Taking a Stand in Dixie

...many of them still drive to and from their mountain homes daily...

...Publicity far greater than labor protests in the southern states ever had before has lit up what was being done in a corner...

...Mainly for these reasons it is less bold than the National Textile Workers' Union which is guiding the strikes in North Carolina, centering in the Loray mill (owned by northern capital...

...No southern state forbids night work for women, and the eleven-hour day and twelve-hour night are common...

...This was that the poor whites of the South, unlike labor elsewhere, never knew when they were put upon...

...In addition, $100,000,000 has been invested in rayon plants in the South—mostly in Virginia, Tennessee and West Virginia—within the last few years...

...Of fifteen Georgia mills reporting in 1926, six 128 THE COMMONWEAL June 5, 1929 worked eleven hours five days and five hours on Saturday, and six of forty-seven reporting in North Carolina did the same...

...Editors of southern textile trade papers who have in the past been nefariously or, at best blindly, partizan, are now intimating that employers in the stretch-out system have pushed their workers too hard, and are in danger of killing the goose that laid the golden egg...

...So from this time on in the textile South there will be more and more concessions by employers...

...Employers are now paying the price of thoughtlessness in the method of instituting the scheme, and of unfairness in distribution of the benefits...

...Workers living in the general community will not be so stall-fed, and will own their, houses and develop other ties to hold them in one place...

...North Carolina, the leading southern state, has 5,000 more operatives than Massachusetts, the leading New England state, and products worth $25,000,000 more...

...The United Textile Workers are sending southern men as organizers among the South Carolina strikers, who previously have had no outside leadership...

...Consequently, it costs less to manufacture cotton in the South than in the North...

...The striking workers in Tennessee have joined the United Textile Workers to the number of 3,500...

...Protests from eastern manufacturers were confined to attempts to lower labor standards in New England...

...The poor whites in the mills are becoming literate...

...The average earnings of the southern operative in 1927 (the latest complete figures) were $637.17 a year or $12.94 a week...

...The cotton-growing states have certainly half of the spindles in place in the United States (48 percent in 1926) and well over half the active spindles (57 percent in 1926...

...Between 1925 and 1927 the New England states lost 9,312 cotton mill operatives, and the South gained 34,416...

...The latest government figures (for 1927, but just released in preliminary form) show that in cotton manufactures alone the cotton-growing states had 61.9 percent of the establishments of the country (59.2 in 1925) 60.2 percent of the number of wageearners (55.5 in 1925) and turned out 57.5 percent of the products in value (54.2 percent in 1925...

...The fact that important southern states voted Republican, North Carolina and Tennessee among them, has worked an emancipation of mind...

...Troops have been used in Tennessee and North Carolina, but the only violence that has occurred anywhere has been on the part of deputy sheriffs and socalled "law and order" forces...

...Nevertheless, these strikes will have been everywhere successful...

...These enmities will increase rather than diminish now that individuals of the two groups are bedfellows...

...Southern children fourteen and over may, with a minor exception in North Carolina, work the hours of adults...

...Now that the seesaw of competition between northern and southern mills has been tipped in favor of the South, and it is demonstrated that this is to be the predominant seat of the industry, obstacles to national recognition of the submerged state of the southern operative are removed...

...this is $6.73 per spindle, of which $4.53 is attributable to saving in labor...

...It was introduced by northern employers who have entered the South in the last half-decade...

...They are the poor whites, ejected by slavery from economic participation...

...The steel strike of 1919-1920 was lost, but public opinion won many of the workers' demands...

...Massachusetts, the New England state hardest hit by the southward migration, permits only forty-eight hours a week and no night work for women...

...Thus their thinking is negative, not positive...

...Southerners aware of the low labor standards prevailing in the section, who have been trying for years to get the facts out, now find valuable allies...

...Main and Gunby, the southern mill saved 33 percent in taxes, the same in power, and 25 percent in maintenance...

...The southern textile industry—in cotton and rayon, in spinning, weaving, knitting and finishing—has grown astonishingly in the last few years because of both expansion from within and migration of factories from the North...

...The progressive decay of the cotton manufacturing industry in New England and the middle states, and the migration of mills to the South, is principally due to low wages and long hours below the Potomac...

...Fewer company-owned vilJune 5, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 129 lages will be built...

...Those in the Carolinas have for the most part been in the mills for several generations, and a larger proportion than in Tennessee come from the lowlands...

...The likelihood is that when the smoke clears a large local of the United Textile Workers will be found at Elizabethton, with defeats elsewhere...

...This is not the first attempt at organization of the southern factory hands...

...Northern and southern managements within the South will not be able to work together in presenting a united front against labor and against public opinion...

...The strikes are an outburst of emotion, and not a result of planning...

...There are some fifteen thousand of them on strike now in Tennessee and the Carolinas, and those in South Carolina came out in a leaderless protest...

...Those in the rayon plants of Elizabethton are working in factories for the first time...

...If the southern mill maintains a companyowned village, the saving is still 14 percent...

...Formerly the southern mill man, with great local influence over press and pulpit and politics, entered no campaign for labor improvement...

...This union has several advantages—long, but sad, experience in the South...

...The twelve-hour day and seven-day week, formerly defended with confidence on every ground, were doomed through publicity...

...Workers in the rayon mills at Elizabethton, Tennessee, want a few dollars a week more, and those at Gastonia, North Carolina, besides abolition of the stretch-out scheme, are ostensibly asking for a minimum wage of $20.00 per week, but strikers in South Carolina make no protest against rates or hours...

...Competition for the most skilled and steady labor will be brisk, and the proportion of "floating" workers, which has been a bar to unionism, will diminish...

...North Carolina has just passed an excellent workmen's compensation act...

...To such students and friends of southern industry a little epoch was marked by the report of the South Carolina legislative committee, albeit the chairman is the president of the State Federation of Labor, to the effect that the true cause of the strikes is overwork and underpay of the people...

...It is a method of speeding up work by requiring weavers to operate more looms—in an extreme case 124 instead of eighteen as a few years before...

...Everyone allows that this policy was inaugurated without tact...

...Overproduction is already calling up a demand on the part of the employers for abolition of one of the abuses of the industry, night work...

...in the latter year (after which almost complete subsidence of unionism followed) there were about 9,000 out, almost as many as at present- The strikes which have taken place in the last six weeks have shown that the southern worm will turn, and this has given comfort to northern manufacturers, who begin to sing that the southern labor honeymoon is over...

...Already they have rung the knell of the grosser forms of exploitation of the southern mill operative...

...If unionism can consolidate its position, the southward trek will be noticeably slackened...

...According to the same estimate, that of Messrs...

...there was no real attempt to save the situation in the North by bettering conditions in the South, partly because many enterprisers had sails all set for flight to the South, and did not want to see waves kicked up in the new haven they had determined upon...

...The immediate occasion has been the multiple loom or, as called in the South, the stretch-out system...

...in the present strikes the United Textile Workers has been impressed with the fact that whereas fifteen years ago many more than half those who joined had to make their marks, the great majority now can write...

...All of the southern mill operatives have a rural background...

...The causes of the strikes fall under two heads— the superficial and the underlying conditions...

...They are, as has been widely advertised by southern chambers of commerce and power companies, 100 percent native born...

...Hourly rates for the four leading southern states were, in 1926 (according to samples collected by the government) in North Carolina $.28, South Carolina $.25, Georgia $.25, Alabama $.24...

...these have fostered the "welfare offensive" of the employers...

...In a typical southern mill running fifty-five hours, in 1926, the cost of manufacture was 16.8 percent less than in a Massachusetts mill running forty-eight hours...

...This was rendered possible partly through the activity of professors in state schools, which are deserting the classics for the study of industry and business, and are alert to local conditions...

...they are Protestants and religious...

...The legal limit in North Carolina and Georgia is sixty hours per week, in South Carolina is fifty-five hours and Alabama has no legal limit...

...The workers are not asking for improvements chiefly, but for the maintenance of the established practices...

...Whether or not the strikers get their demands at this moment is less important than whether unionism gets a new start in the South...

...but they are not utterly passive...

...The South consumes about 30 percent of its own cotton crop, or two-thirds of the total consumption of American cotton by American mills...

...In the present state of cotton manufacture, what with the entrance of rayon and the enormous diminution in quantity of cotton goods worn by women, coupled with the growing ability of the far East to supply its own needs, the struggle of the individual plant for survival will be active...

...This union is Communist in inspiration, and has presented demands for a forty-hour, five-day week, a minimum wage of $20.00 and, of course, recognition of the union, besides abolition of the stretch-out...

...In view of these facts it may appear inconsistent to give superior importance to low pay and long hours, and yet these have been the occasion of restiveness and will be one of the determining considerations in the history of American textiles in the next few years...

...affiliation with the American Federation of Labor, a foothold in the North, and good discipline...

...Furthermore, there is coming to be a plethora of cotton mills in the South, and the anxiety to capture new ones will turn to suspicion of adventurers from the North who come down to profit by low wages and long hours in the South...

...The strikers themselves are of more importance than the demands of the strikers...

...Wider breaches will present themselves to the entrance of labor organization, and another industrial swamp will be gradually drained...

...Employers of the two sections have been organized in separate associations, the relations between which have not always been friendly...

...This in itself forecasts an end of economic passivity on the part of the workers...

...they do have in the main a rural background...

...The study last quoted shows that average fulltime hours in the five leading southern states were 55.58, and in the five leading New England States were 51.24...

...New and varied industries are developing in the South—paper, furniture, cement, iron and steel—and these will dissipate the cotton mills' grip on labor and legislative protection...

...This legislature had not been distinguished for frank statement before...

...At intervals from 1898 to 1921 there were organizations and strikes...

...The latter has been one of the most conspicuous drifts in the whole history of industry...

...All in all, a change is arriving in public opinion...

...Now that the majority of the mills are in the South, and competition within the section will be ever keener, inhibitions will be removed...

...Northern earnings in 1926 were 55 percent higher than those in the South, despite a shorter working week...

...To set a northern efficiency man with a stop-watch to calculate the wasted time of a southern operative without previous consultation was almost certain to lead to indignation on the part of the operative, particularly when it resulted in a conspicuous increase of his work with little increase of his wages...