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Textiles. In the years following WWI, southern leaders, especially from Tennessee, the Carolinas and Georgia, engaged in a major campaign to recruit New England textile companies. They touted the South’s climate, the proximity of raw materials, and especially the cheap and unorganized labor.
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In the years following WWI, southern leaders, especially from Tennessee, the Carolinas and Georgia, engaged in a major campaign to recruit New England textile companies. • They touted the South’s climate, the proximity of raw materials, and especially the cheap and unorganized labor.
Charlotte NC, 1907. From left to right: Charlotte Trouser Company, Park Manufacturing Company, Charlotte Cordage Company, Mecklenburg Roller Mills.
As a result, between 1923 and 1929, over a million textile jobs were added in the South. • The mills were predominately in the piedmont or east Tennessee, but high country families, in need of work, were drawn to the mill towns. • The mill towns were no better than the coal camps. The housing was poor and owned by the companies.
The companies ran the stores, schools and churches. They maintained order with hired guards or deputies. • After a failed organizing attempt by the United Textile Workers in 1919-20, conditions in the South deteriorated even further.
“In 1926, while the average textile worker in New England earner $21.49 for a fourty-eight-hour week, the average worker in the South earned $15.81 for a fifty-five-hour week. And this was only the average. Neither a sixty-hour workweek nor wages as low as $1.81 a day for women were uncommon.” • [Philip S. Forner. Women and the American Labor Movement: From World War I to the Present. New York: The Free Press, 1980.
Efficiency experts were brought into the factories to speed up assembly and to decrease the workforce. • Sanitary conditions in the mills were terrible. Tuberculosis was rampant.
Men and women weaving at the White Oak Mill in Greensboro, NC, 1909
The AFL affiliated United Textile Workers did little to aid southern workers until the National Textile Workers Union came into existence in 1928. • As in the case of southern miners, a communist affiliated union challenged the moderates to become more active.
The first strike of 1929 began in Elizabethton TN. 350 mill closings followed. Leadership came from the local workforce. • The Elizabethton local of the United Textile Workers formed on March 15. Within a week, it had 4,000 members. • Most of these strikers were teenaged girls who pleaded for the “grown folks” not to weaken.
On March 22 the strike was settled, with men getting pay increases from 5 to 15 per cent and the women getting 11 per cent. All workers were to be rehired. • Once the workers were back in the mill, the company reneged on the agreement. • UTW officials who came to the scene were abducted, taken out of Tennessee, and told they would be killed if they returned.
A second strike began on April 15. 800 national guard, 200 special police and 100 deputies were brought to town; machine guns were set up to suppress this rebellion of teen girls. • When the company attempted to re-open, a six block long parade of workers blocked the plant.
But the union let them down. With strike funds exhausted, the UTW accepted a contract negotiated by the Department of Labor. • Though the contract included a non-discrimination clause, hundreds of workers were blacklisted. • Union membership declined to 200.
The card room at White Oak Mill in Greensboro, NC, 1909. Fast-moving belts and powerful machines made carding a particularly dangerous job.
The most notable of the strikes of textile workers was that in Gastonia NC, 1929. • Gastonia was known as “the South’s City of Spindles. • The Loray Mill was located in the nearby Loray Village, a typical company town. • Organizing was done by the National Textile Workers’ Union.
