September 28, 1978 Session

Introduction

How Perkel First Came to TWUA
Scope and Content Note: His family background was Russian-Polish socialist, and from youth he had been interested in working for a union. About 1947 he sent a general letter of inquiry to several union research department directors, and Sol Barkin responded when TWUA had an opening. He had made no conscious decision to work for TWUA; he had merely written that union because it was in New York City, and he preferred to work there.

How Perkel Became Research Director
Scope and Content Note: He had left TWUA in early 1960 to work for the New York City Department of Labor. [It was actually 1961 that Perkel went to work for the New York City Department of Labor.] When Barkin announced his intention to leave the Union, Pollock called and offered Perkel the job. It was more or less assumed that Perkel would become director if Barkin left because he had been the senior person under Barkin for so long.

The Relationship of the Field Staff to the Professional Staff
Scope and Content Note: There is a barrier between the two, based on educational achievements and social strata. Organizers by and large are militant workers who look upon college-educated people as part of the enemy class. To be effective, then, the professional staff must find ways to overcome this barrier; and, even when they are able to do this, there is often a residue of suspicion on the organizer's part, a feeling “that the college boy is not one of us.” This problem is probably not just confined to TWUA. Perkel is not quite sure how important a role this plays in reducing the effectiveness of the professional, but he gets the feeling that the field man is not completely levelling with him in most conversations, and he is thus not sure how best to help the field man since he is not quite sure he fully understands what the field man wants to do or is trying to do.

There Is a Similar Problem with Union Officialdom That Is Not College Educated
Scope and Content Note: There is still this residue of suspicion “and in some cases pretty strong hostility,” although it is usually hidden. It is similar to the feeling a worker has toward anyone in the white-collar class; there is an assumption that an office job is always a soft job.

An Example of Officialdom's Suspicion of Professional Staff
Scope and Content Note: In the 1950s when organizing was going very poorly for the Union, Barkin pursuaded the top officials that it was important to discover why things were not going well. Barkin devised a program to evaluate what happens during an organizing campaign. It was an attempt to rationalize organizing, to systematically think about what goes on during a campaign and to focus the organizers' attention on each aspect of the campaign. Conferences were called at which Barkin explained the purpose of the program and distributed copies of the forms. A great deal of hostility to the project was shown by the staff and also by their supervisors--regional directors, etc. The regional directors never accepted the program; they felt it was improper supervision of their work, that the professionals in New York, who never did any organizing themselves, should not even be addressing the issue.

Perkel Suspects These Field Staff Attitudes Are Applied to the Education Department as Well
Scope and Content Note: Bruce Raynor, TWUA's Education Director before the merger, has a better personality to overcome this barrier than does Perkel, but there is still probably a residue of suspicion that he is a college boy, and “not one of us.”

Field Staff Suspicion Does Not Necessarily Extend to Top Officers Who Happen to Be College Educated
Scope and Content Note: ACTWU's current top officers are both attorneys, but Perkel has not witnessed any resentment of this. The difference is that these people are leaders, not professional staff. The professional staff must work closely with the field staff, whereas the leadership often comes no closer than making a speech to the field staff. This, however, raises the whole question of whether a union leader should be “one of the boys” or somehow removed from the rank and file. One school of thought claims the rank and file expect the latter. The ACTWU leaders do not attempt to maintain an image of being on the same level as the workers; they mingle with the workers, but not as equals. With TWUA it was the opposite; the officers were always former workers.

The Competence of Organizers
Scope and Content Note: Organizers have a function which is very difficult to perform and very difficult to supervise. Often they are working alone and have to make many decisions on their own. This calls for a lot of imagination, ability, initiative, and planning. Usually organizers have not been prepared adequately for this complex task. Generally organizers are people with little formal education who rose to their current positions because they exhibited leadership qualities in a local union. While leadership skills are very important in organizing, other skills which, given the backgrounds of most organizers, most cannot be expected to have, are also very important. Particularly lacking is skill in planning complex operations. In most cases, “before becoming organizers, they've had no occasion to plan and think ahead in a major way of that sort, and they are accustomed to rushing into things and getting things done as quickly as possible and going from one problem to another without building a structure and planning and anticipating. Many campaigns, I think, are carried out in a rather disorganized manner, and they react to problems as they arise rather than trying to plan for them....” “He finds a compromise between what's comfortable for him and what's going to work. And, since organizing is a very difficult thing, this compromise almost necessarily results in...low rates of success....”

TWUA Organizers' Training Program
Scope and Content Note: In the mid-1960s the Union started a staff training program. The department heads were responsible for working up the program under the direction of the Education Director and later under Paul Swaity when he became Director of Organizing. As far as Perkel can tell, this was a first in the United States. Four to six programs were held over an eight to ten-year period. A great deal was learned and a fair amount was accomplished in improving the capability of organizers to handle their jobs. The program, however, was never fully accepted; there was always a fair amount of opposition from the regional directors who were responsible for supervising organizers.

Introduction

More on Regional Directors' Opposition to the Organizer Training Program
Scope and Content Note: The regional directors were resentful of the input of the department heads, “and part of that resentment, I think, reflected the antipathy between the manual workers and the white-collar workers that I referred to earlier.” It became evident that the regional directors were sabotaging the training program by instructing organizers, when they came back from the training, to forget about what they were told and to get back out and do the job as before. In an attempt to overcome this opposition, the regional directors were invited in to serve as part of the faculty at one session. At the end of this session, a meeting was held to review the experience and to plan for the next session. “We spent a couple pretty rough days trying to save this educational program, and we failed to save it because the regional directors were negative about everything....” Many felt that if an organizer needed preparation or training, it was their responsibility, and they would take care of it. “And, of course, (they) would take care of it in the time-honored way of either throwing him out on his own or starting him off with some older organizer so that a guy could learn the bad habits of the older guy....”

The Difficulty in Supervising Organizers
Scope and Content Note: Because it is so difficult to supervise organizing, most organizers simply do not get supervision. This lack of supervision, coupled with the lack of preparation, “makes for, in my opinion, quite low performance and has contributed appreciably to the poor record of organizing in our Union.”

Dismissal of Unproductive Organizers
Scope and Content Note: The Union had never fired any organizers for failure to produce results until the 1960s, after the Federation of Textile Representatives (FTR) had been formed. Several were fired at that time, but they were all reinstated because the FTR took the matter to arbitration and won on the basis that past practice had been not to fire unproductive organizers. The existence of the FTR probably makes it more difficult to correct organizing deficiencies, but it does not make it impossible. A sustained effort to train organizers could still be accomplished if done correctly.

Organizer Burn Out
Scope and Content Note: Perkel is not close enough to the organizing activity to speak authoritatively, but it appears that the nature of the work is such that it must be very difficult to maintain a reasonably high level of productive work for more than five or ten years. In practice, the natural progression from organizer to International representative or joint board manager means that few organizers actually do organizing for more than ten years.

Regional Jealousies in TWUA
Scope and Content Note: Pollock attempted in the early 1970s to restructure the Union by removing authority over organizing from regional directors and placing it under the International's Organizing Department. This was done over the strenuous objections of most vice presidents and all regional directors. One of the first activities of Stetin as President was to reverse this setup. The political nature of the Union made it difficult for the President to tell regional directors what to do since each regional director was usually also a vice president with his own constituency.

TWUA Structure
Scope and Content Note: It arose out of the historical process by which the Union was formed. The Dyers had their own union and thus became a separate division within the TWUA with a great deal of autonomy. The Synthetic Division also dates back to the beginnings of TWUA and has maintained a good deal of autonomy. The Carpet Division, although small, was cohesive and militant and formed a fairly autonomous sector. Other divisions, however, never developed this sense of homogeneity and autonomy, mainly because they were not well organized. Hence, the cotton and wool divisions tended not to be cohesive; and workers within these divisions were more likely to look to the state or regional division than the industrial division. It was not possible to sit down and determine the structure of the Union; the structure was the result of how the Union grew and the personalities involved in the various industrial groups. “It grew like Topsy, you could say, and that's the way it ran.” Union politics and the existing separate constituencies would make it very difficult to change now; it would take a president with a very strong personality and a very strong will. “I think that the Union suffers from the fact that it has lacked for many years the kind of...strong central leadership that was needed to harness the various divisions and various regions into a more cohesive and effective institution....”

Textron Formula
Scope and Content Note: In the early 1950s, the Union signed a three-year contract with the Textron corporation, which provided for automatic cost of living wage adjustments. The problem was that the workers came to look at these small pay increases every three or six months as coming from the company and not from the Union's efforts. The leadership concluded that it would be better to negotiate lump sum increases on a yearly basis than to have these periodic small increases, because then the Union would be more identified with the pay raises.

The Principle of Continual Improvement in the Standard of Living of Textile Workers Did Not Become Firmly Implanted until the 1960s
Scope and Content Note: It had been established in textile during the boom years of the 1940s, but the textile recession of the 1950s saw textile workers foregoing raises or even accepting pay cuts while workers in other industries were getting annual raises. Most members of the TWUA lived in depressed areas and were beaten down; hence, they did not blame the Union for not getting them raises similar to those in auto and steel.

1951 Southern Cotton Strike
Scope and Content Note: Perkel believes it was political in nature. He can recall people from the Emil Rieve/Mariano Bishop forces saying that the George Baldanzi people wanted to be militant and show that they could run the Union better, so “'let's see what happens,' meaning that they would probably get their ass kicked in and it's a good thing, too.”

Danville and Modern Unionism
Scope and Content Note: There was a great effort to build a union in Danville with the aid of such forces as industrial engineers and publicity and education people. In that respect, it was a departure from the old type of unionism. Perkel cannot say, however, whether there was any philosophical dispute over whether to proceed this way or not.

Southern Organizing on a Localized Basis
Scope and Content Note: Sol Barkin maintained that southern organizing had to be done differently than northern organizing; that community attitudes had to be changed before organizing could be successful. Perkel believes the idea has merit, although he thinks modern media has made the local community less important than the national community in forming opinions. The Union did get involved in localized organizing efforts, but this approach was never given an adequate opportunity to prove its worth.