A Touch of Civil Rights Fervor

In 1963 union organizers seeking to crack the Southern textile industry picked as their No. 1 target J.P. Stevens & Co., the nation's second largest textile maker. Their reason: before it moved most of its mills south, Stevens had union contracts in some of its Northern plants, and organizers thought it might be less hostile to unionism than other Dixie employers. That was a monumental miscalculation: Stevens fought back so hard as to lead the National Labor Relations Board to accuse it last year of "unfair labor practices of unprecedented flagrancy and magnitude." To this day the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) does not have a contract at even one of Stevens' 85 plants, most of them in the Southeast. The intensity of the company's resistance, however, has only confirmed unionists in their view that Stevens is the key to organizing all the South. Now they are launching a new campaign, touched with the fervor of the civil rights crusades of the 1960s.

First Taste. Last week, as a record 550 shareholders jammed into the cafeteria and three other rooms of the Stevens Tower in mid-Manhattan for the annual meeting, management got its first taste of the new offensive. In the street below, 3,000 ACTWU sympathizers--butchers, seamen, teachers, Princeton students--waved picket signs and chanted union slogans. At the meeting, several former Stevens workers accused the company of firing them for union activity. Many Roman Catholic nuns and priests and Methodist ministers, members of five religious organizations that had bought shares of Stevens stock in order to have a voice, expressed concern about the company's labor policies. Old civil rights activists banded together as Southerners for Economic Justice joined the fray. Said Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., to Stevens Chairman James D. Finley: "I come before you as an American intolerant of injustice."

The protest got nowhere: a resolution calling on Stevens to explain its labor policies drew only 6% of the shareholder votes. But the demonstration was only part of the union attack. In mid-1976 ACTWU announced a nationwide boycott of Stevens products and in the past few months it has intensified the effort. With the support of church, student and civil rights groups, it hopes to call on community leaders and get them to urge retailers to take Stevens goods off the shelves. This is the same tactic, and the same coalition, that broke the impassioned resistance to unionism of Farah Manufacturing Co., the Texas pants maker, in 1974.

So far the boycott has had no perceptible result. Stevens set records for both sales ($1.4 billion) and profits ($41 million) last year. But union leaders say that serious boycott preparations started only in January. One problem they face is that much of Stevens' output is unfinished cloth sold to other manufacturers, and the company's own consumer products sell under a bewildering variety of private labels and brand names, including Utica blankets and Gulistan carpets. Some, like Yves Saint Laurent sheets, bear designer names. Nonetheless, ACTWU is printing up thousands of wallet-sized cards listing labels, and plans to take ads in local papers to persuade housewives to boycott Stevens.

ACTWU is also trying to get people in union offices all over New York to tie up the Stevens switchboard with telephone calls. Says Campaign Director Ray Rogers: "We want to get so many phone calls going into the company that they can't make phone calls out." The union has allotted $1.5 million a year for the next ten years for the Stevens campaign, and has a pledge of full support from the AFL-CIO.

But Stevens is an exceptionally tough nut to crack, even by Southern standards. The NLRB has cited the company 15 times since 1965 for violations of federal labor laws. Stevens has been forced to offer jobs back to 125 dismissed workers and give them and other employees $1.3 million in back pay and other compensation. The company closed one carpet-yarn mill in Statesboro, Ga., after a court ruling that management had to bargain in good faith with the union; Stevens says the mill was shut because demand for its product "declined drastically." In 1974 the union won an election at seven Stevens plants in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., but 2 1/2 years later ACTWU officials still have not been able to get the company to sign a contract. Stevens accuses the union of making "impossible" demands. ACTWU officers reply that Stevens adamantly refuses to accept arbitration of grievances or a checkoff system for dues collections, and that without those provisions the union cannot function.

No Softening. Stevens officials rarely talk to the press, but this week they will send stockholders a booklet defending their labor policies. Among other things, it accuses the union of employing violence in some organizing campaigns, claims that Stevens has a good record in hiring and promoting blacks and other minorities (23% of its work force) and women (42%), and says that Stevens has raised wages an average of 7% in each of the past ten years, to $3.98 an hour now. That is competitive with the rest of the industry, but below the unionized wage scales in some nontextile factories in communities where Stevens has plants. Says James Boone, a packer in Roanoke Rapids: "1 hate to stand in the check-cashing line at the bank behind the paper mill guys"--who make up to $6 an hour.

At last week's annual meeting. Chairman Finley admitted that Stevens "has made mistakes of judgment." But officials show no signs of softening: the leaflet to stockholders asserts that union boycotters are "proving that they will readily sacrifice the interests of the employees ... to increase their own power." On their side, ACTWU officials vow a battle to the death. After 14 years the struggle is more bitter than ever.

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