Correspondents' Correspondence
Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS. The Darlington Case Charlotte, N.C.-The average hourly...
...Kissinger...
...The longer it can use new claims to keep the matter tied up in court, the more it has to gain: According to a 1969 union survey, over 150 ex-Darlington workers have dropped from sight and at least 20 have died...
...Tell them I've called," they say...
...Operator: Ah, Mrs...
...On September 6, 1956, the Darlington workers voted 256-248 to be represented by the TWUA...
...They pronounce it all very clearly, and then repeat it very slowly...
...By a vote of three to two, the Circuit Court reversed the NLRB decision...
...only 31 per cent would stay in the industry if they could start all over again...
...Blank" -er whatever their name is...
...Are you there, operator...
...is the owner of a textile mill...
...Meir, nice to speak to you...
...I'm sorry, all the embassy fines are busy just now, Mr...
...Someday Deering-Milliken may finally be forced to pay the penalty for what was judged-ever a decade ago-To be a serious violation of the nation's labor laws...
...Time and the NLRB's ineffectiveness are on the side of the company...
...Now, if it's really urgent, Mrs...
...Since Ervin is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which passes on Supreme Court nominees, the union cried foul...
...Milliken himself told the Darlington workers he would close the mill if they voted for the union and warned supervisory personnel that they would be out of a job too if they didn't stop their employes from organizing...
...But it will come far too late to restore the basic right of the Darlington workers to organize into a union...
...Operator: Oh, everybody says the same thing...
...Golda: Wait to speak to my own embassy...
...And Frederick Dent, now Secretary of Commerce, is the former president of a South Carolina textile company...
...revealed that he called the Chilean and Israeli embassies last year in order to be recorded on the Federal government's wiretaps of their phones...
...The largest contributor to the successful 1972 Senatorial campaign of Jesse Helms (R.-N.C...
...This is Mr...
...Are you a government employe...
...Enough already...
...In fact, the mill was being expanded at the time, and had 80 looms in their crates ready to be unpacked and put into operation...
...Then, for the third time, the case was appealed to the Fourth Circuit Court...
...At this point the company changed tactics, claiming that the Darlington plant had been due to shut down within a year of the actual forced closing...
...Operator: May I know your position now, and your position in June of 1972...
...When the TWUA started organizing there, wages ranged from $1.00-$1.56 an hour, working conditions were poor and even 20-year veterans were turning to the union for relief...
...And who are all these people on the line...
...Voice: Yes, I'm having trouble reaching the Israeli Embassy...
...Nixon.-Mark Shenker...
...The industry's labor force is becoming steadily older, though, for companies are unable to recruit young workers...
...By the mid-'50s, Darlington had a population of 1,500, a third of whom worked at the Deering-Milliken plant, the area's largest business, with an annual payroll of over $1 million...
...By 1969 it was estimated that the cost of settling with the Darlington workers would run in excess of $7 million...
...Operator...
...Stop...
...There's a long list of people ahead of you...
...Operator: Well, so far we've had John Mitchell, John Dean, H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Caulfield, Maurice Stans, Ronald Ziegler, Herbert Porter, Patrick Gray, Jeb Stuart Magruder, Richard Helms...
...I am sorry but I'm afraid you'll still have to wait...
...Roger Milliken, president of the Deering-Milliken chain, has donated generously to all three of Richard Nixon's Presidential campaigns...
...There the company was found guilty and was ordered to pay the Darlington workers their back wages to the closing date...
...By contending it owed the workers only one year's back pay, however, Deering-Milliken hoped to reduce the final settlement to about $1 million...
...May I help you...
...Half of the jobs in a typical mill here have to be filled every year because of a quit rate twice the national average...
...if it refused, the judge would have to throw out his case...
...Faced with a multimillion-dollar damage suit, the lawyers went to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals headed by Judge Clement Haynsworth...
...You want the Israeli Embassy...
...When the National Trial Examiner of the NLRB, together with the TWUA, appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court, Deering-Milliken hired Senator Sam Ervin as a "special counsel" to argue the company's case...
...Auctioneer Samuel Friedman said that in his 40 years' experience, "I have never had the pleasure of offering for sale a cotton mill as modern and up to date...
...What kind of nonsense is this...
...Powerful Senators like Sam Ervin (D.-N.C...
...The future unsuccessful Supreme Court nominee had no qualms about hearing the case even though he held a substantial interest in a company that supplied vending machines to the entire Deering-Milliken chain...
...Along with many other established textile manufacturers, Deering-Milliken fled the unions of New England during the Depression...
...To make collection more difficult, its lawyers also argued that each case for the more than 500 former employes should be adjudicated separately...
...Perhaps the most egregious example of this is the legal battle-still raging after 17 years of litigation-ever Deering-Milliken's closing of its mill in Darlington, South Carolina, to escape unionization and discourage workers from organizing in the chain's 24 remaining plants...
...Who's this...
...What in the world do they all want...
...If ever there was a law broken, the company broke the labor law...
...A recent exchange, recorded on a National Security wiretap, went as follows: Operator: Hello, Washington operator here...
...Golda: That's all they say...
...Deering-Milliken's opposition was adamant: A former foreman at the plant said afterward, "We were told to keep the union out...
...Since then, the cold lines as well as the hot lines have been humming at the Israeli Embassy...
...With that kind of political influence, textile firms have had little trouble exploiting the inadequacies of the NLRB...
...Voice: As a matter of fact, I am...
...Meir, I think I could get you through to the embassy later in the evening...
...Maybe I could put you ahead of Dr...
...Indeed, according to the University of Michigan survey, Work in America, textile employes rank among the lowest in career satisfaction...
...five days later, the company's board of directors voted to shut down the mill...
...This and other conflict of interest charges notwithstanding, Ervin remained on the case, but the Supreme Court upheld the original NLRB decision in 1965, citing the company's intent "to chill unions in any of its remaining plants...
...Should he find himself being prosecuted for his role in the break-in, he explained, his plan was to have his attorney demand that the government produce a transcript of his calls...
...Hello, is this the Israeli Embassy...
...The Darlington Case Charlotte, N.C.-The average hourly wage of the Carolinas' half-million textile workers falls about $1.10 short of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' all-manufacturing scale for the whole U.S...
...The case was remanded back to the NLRB and in 1967, following another series of legal maneuvers, Deering-Milliken was ordered to pay up...
...And what happened to them will remain a deterrent for other textile workers in the South.-philip Sparks Busy Signal Washington-Tn his testimony before the Senate Watergate committee, James W. McCord Jr...
...Operator: Hold the line a minute, Mrs...
...Operator: Yes, that's all...
...In search of cheap labor, it settled in Southern locales like Darlington and set up mill towns where workers bought their food from the company store, were treated by the company doctor and took loans from the company bank...
...Operator: I'm afraid all lines to the embassy are busy now...
...The Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) reports that only 15-20 per cent of the Southern labor force is organized, and its leaders complain that mill owners regularly violate National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) regulations against interfering with their employes' right to choose a union...
...Despite the high level of worker discontent, unionization has made little headway during the past 40 years against the no-holds-barred resistance of the giant chains that dominate the industry...
...Voice: Prime Minister of Israel...
...But lots are still waiting?Herbert Kalmbach, Egil Krogh, Henry Kissinger . . . Golda: Stop...
...Deering-Milliken, maintaining that it had acted within its rights, exhausted every available appeal process until, in 1962, the case reached the highest office of the NLRB in Washington...
...Golda: That's very nice of you...
...Meir, there's someone flashing me...
...Now may I speak to my embassy...
...This has become a major area of conflict between the union and the manufacturers, who are well represented in Washington...
...and Strom Thurmond (R.-S.C...
...The union immediately went to the NLRB and filed "unfair labor practice" charges...
...The following month all the employes were laid off, and in December the plant and its machinery were auctioned off...
...have looked after the industry's interests for many years...
...Most Southern plants still grant only four or five paid holidays a year as against the national standard of 10-12, and the last major change in vacation policy and shift bonuses was adopted more than 25 years ago...
Vol. 56 • July 1973 • No. 15
