Labor Unions in Southern Textile Mills

Read the excerpt below and chapter 8 section 1 in your textbook, then answer the questions that follow.

The history of unions in the Southern textile mills is marked by tension and violence between workers, union organizers, and mill owners. After World War I, the wartime demands for cotton dropped and mill owners scrambled to make up for this loss of profit. Dramatically dropping workers’ wages led to widespread protest, so owners turned to other, more subtle, methods to increase profits. They installed new textile technology, replacing many workers with machines, and sped up the machines. They instituted a third shift, keeping their mills open 24 hours a day. They required workers to be responsible for more machines, frowned on lunch or bathroom breaks, and forbade socializing in the mills. They changed many workers’ schedules from full-time positions with an hourly salary to “piecework” rates, meaning the workers were paid on a part-time basis according to the amount of cotton they processed. This move to piecework rates always led to a drop in salary, but workers had little choice in the decision. If they complained, they could easily be fired, and finding work at another mill was challenging due to the network of mill owners who communicated the names of “difficult” workers.

All of these tactics employed by the mill owners throughout the 1920’s were called “the stretch-out” by employees, meaning that the owners tried to make more money by stretching out the resources provided by workers. Owners wanted to keep up profits while employing fewer people at lower wages, and providing fewer benefits for the workers they did keep.

Workers unhappy with these practices began to practice spontaneous “walk-outs” where the employees of a mill all left the mill at the same time and refused to return until conditions were improved. Not many of these walk outs were successful — workers often went back to work after only a few days off the job because they needed the wages so badly. Northern labor unions took notice of these walk-outs, and began trying to organize in the Southern mills. The union organizers were seen as a threat to profits by mill owners, and they worked to keep the unions out of the mills.

The conflicts between unions and owners sometimes led to violence. Six strikers were killed at three mills in Marion, North Carolina by federal troops called in to stop the strikes in 1929. An especially bloody conflict took place at Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina, which had the highest number of cotton spindles of any county in the South. The National Textile Workers’ Union built on Loray workers’ dissatisfaction to encourage a strike on April 1, 1929. The town’s police chief and Ella May Wiggins, a striker and union balladeer, were both killed in the chaotic conflict following the strike.

Using the excerpt aboveand your textbook (Ch. 8, section 1), answer the following questions:

  1. Who makes up the civilian labor force in the United State?
  2. What is a craft/trade union and how is it different from an industrial union?
  3. What is piecework?
  4. What is a walkout?
  5. What is “the stretch-out”?
  6. What is a strike?
  7. What does it mean to picket something?
  8. What is a boycott?
  9. What is a lockout?
  10. Why did some companies create their own company unions?

Pro-Union Legislation

  1. Norris-LaGuardia Act (1932)
  2. Wagner Act (1935)
  3. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB, 1935)
  4. Fair Labor Standards Act (1938)

Anti-Union Legislation

  1. Taft-Hartley Act (1947)
  2. 1st provision
  3. 2nd provision (Section 14(b))
  4. Landrum-Griffin Act (1959)