Windham - KNOCKING ON LABORS DOOR: union organizing in the 1970s and the roots of a new economic divide

Knocking on Labors Door

Justice, Power, and Politics

COEDITORS

Heather Ann Thompson

Rhonda Y. Williams

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Peniel E. Joseph

Matthew D. Lassiter

Daryl Maeda

Barbara Ransby

Vicki L. Ruiz

Marc Stein

The Justice, Power, and Politics series publishes new works in history that explore the myriad struggles for justice, battles for power, and shifts in politics that have shaped the United States over time. Through the lenses of justice, power, and politics, the series seeks to broaden scholarly debates about Americas past as well as to inform public discussions about its future.

More information on the series, including a complete list of books published, is available at http://justicepowerandpolitics.com/.

Knocking on Labors Door

Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide

LANE WINDHAM

The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Authors Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

2017 Lane Windham

All rights reserved

Set in Charis by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Windham, Lane, author.

Title: Knocking on labors door : union organizing in the 1970s and the roots of a new economic divide / Lane Windham.

Other titles: Justice, power, and politics.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2017] | Series: Justice, power, and politics | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016059292| ISBN 9781469632070 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469632087 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH : Labor unionsUnited StatesHistory20th century. | Industrial organizationUnited StatesHistory20th century. | Labor movementUnited StatesHistory20th century. | Labor laws and legislationUnited StatesHistory20th century. | LaborUnited StatesHistory.

Classification: LCC HD 8072.5 . W 56 2017 | DDC 331.89/12097309047dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016059292

Jacket illustration: Lillian Lightbourne, a welder and member of Ironworkers Local #201 working in a fabrication shop in Washington, D.C., in 1979. Photograph by Martha Tabor, University of Maryland (courtesy of Martha Tabor Collection, University of Maryland Libraries, http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/35149).

An earlier version of Chapter 4 originally appeared as Signing Up in the Shipyard: Organizing Newport News and Reinterpreting the 1970s, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 10, no. 2 (2013): 3153.

To all who organize for justice

Contents

Figures, Illustrations, and Table

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Table

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Abbreviations Used in the Text

ACTWU

Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union

AFA

Association of Flight Attendants

AFL-CIO

American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations

AFSCME

American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees

ATMI

American Textile Manufacturers Institute

CBTU

Coalition of Black Trade Unionists

CLUW

Coalition of Labor Union Women

CUAIR

Construction Users Anti-Inflation Roundtable

DRUM

Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement

EEOC

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

FFACT

Fiber, Fabric, and Apparel Coalition for Trade

GCIU

Graphic Communications International Union

GE

General Electric

GM

General Motors

HERE

Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees

IAM

International Association of Machinists

IBEW

International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers

ILGWU

International Ladies Garment Workers Union

IUE

International Union of Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers

LLRG

Labor Law Reform Group

MFA

Multi-Fiber Arrangement

NAACP

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

NAM

National Association of Manufacturers

NEA

National Education Association

NLRA

National Labor Relations Act

NLRB

National Labor Relations Board

OCAW

Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers

PSA

Peninsula Shipbuilders Association

RCIA

Retail Clerks International Association

RCIU

Retail Clerks International Union

SEIU

Service Employees International Union

TWUA

Textile Workers Union of America

UAW

United Auto Workers

UFCW

United Food and Commercial Workers

UFW

United Farm Workers

UMW

United Mine Workers

UNITE

Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees

USWA

United Steelworkers of America

Knocking on Labors Door

Introduction

One sweltering July morning in 1976, Jan Hooks, a thirty-one-year old Southern white woman trained as a secretary, crushed a hard hat over her head of unruly curls. The 1970s offered fresh promise for Americas working class, and Hooks wanted in. Growing up in the 1950s, she had watched her father leave each morning for his job at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in Virginia. Yet she had never really considered that she might follow in his footsteps. By 1973, things had changed. That year the nations largest private shipbuilder for the navy started recruiting women for production jobs, keeping in step with the federal governments new affirmative action guidelines. Hookss twin sister, Ann Warren, was among the first women hired. Separated from her husband, Hooks was raising two girls alone, and she knew office work would never pay as much as her sisters blue-collar shipyard job. Thats how Hooks soon found herself hauling a toolbox down into the mouth of a nuclear-powered guided-missile cruiser and embarking on her new shipwright career.

Her first assigned task was to clean metal scraps with a three-inch brush in the ships deep recesses, alongside another woman. And I was shaking, tired, scared to death. We sat there until I smoked my cigarette and drank a Pepsi and got myself calmed down. Within a few weeks she began training as a crane operator, and held great pride in her eventual rise to a job that allowed her to drive the 150-ton, eight-story-tall giants with a pocket-size remote control.

Yet Hooks did not just want any job when she crawled down into that ships hold; she wanted a really good job. Though her shipwright position paid better than most jobs available to women, Newport News shipyard workers remained among the lowest-paid shipbuilders in the nation and their pensions were paltry. They began to organize a new union with the United Steelworkers of America (USWA). One crisp and cold January morning in 1978, Hooks served as an official observer for a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election at the shipyard involving nineteen thousand workers. Hooks ticked off the welders, riggers, and mechanics names from her polling station by the number 11 dry dock, offering a friendly nod and a smile to those she recognized. Theirs was the largest single workplace union election ever held in the South, and it would be the largest NLRB election held at a single worksite in the nation in the 1970s.