Posted on 09/14/2009 1:19:43 PM PDT by FourtySeven
RALEIGH, N.C. - Crystal Lee Sutton, whose fight to unionize Southern textile plants with low pay and poor conditions was dramatized in the film "Norma Rae," has died. She was 68.
Sutton died Friday in a hospice after a long battle with brain cancer, her son, Jay Jordan, said Monday.
"She fought it as long as she could and she crossed on over to her new life," he said.
Union organizers had targeted J.P. Stevens, then the country's second-largest textile manufacturer , because the industry was deeply entwined in Southern culture and spread across the region's small towns. However, North Carolina continues to have one of the lowest percentages of unionized workers in the country.
Bruce Raynor, president of Workers United and executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union , worked with Sutton to organize the Stevens plants. In 1974, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union won the right to represent 3,000 employees at seven Roanoke Rapids plants in northeastern North Carolina .
"Crystal was an amazing symbol of workers standing up in the South against overwhelming odds — and standing up and winning," Raynor said Monday. "The fact that Crystal was a woman in the '70s, leading a struggle of thousands of other textile workers against very powerful, virulently anti-union mill companies, inspired a whole generation of people — of women workers, workers of color and white workers."
...
"She never would have been rich. She would have given it to anyone she called the working class poor, people that were deprived," Jordan said.
Sutton donated her letters and papers to Alamance Community College in 2007. She said: "I didn't want them to go to some fancy university; I wanted them to go to a college that served the ordinary folks."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
So her union became part of SEIU. I guess all those manufacturing jobs are gone now. Some victory.
I bet that really worked out. How many jobs at these plants are left today?
Are the plants still in operation?
Probably zero but the area is being flooded with illegal aliens. I think the carpet mills in Dalton, GA are filled with illegal aliens now.
Foreign textile workers are surely grateful that this character hastened the demise of the American textile industry.
“I bet that really worked out. How many jobs at these plants are left today?”
Over the years I worked for three different textile companies that are no more...almost all are gone now.
And the entire time the dems promised, and the unions promised, to save those jobs.
Unions had a place at one time, but the mobility of the public, technology, the modern business climate, overseas outsourcing, and most significantly the politicization of union management have long since eliminated the conditions that allowed businesses to misuse their employees.
and the Textile industry in the US died 25 years ago.
The jobs that they can’t outsource are filled with illegals. Welcome to post-America. Viva la Raza.
John Edwards said his daddy worked in a meel.
Correction: Filled and gone.
Textile industry in North and Central Georgia is a bust. Now they are all in Mexico or Brazil.
My husband worked in the textile industry until 2004. Started in mid 1970’s.
Some victory. Look at the tags in your clothes and linens. There are virtually no textiles manufactured in the USA now, and the little southern towns have died along with the mills.
She made $2.65/hr in 1973, the equivalent of $12.85/hr today (if you believe the govt numbers) — for folding towels.
http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
Stevens sold out to Westpoint-Pepperill in 1988. Not sure how many of the Stevens plants are still open.
Those plants were killed off by globalization. It’s labor intensive work and low wage countries have an advantage. The Multi Fiber Agreement, GATT, and the WTO all played a part.
Yep great victory!! The industry is gone and American textiles were once upon a time the standard of the earth.
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