Search

This article examines local labor insurgency in Philadelphia between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s. Drawing on alternative press sources, it traces the efforts of Black, Puerto Rican, and female work...

This article assesses the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) during the presidency of John J. Sweeney, which lasted from 1995 until 2009. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including press accounts and the AFL-CIO's own papers, it provides one of the first scholarly assessments of the entire Sweeney presidency. Sweeney won office in the first contested election in the AFL-CIO's history, and he came into power promising to revitalize the Federation, which is the largest labor federation in the Western world. Under Sweeney, the AFL-CIO invested an unprecedented amount of resources into both organizing and political mobilization, two key areas. In the early years of his presidency, Sweeney oversaw some important gains, particularly in the organizing arena, but the 2000 presidential election proved to be a turning point. After 2000, Sweeney's reforms were undermined primarily by external factors, particularly mounting corporate opposition, deindustrialization, and a h...

This article explores the ‘Crafted With Pride in the U.S.A.’ campaign, a high-profile effort to encourage American consumers to buy domestically made textiles and apparel. Using a wide range of sources, this study examines an important campaign that has received little scholarly attention. Launched in 1984, the initial seven-year operation cost $100 million, and the funds were used to sponsor Miss America and to purchase national advertising on network television, including commercials that featured celebrities such as Ted Danson, Linda Evans, Eddie Murphy, Jerry Hall, and Bob Hope. Funding was provided by both textile and apparel companies and by labor unions, who put aside their historic differences, because they recognized the seriousness of the import threat. Roger Milliken – a powerful executive with considerable political influence – also bankrolled the campaign. Overall, the Crafted With Pride effort did succeed in uniting the industry and in winning some important backers, most notably, Sam Walton...

This article explores the closure of Pillowtex Mills (formerly Cannon Mills) in Kannapolis in July 2003, a mass layoff that was the largest in the state's history, with almost 5000 workers losing their jobs. The Pillowtex closure was part of the broader demise of the textile sector, which lost 700,000 jobs between 1994 and 2002, the bulk of them in the southern states. It was also part of the wider decline of manufacturing industries in the United States. To date, most studies of deindustrialization have concentrated on the ‘Rust Belt’ states in the Northeast and Midwest, but this study of the Pillowtex closure reveals that deindustrialization is a truly national phenomenon. Although the Kannapolis workers lived in a ‘sunrise’ region associated with economic growth, and although their plight attracted a great deal of attention from both the media and politicians, the effects of the closure were still devastating. The decline of the textile industry is, moreover, hurting workers and communities across the ...

As deindustrialization accelerated in the American south in the late twentieth century, workers were drawn increasingly into the low-wage service sector. The challenge facing unions was to organize unskilled workers in the hotels and grocery stores of this historically anti-union region. Despite a hostile political climate, employees in Hampton Roads, Virginia responded positively to this effort. In a dramatic union certification campaign in the early 1990s, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) confronted a company determined to thwart resistance in the workplace. When the UFCW challenged the dubious results of the election, the company took them to court. There, the Bonnie Be-Lo Company found comfort in a legal system that privileged the claims of ownership over collective self-determination. The struggle in Hampton Roads illustrated the legal obstacles that faced organized labor in the south and in the nation at large. In fact, the southern way was quickly becoming the national way.