Women, Work, and Protest by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1181070
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Labor looks south

Since the 1880s, the south has been swept by wave after wave of organizing campaigns mounted by virtually every branch of the US labor movement. The Knights of Labor was the first group to recognize the strategic importance of organizing in the south. Then, in the 1900s, the AFL looked to 'The Awakening of the South,' promising to enter the region 'like a solid wedge against the injustice and wrong of child labor and overlong hours.' Throughout the 1920s, unionists from the northeast sought to organize southern workers in order to stabilize industry and save their unions, especially in cotton textiles, garments and hosiery. The independent CIO also launched intensive drives to organize southern workers from the late 1930s until the early 1950s. In the 1960s, black women began to take the lead in organizing in the garment, tobacco and textile industries. And today, as women workers throughout the region cling to ever-more scarce jobs in manufacturing and take new jobs in the service and clerical sectors, the south is again the potential target of efforts by national unions to organize the unorganized.27

The most successful nineteenth-century labor organization in the southern region was the Knights of Labor. The Knights' national policy of including women and black workers in its membership ranks was particularly important in the south. In 1889, there were already over fifty women's local assemblies in the region. Established between 1884 and 1886, southern women's locals comprised 30 percent of the Knights' women's assemblies in the United States. Black women organized one-fifth of the women's assemblies in the south. By 1890, however, the Knights began to wane nationally, and labor organization among southern workers reached a nadir. After local orders of the Knights had dissolved and the cotton textile industry in the south had grown sufficiently to challenge New England's supremacy in the production of coarse-cotton goods, the AFL-affiliated National Union of Textile Workers (NUTW) began to organize in southern mills. A craft union, the NUTW organized only the skilled male operatives, and by 1900 it had only 5,000 members out of the 90,000 textile-workers in the south. Not until a generation later would southern women textile-workers organize on a large scale.28

In the 1920s, unions were enticed into the region by pleas of spontaneously militant workers, and by the potential for vast union gains in the south. The attention of the labor movement was also commanded by the south's growing importance within the national industrial economy. As Edith Kowski put it after spending the summer of 1928 in the south, it was necessary to 'worry about the south ... if for no other reason than to save our own union hides from an onslaught of company unionism and open shop drives.'29

Labor activity in the south in the late 1920s centered on the Full-Fashioned Hosiery Workers, a Philadelphia knitters' union determined to organize southern workers in order to protect the jobs and wage levels of hosiery workers throughout the east. Union organizer Alfred Hoffman established the Piedmont Organizing Council in 1927, and invited the AFL to assist with general organizing work in the south.

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