Word: unionize
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...office in the New York headquarters of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) is unpretentious enough, strewn with pro-union posters and staffed by an assistant and a secretary. His stockiness, kind eye and tempered assertiveness create an image more of a humbled, once-great football player than of a powerful and controversial leader. But labor organizer Ray Rogers happens to wield a new weapon that may give workers a power far more effective than the traditional boycott or strike...
...weapon, innocuously labelled the "corporate campaign," uses labor's pension and shareholder power to forcefully alienate corporate and financial supporters from uncompromising corporations. And his target happens to be the monstrous textile manufacturer J.P. Stevens, a corporation Rogers labels "the largest, most ruthless and powerful anti-labor, anti-union corporation in the United States...
Labor groups think Stevens must become the first domino to topple if they are to successfully organize the largely non-union South. Since 1963, Stevens workers have voted against unionization in 13 of 14 elections held in the company's plants. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) determined that the workers voted under coersion and the threat of illegal firing. When Stevens did not respond to the charges, the ACTWU organizers tried a new tack and joined with the AFL-CIO in launching the much-publicized boycott of J.P. Stevens products in 1976. But like the NLRB warnings, the boycott...
Rogers launched his corporate campaign in 1977 armed with a fraction of the budget and administrative personnel assigned to the boycott. The campaign keyed first on the Stevens' annual shareholders meeting, bringing 4000 demonstrators to protest outside the meeting and crowding 600 pro-union shareholders into the corporation's New York headquarters. To Rogers, the raucous shareholder meeting and Stevens' decision to hold all subsequent meetings in Greenville, S.C., re-emphasized the need for mass labor support if any type of effort--even one demanding as few organizers as the corporate campaign--was to succeed. Thirty-one years earlier, Stevens...
...struggle--a list of Stevens' present and former corporate directors with black lines through the company boards they have been forced to leave. He grins sheepishly and says, "We're isolating the company pretty well." The forced exile of Stevens directors began in March 1978 when labor unions, backed by the ACTWU, threatened to withdraw more than $1 billion in pension funds from Man Hanny unless it dumped two of its directors that were also on the Stevens board. Four months later the bank accepted the resignation of Stevens Chairmen James D. Finley and David W. Mitchell. About his resignation...