy of a toothless labor law--than in accepting the union, raising the wage and benefit rate and having to establish pensions and contributions to compensation and disability funds...

...The Washington Post, which pays scant attention to labor affairs unless they involve strikes or politics, called it "a stunning victory" and a "battle of powerful organizations with potentially far-reaching implications for the labor movement in Virginia, the Sonth and the nation...

...J. P. Stevens is not a strug,oling employer, fighting for its economic existence...

...What the Senate does with Labor Law Reform could set a threshold environment for a new union thrust in the New South, and that in itself could be the beginning of a fundamentally different kind of a ~onth...

...This is the "toothless labor law" of the J. P. Stevens counsel--a maze of administrative edicts and rulings which function through political appointees, many of them left over from the Eisenhower years and with fresh Nixon attachments, few of whom are even philosophically committed to the concept of collective bargaining...

...In the past 16 years, charges have better than doubled to 34,203 annually...

...efits...

...It goes beyond the traditional rhetoric of the union organizer who points an...

...For J. P. Stevens has become the cause c~l~bre of the push in Congress [or reform of the 42-year-old National Labor Relations Act, still known to old Washington hands as the Wagner Act...

...Stevens, says the AFL-CIO, is the leading labor law violator in the nation...

...Another worker who testified before a NLRB hearing, and as a result lost her job, declared that "Stevens doesn't just fire you...

...Richard holds up his right hand, showing only the slighte evidence of stumps for four fingers and thumb...

...A union-community services dinner in San Francisco recently proceeded only after waiters removed Stevens tablecloths...

...It slapped over...