Race Hate: Newest Union-Busting Weapon
Carey, James B.
Race Hate: Newest Union-Busting Weapon by JAMES B. CAREY ""\7"OU labor hotshots are up in J- cloudland when your papers and your speeches say bosses ain't changed in a hundred years." The...
...But this wasn't the end...
...There were barrages of telephone calls to homes...
...I wondered at first whether the use of race-hate propaganda in Vickers was just a despicable but private undertaking by a screwball foreman or supervisor without knowledge of the company's higher echelons...
...He shrieked at me as a "Nigger-loving union president...
...At the outset they paid their workers 65 cents-an-hour—ten cents below the federal, minimum wage in 1952—by classifying production workers as "learners...
...The IUE, on behalf of all American labor, is determined to end this immunity, and we intend to do it by persuading the NLRB to accede to a new policy rule which would, in effect, outlaw the use of race-hate propaganda in union preference elections...
...I learned it most definitely was not...
...NECO is located in Bay Springs as a result of now-familiar tax gimmicks and a variety of community seductions...
...First, NECO's entire working force—about 400—was herded into two captive meetings...
...But the Russells were not content with all these built-in guarantees for profit-making...
...Why, we ain't started to use the powder-charges we got against you Nigger-lovers and unionists...
...Most important is the fact that the IUE has found that the use of such detestable race-hate propaganda is not confined to ignorant, bigotry-blinded small-town employers...
...The campaign we conducted was a normal, quiet campaign similar to dozens of others we had carried on in the South...
...In fact, we got the Mohawk formula combined with race and we got it combined with sex...
...NECO is a northern company...
...Despite the race-hate propaganda, the IUE won the Vickers election...
...NECO's biggest customers are two nationwide retail chains: Sears Roebuck & Cbmpany and Rexall drug stores...
...The occasion was an official party given by the Swiss government for the International Labor Organization delegates...
...And as a clincher, they were handed $33,000 in cash, raised by merchants and others, as an inducement to come to Bay Springs...
...I sent two IUE organizers into Bay Springs in response to a number of appeals...
...This was proved when we discovered that the same photograph was used as race-hate propaganda against the IUE in an election in Gainseville, Florida...
...Later that day it mysteriously appeared as a huge handbill distributed inside the Vickers plant...
...There was no need for unusual pressure or dramatics...
...Today the wage scales are far below national average, and substantially below the scales even for Mississippi...
...A major item, perhaps the principal item, of race-hate propaganda used against the IUE in this and other recent election campaigns was a picture of me dancing with an attractive young Negro lady...
...his great-great-great grandparents settled in Mississippi in 1800...
...To date, union-hating employers— hand-in-hand with the White Citizens Councils and the Klan—have exploited race-hate against unions with complete impunity and an assurance of immunity...
...Suddenly in 1957—because of the intensified emotions generated by court decisions on integration and the drama at Little Rock—industrial employers in the South discovered (or possibly rediscovered after nearly 100 years) race-hate as a union-busting weapon...
...the young lady was with the Nigerian delegation...
...It was first used a few weeks earlier in another NLRB election campaign, at a new plant erected by the Vickers Company (a subsidiary of Sperry Rand), in Jackson, Mississippi...
...no union—291...
...That's when they hired detective agencies, union-busting outfits like Burns, Pinkerton, and Railway Audit...
...But now you're beginning to see how we can clobber you, and stick inside the law, too...
...we hope so...
...He had just come from another Deep South community in which he—and several hundred workers in a runaway plant from the North—-had been whipped by exactly the formula described by the beery, garrulous foreman...
...They ain't gonna spend any more millions to destroy unions...
...The story of Bay Springs—population 1302—may become historic...
...That's when the LaFollette Committee showed just a small cross-section of industrial companies spent ten million bucks in just three years for spies, strikebreakers, guns, and ammunitions...
...Today they admit they were dopes in the 1930's...
...It was never printed anywhere before Mississippi and I did not know the picture existed...
...This is not the end but the beginning of a campaign...
...You say the big bosses ain't learned nothing...
...its owners are two Chicagoans, Sam and Ed Russell...
...With no trouble the IUE signed up an overwhelming majority of the NECO workers...
...Such union protections as seniority, health and welfare benefits, and maternity leave are unknown...
...Its headquarters and "parent plants" are in Chicago...
...For example, the Russells got their plant, owned by the taxpayers of the county, at a supposed rent of $3,700...
...They exploited their employes atrociously...
...The foreman, a potential plant manager, put down his beer in a bistro near the new electrical plant, and narrowed his eyes at the union organizer...
...The IUE entered Bay Springs early this year in response to urgent appeals to the Mississippi CIO and anonymous—obviously frightened— letters written to me in Washington by employees of a firm called the NECO Company, a small manufacturer of components for electric blankets and heating pads...
...In addition, the Russells insisted on, and got, exemption from all county taxes...
...We hope to induce the NLRB to adopt this new policy through a test case we initiated recently in the tiny town of Bay Springs, Mississippi...
...Today those companies, at least in the South, figure that's sheep-dip...
...We are still mystified how this picture taken by a Swiss photographer hired by the ILO found its way 5,000 miles from Geneva into the hands and the newspaper presses of Mississippi employers and race-haters...
...Such use of race-hate propaganda justifies setting aside an election upon the request of the losing union and constitutes an unfair labor practice...
...The other has lived in Mississippi all his life...
...The foreman took a long sip of his beer and glared...
...The IUE has, in fact, been one of the most successful unions in the South, having organized more than 40 locals with only one previous instance of the racial issue injected by an employer...
...There has never been a case in National Labor Relations Board history in which an election has been set aside because an employer used race-hate or one in which the exploitation of race-hate JAMES B. CAREY is president of the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers AFt-CIO...
...You want to try to beat that, Yankee...
...And the IUE has made it clear that this case will be carried to the U.S...
...The union organizer who had to listen to this talk in a.tiny Alabama town heard it almost in resignation...
...In this drive, the picture was published 36 hours before the election and spread across four columns at the top of Page One of the Jackson Daily News...
...they're gonna arrange it so that the unions destroy themselves down here...
...There were warnings, threats, and promises...
...its initials stand for Northern Electrical Products Corporation...
...The new Vickers plant in Mississippi is part of the fourth largest corporation in our industry, the huge billion-dollar Sperry Rand Corporation...
...Supreme Court if necessary...
...The large majority that signed IUE membership cards evaporated under management pressure, resulting in an NLRB vote of: IUE—86...
...We are asking the NLRB to adopt just two sentences: "The use of race-hate propaganda during organizational campaigns is a vicious form of interference and coercion which prevents employes from exercising a free choice of collective bargaining agent...
...there were ominous and methodical house-to-house visits...
...Why, right now," he continued, "we've got the hottest thing working for us since the old Mohawk Valley formula—remember Remington Rand in the 1930's...
...No one could charge Northern "invasion" or Yankee "interference" here...
...But through a variety of financial maneuvers NECO was allowed to buy the unexpired lease of the previous tenant for $18,400 and apply that against future rent...
...The company man took another gulp of beer...
...The result, unfortunately, was different in Bay Springs...
...NECO President Ed Russell addressed both meetings and denounced, first, our Mississippi-born organizers as "Nigger-lovers," then the IUE as a "Nigger-loving union...
...Night and day the Russells and their stooges drummed on only one theme, pounded on it, hammered on it, over and over: "Hate, Hate, Hate...
...Here, I submit, is a new descent into the depths of industrial immorality—depths that might well be explored by the McClellan Committee, which so far has displayed a blithe indifference to corporations that fight unions with this most indecent and anti-democratic of all weapons...
...It was a revolting performance, appealing to base emotions and attempting to incite inhuman hatreds and conflicts...
...has been judged an unfair labor practice...
...Then we petitioned for an NLRB election, and it was at this point that pandemonium broke loose...
...One was born and bred within 20 miles of the plant...
...Consequently NECO pays no rent for at least five years...
...Our union, the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers AFL-CIO, and a dozen other industrial unions, are now confronted, for the first time, with calculated, correlated campaigns waged by large and small employers to exploit prejudice and bigotry in order to forestall organization of their employes...
...The last 48 hours of the Bay Springs campaign became a nightmare as a thunderstorm of racism broke over our heads...
...This picture was taken at a meeting of the International Labor Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1955...
...The Russells were responsible for every conceivable incitement to mob action and a lynch spirit...
Vol. 22 • January 1958 • No. 1
