Fighting Union Busters in a Carolina Carpet Mill: An Organizer’s Memoir

Fighting Union Busters in a Carolina Carpet Mill: An Organizer’s Memoir, by Phil Cohen (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2020)

Southern organizing and the role of anti-union consultants in thwarting it was back in the news this year when Amazon workers lost a union representation vote in Bessemer, Alabama. Union members and staff hoping to avoid such setbacks in the future should consult a new book by Phil Cohen, a longtime labor activist in the South. Cohen’s Fighting Union Busters in a Carolina Carpet Mill: An Organizer’s Memoir describes how a group of North Carolina factory workers survived a union-busting campaign, which employed many of the same tactics, legal and illegal, used by Amazon. For organizers countering similar threats to existing bargaining units or those trying to create new ones without the benefit of employer neutrality and card check recognition, Cohen provides a useful prep course on what to expect in any contested National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election proceeding.

The struggle by Local 294-T of Workers United/SEIU in Eden, North Carolina began in 2017, when employees of Mohawk Industries faced loss of their collective bargaining rights due a management-backed decertification drive. Mohawk is a Fortune 500 manufacturing conglomerate, employing 30,000 workers in sixteen countries. Local 294-T represents its only union shop in the U.S. Once part of a cluster of unionized textile mills in Eden, this 90-year old bargaining unit became a lonely survivor of local layoffs and industrywide plant shutdowns. As its own numbers declined, Local 294-T struggled to maintain majority support under North Carolina’s open shop conditions. According to Cohen, actual dues paying “membership stood at only forty percent, an open invitation for a hostile employer to exploit its weakness.”

Mohawk Industries was able to exploit that weakness after “hiring workers in their twenties and thirties [who] knew nothing about the union’s struggle to make this the highest paid plant in Rockingham County and took for granted rights and guarantees provided by the union contract.” In 2016,

“soft business conditions resulted in a temporary downsizing of the workforce until sales recovered. Per the seniority article in the contract, most of the new hires were laid off. Some of them were angry and, upon returning, complained that the layoff hadn’t been fair, because they were better employees than individuals with decades of seniority who’d remained.”

At the direction of corporate headquarters, local management arranged for “a hand-picked group of employees to visit one of Mohawk’s nonunion facilities.” The plant manager started telling people about how employees of a Mohawk plant in Alabama were much better off after voting out a union there because now, “seniority carried little weight” in management decisions about who was laid off or promoted.

It wasn’t long before a petition was circulating, which sought the decertification of Local 294-T. Cohen, a forty-year veteran of labor activism in the south and author of a previous book called The Jackson Project: War in the American Workplace (University of Tennessee Press, 2016) was called out of semi-retirement to help save the local. His second book chronicles the resulting campaign to rally the membership and expose Mohawk’s covert role in what, under federal labor law, is supposed to be concerted activity by anti-union workers themselves. In the course of this story, we meet some of those “anti’s”—men and women with personal ambitions and/or a grudge against the union—who took the lead in recruiting other supporters of decertification. (One worker involved ended up being personally represented by the National Right-To-Work Committee.) Cohen also profiles the largely African-American leaders of Local 294-T, who worked with him to build an unfair labor practice case against the company that could block any de-cert election.
That effort took place in the perilous context of the NLRB going from bad to worse under President Donald Trump. New Trump-appointed Board members, and the agency’s General Counsel, were looking for cases to decide and procedural rules to issue that would further undermine workers’ rights to organize and bargain. One Board precedent they hoped to reverse was the practice of rejecting employee appeals for a decertification vote when they are found to be the product of management misconduct—in the form of illegal involvement in de-cert petition circulation and signing. (Instead, following a new procedure, the Board would conduct an election, impound the ballots, and count them after unfair labor practice charges were resolved; in the meantime, support for the incumbent union would continue to erode.) While this anti-union policy change was still pending, Cohen and Local 294-T were faced with the challenge of gathering and presenting evidence on behalf of “blocking charges,” that could trigger an unfair labor practice complaint by the Board and derail any decertification vote.

Fighting Union Busters offers a detailed account of the successful union detective work involved and the company’s legal counter-maneuvers, orchestrated by a highly-paid lawyer from an outside firm. To defeat Mohawk’s de-cert attempt, Cohen drew on decades of experience handling NLRB case and utilized the workplace relationships and networks of Local 294-T members to make this one successful. The NLRB ultimately cited three Mohawk officials for direct solicitation of decertification petition signatures, plus found sufficient evidence of the company’s other forms of unlawful assistance to the “anti’s” in the plant. Cohen’s book contains lots of good practical advice, for union officers and staff, about dealing with union and management lawyers, Labor Board agents, and Regional Directors.

Before leaving town, Cohen also made sure that Local 294-T understood that its near-death experience “followed years of complacency as union reps became too comfortable with what appeared to be a stable situation, neglecting to encourage workers to sign union cards.” As a result, “enjoying the benefits of union representation without paying dues had gradually become part of the culture” of the workplace, a trend that could only be reversed through systematic internal organizing, more house visiting, and an aggressive focus on shop-floor issues, like the repetitive stress injuries so common in the plant. Otherwise, Cohen predicted, the union’s now stronger majority would still not include many “supportive workers who had watched a great union victory unfold…without signing a Workers United card.”

Reviewed by Steve Early, a journalist, lawyer, and author. He was involved in union organizing in the northeast for 27 years as an International Representative for the Communications Workers of America. He is the author of four books about labor or politics and a forthcoming one, from Duke University Press, on veterans. He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com.