When Workers Manage

...But brutal economics alone did not kill the co-op structure...

...It was also filled with the dialect of his heritage and numerous racial anecdotes...

...One of their longest contracts not only paid them a shabby per-dozen rate, but required them to buy all their zippers, buttons, bags, and packing cardboard from the company store...

...Decisions do not seem to be made as much as they simply happen, by informal consensus—as the women get together after work, sweep the floor, empty the garbage, and make repairs on Saturdays, or mingle during lunch break by the vending machines...

...The 400 women walking the twenty-four-hour picket lines eventually were frozen out when a scab force moved into the plant and voted out the two-year-old union local...

...Bernice Ratcliff and Lorine Miller, strikers at Levi and now part-owners of the factory, were packing Penney's jackets in cardboard cartons and heaving them into the van of a semi-trailer...

...The six-year-old factory has struggled, but it is surviving—and testifying that although there are enormous economic, political, and psychological obstacles to overcome, working people with few resources but skills, enormous patience, and willingness to sacrifice can buck a giant corporation and create their own economic base...

...I asked the women if they ever considered reviving "this dream, the co-op thing," perhaps by gradually giving employes part shares of ownership and control—as some machinists there told me they would like—but the five women who have struggled here so long are too jealous of their fragile child to let others help nurse it...

...But instead of being applauded, I was roundly attacked by the chairman as a fraud, posing as a "know-nothing" because he knew that I had graduated from an Ivy League school and "knows better than to use that kind of grammar...

...The other women gave Bernice the authority to make any decisions on her own, but as one of them told me, "I can't think of anything she does without consulting with us first...

...But by any scales which measure the satisfaction of the women working there, and the quality of the garments they produce, McCaysville Industries is a wonder...

...Moral: Let's don't make fun of one another's favorite minorities...

...We've shown that this thing can be done," says Bernice—in McCaysville, Georgia, anyway...

...But from the beginning, this worker-owned and controlled factory stumbled painfully...

...the same social poisons which have destroyed democratic co-ops throughout American history did...

...by opening to everyone the opportunity for education and training, the opportunity to work, and the opportunity to live in decency and dignity") and launched their own cooperative garment factory...

...What they most need now, they all agree, is some training in how to cost a garment —because until then they won't know how to negotiate a decent price...

...The speaker was a black man, a former professor of philosophy, holder of earned and honorary degrees, author of several books, a man highly respected in the academic world...

...The afternoon topic was: "Redneck Religion...

...You've got to have common sense and work your way through it...

...Bernice asks, sadly...

...Then after the meeting people would break up into small groups and start complaining and fighting each other...

...Looking back now, the women's memories are filled with talk about "fighting it out," and "sticking with it," and "making this thing work...

...the women in the factory and the women who quit bitterly accuse each other of sabotaging "this dream, the co-op thing," as Beulah calls it...

...If a girl wants to leave her machine and take a smoke, she can take a smoke...

...and those same five women have continued fighting to keep McCaysville Industries alive ever since...

...I've never looked at the books and I don't want to look at the books," Lorine told me—and then learned for herself, only when I asked her to rummage around for a financial statement, that the factory had made a few thousand dollars profit last year, which they plowed right back into the plant...

...It was a transplant, really, by outside organizers who come from a different world...

...But perhaps the co-op was doomed from the start...

...Perhaps the co-op tried too fast to take sixty people—born and raised in a section of the country where, even more than in other areas, big corporations use people like machine parts and toss them out when they break—and transform them overnight into equal partners in a democratic economic institution...

...I found it at the foot of the scorched red hills killed by copper smelting fumes, around the bend from a river jam of automobile carcasses, and inside the cinderblock walls of an old chicken hatchery...

...But the women actually end up producing as much per person as large production factories in the area—and their quality is reputedly tops, too...

...Then they went on strike...

...The five partners have delegated most of the financial matters to a dour old bookkeeper named Mrs...

...Just eight years ago they were yanking 900 seams of denim a day under the needles at the nearby Levi Strauss blue-jean factory, trying to meet production demands so they would not get fired, sneaking smokes in the toilet stalls so they would not get caught, and taking home $1.25 per hour for the privilege of having any work at all in this jobless part of Appalachia...

...The members did not know how to make group decisions, or delegate authority...

...At the meetings, people would agree on anything, anything," Beulah remembers...

...The women of McCaysville Industries do not talk any more about whether they can keep their company alive but whether they can make it grow...

...We don't push them to make a bunch of money here...

...He also knew that the morning speaker's academic accomplishments far exceeded my own...

...WILL D. CAMPBELL (Will D. Campbell is director of the Committee of Southern Churchmen and publisher of Katallagete...

...The IRS padlocked the factory one weekend for nonpayment of taxes...

...instead of her first name—and they don't know many details about the company finances and don't care to know...

...In both cases the words are used to describe a powerless and, to the user, unattractive group...

...The years and resentments have warped their memories as time discolors a photograph...

...Some of the women were hunting jobs at other garment factories in the area when organizers from the Southern Labor Action Movement, a ClO-affiliated educational group, breezed into town...

...Lorine tears off long snatches of sealing Daniel Zwerdling, a Washington-based free lance ivriter, is currently on a tour of worker-managed enterprises around the nation...

...Today, they are still churning out garments—but this time in a factory which the working women at Levi founded and now manage completely on their own...

...They do not have the luxury of mechanical carton packers or forklift trucks as do the workers at Levi and the other big garment manufacturers...

...He opened the gig with a currently popular country song called Rednecks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer...

...The response would have been one of offense at this poor taste, this uncouth verbiage, this insult to a struggling minority, despite the fact that the term "redneck" is as filled with emotional intensity as the word "nigger...

...Bernice Ratcliff is boss, but in this factory that is hardly the word for it...

...McCaysville Industries sprouted from the ashes of a grueling fourteen-month strike against Levi in 1967...

...The morning was given over to the subject, "The Black Church Today...

...Sometimes I think that's better than all sorts of special training—experience is the best teacher, I know...

...I know we sell too cheap, but we haven't got much choice, have we...

...Green— the only woman in the building called "Mrs...

...I wondered aloud what the response would have been if the morning subject had been "Nigger Religion," and the afternoon had been given over to a discussion of "The Church of the Culturally Deprived and Increasingly Alienated Caucasian Minority...

...They talk wistfully about buying thirty new machines—"this man we sell to says we can't really make any money in this business until we've got at least sixty," Bernice says—and they dream of launching their own brand name line of clothing with their own designs...

...Her partners and fellow workers selected her—"I was working on the floor, and Madeleine said, 'I think Bernice is qualified if she'd try it,' so I tried it," Bernice recalls...

...That is how they shipped about $130,000 worth of clothing to wholesalers in the New York garment district last year...

...They could get by because their husbands worked—many of them in the Cities Service copper mines...

...The Southern Federation of Co-ops gave them some money, and so did the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a rich philanthropist in Rhode Island, but the women kept the factory alive mostly on the proceeds of potluck dinners and some community donations...

...He was well received...

...If working women running their own factory is an oddity, she said, she doesn't know quite why...

...we take her to another machine which is easier and teach her how to run it...

...The co-op soon swelled to sixty members, and from the beginning it seemed like pure democracy...

...Not far from McCaysville, black women had already formed two "cut and sew" garment cooperatives (which later failed...

...All this could eventually sabotage the unique and humane character of this little factory...

...I guess," Madeleine said, "it's just never been tested enough for people to know about it...

...The women here talk about the old days working for Levi much like emigrants recall the horrors of the Cossacks or Gestapo in the old country before they fled...

...I began by noting that the two titles ranged from one of extreme sophistication to one of extreme vulgarity...

...But the house grew silent with hostility when he announced that his next song would be, "Niggers, Mudguards, and Red Ripple Wine...

...We've seen production, we know," Bernice told me...

...So, the few original co-op members still left formed a seven-person board of directors, which later dwindled to five...

...By most traditional American business standards, the McCaysville Industries operation is a joke...

...Of all the shops in the area, this one's tops," says Ethel, a former schoolteacher who now sews buttons at McCaysville Industries and prefers it to teaching...

...The one common remnant they share is the feeling, as Lorine told me, that "co-ops can't work...

...For one thing, it had virtually no operating capital—and it was not about to get any help from a society whose laws and values promote massive and authoritarian corporations and squash small enterprises which the workers try to control democratically...

...But the final blow came from the Georgia Internal Revenue Service, which has no laws regulating non-agricultural co-ops and which did not know what to do with this one...

...That's what we left at Levi...

...We could get out there and set production high and set a time clock and tell them what to do and when to do it but we don't want that...

...The members elected a manager, Beulah Mull, and a board of directors which rotated every three months so everyone could have a chance to serve...

...Like the morning speaker, I spoke often in the idiom of my people, the rednecks...

...It was received with much hand clapping, foot stomping, and cheering...

...and as one of them, Mike Lozoff, recalls from his law office in Durham, North Carolina, "We said, 'Why don't you start your own?' " That year the air in the Appalachians and the rural South was warming to the glow of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and the anti-poverty program...

...Beyond the failure of the co-op and beyond the struggles of their factory, the women of McCaysville have proved what radical theoreticians preach: that working people can create and manage their own factory, and sustain it...

...Many of the women voluntarily paid themselves no more than $24 a week...

...to be successful a co-op should be an organic idea and a commitment by the members who forge it...

...Beulah quit—perhaps the one woman who more than any other got the co-op going...

...If a girl needs to take off sick she doesn't have to go to the doctor and get an excuse (as employes do at Levi...

...More recently someone I know was doing a coffee house performance before a refined, ecclesiastical group of Episcopalians...

...they did not know how to make a democracy work...

...I have seen the machinists at Levi tensed over their machines and ramming denim under the needles, like imprisoned speed freaks...

...The five women who own and manage the factory work the machines just like the thirty others they employ on the factory floor, and they pay themselves the same rate, $1.65 an hour...

...the state Labor Board warned the co-op it would avoid any future financial disasters by dissolving itself and re-forming as a corporation...

...So with Lozoff and a few colleagues giving organizational advice, more than forty defeated Levi strikers joined together and rented some sewing machines, leased and renovated an old barn still dusty with hay and fodder, drafted some fiery bylaws ("to eliminate the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty...

...With no economic power behind them, the women grasped gratefully at poor contracts...

...McCaysville is a small factory...

...But the other title, "Redneck Religion," was just the opposite...

...We enjoy it here, and don't really get tired because it's so relaxed...

...There is no production standard at the factory, so each woman works at her own speed...

...His presentation was brilliant and entertaining...

...And we started out with experience —working eight hours a day running Levi machines...

...tape and wets them with a crumpled paper towel...

...I was to be the leader of that discussion...

...If a girl can't work a machine, we don't fire her...

...REDNECKS & NIGGERS Not long ago I was on a program at a leading southern university where journalists were gathered to discuss the South and its people, their religion, their racial attitudes...

...Government and foundation-founded poor people's cooperatives were popping up in the impoverished hills and deltas like fresh mushrooms on a dung heap...

...The Black Church Today" was a title filled with dignity, intellectual sophistication, and liberal, academic acceptance...

...I don't think that books tell you everything," Madeleine told me as she stitched seams...

...We'd like to send one of us to school, but us'ns ain't got the money...

...The most extraordinary thing is a psychological climate, a relaxed sort of camaraderie, which perhaps only people who have gunned needles on a production line like Levi can appreciate...