Stevens Accord

Semi-cease-fire in the South Everybody stood up, held both hands, and was waving and yelling." So said Gladys Wright, a cloth inspector at a J.P. Stevens & Co. mill in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., describing the scene last week in the local high school's auditorium. Allowed to vote as a result of a hard-fought union-management agreement, 900 Stevens employees unanimously approved the first collective-bargaining contract between the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union and the nation's No. 2 textile maker, which has led labor's enemies list for nearly two decades. Stevens workers in three other cities ratified similar contracts.

Although the agreement covers only ten of Stevens' 80 plants and just 3,500 of its 32,000 production workers, it is a union victory. Under the deal, which came just before the Supreme Court let stand a National Labor Relations Board order permitting the A.C.T.W.U. to organize inside Stevens' plants, the company will pay about $3 million to workers in Roanoke Rapids in compensation for wage hikes withheld for the past 15 months. The A.C.T.W.U. also won promotion by seniority, a checkoff for union dues, better grievance procedures and arbitration of disputes. While the union may extend the contract to other Stevens plants where it wins elections or is declared bargaining agent by court order, it agreed not to recruit on company property for 18 months. The union also ended its four-year boycott of Stevens products and its campaign of corporate harassment of the company.

Unions have fared poorly in the South, where only 10% to 15% of the 655,000 textile workers are organized. The textile union chose Stevens as its prime target for organization in 1963. The company fought back so hard that the NLRB cited it 22 times for violations of federal labor rules, and in 1977 a New York court branded it "the most notorious recidivist in the field of labor law." Stevens' image was also bruised by the 1979 film Norma Rae, which was about the drive to organize Stevens workers in Roanoke Rapids.

When the union's boycott of the company proved ineffective--Stevens last year earned a record $47.7 million on revenues of $1.8 billion--the A.C.T.W.U. also launched a corporate harassment campaign that turned out to be very potent. Devised by Raymond Rogers, 36, a former VISTA worker, the strategy aimed at isolating Stevens from the business community. Rogers scored his first coup in 1978; that was when the Manufacturers Hanover bank dropped two of its directors who were also Stevens directors, following a threat by many unions to withdraw more than $1 billion in pension and other funds they had on deposit at the institution. Six months later the New York Life Insurance Co. decided to remove Stevens Chairman James Finley from its board, after the A.C.T.W.U. threatened to run its own candidates for the board seats held by Finley and New York Life Chairman R. Manning Brown Jr. When the agreement between the union and Stevens was signed, Rogers was preparing assaults on three other companies with Stevens connections: Sperry Corp., J.C. Penney and Metropolitan Life Insurance Co.

Current Stevens Chairman Whitney Stevens, great-great-grandson of the firm's founder, claimed that the settlement was actually a win for Stevens because wages and benefits in the unionized factories will be no higher than in the company's other plants; in those, the average weekly pay is $226, or somewhat above the $202 average for all U.S. textile workers. But A.C.T.W.U. President Murray Finley is unimpressed by Stevens' talk of triumph: "The company can say whatever it wants about winning--but why were those 900 people cheering?" -

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