Interview
Perkel is a soft-spoken, patient, and idealistic man of slight build. I interviewed him at the 1978 ACTWU convention in Los Angeles for two hours on September 25 and for one hour on September 28, and in his New York City office for an hour-and-a-half on November 16, 1978. Before the interview I told Perkel I would like him to play the role of the intellectual for the recent history of TWUA as Department Directors Larry Rogin, Ken Fiester, and Sol Barkin had for the earlier years of TWUA history. He agreed and gave a thoughtful and thought-provoking interview.
While the interview contains discussions of the Union's internal fights, the 1951 southern cotton strike, and other topics considered by most other interviewees, Perkel's real contribution was in his discussions of the Union's problems and of the economics of the textile industry. He offered particularly useful information and insights on the following topics: imports, occupational safety and health, the difficulties of a labor union dealing with a highly bureaucratized government, reasons for TWUA's decline and ways it might have been stemmed, the South and the mentality of the southern employer and the southern worker, approaches to organizing, the structure of TWUA, and the relationship between union professional staff and union field staff.
Abstract
The tapes for this interview have two tracks: a voice track containing the discussion and a time track containing time announcements at intervals of approximately five seconds. The abstract lists, in order of discussion, the topics covered on each tape, and indicates the time-marking at which point the beginning of the particular discussion appears.
Thus, the researcher by using a tape recorder's fast-forward button may find expeditiously and listen to discrete segments without listening to all of the taped discussion. For instance, the user who wishes to listen to the topic on “Duties When He First Joined TWUA” should locate the place on the second track of side one, tape one, where the voice announces the 02:05 time-marking (the voice says at this point, “Two minutes, five seconds”), and at this point switch to the first track to hear the discussion. The discussion on “Duties When He First Joined TWUA” continues until approximately 02:55 at which point discussion of the next topic (“Working for Sol Barkin”) begins.
Notice that in most cases sentences beneath each headline explain more about the contents of the topic. For example, the sentences underneath “Duties When He First Joined TWUA” give further details on what appears on the tape between 02:05 and 02:55.
The abstract is designed to provide only a brief outline of the content of the tapes and cannot serve as a substitute for listening to them. However, the abstract when used with the index will help the researcher easily locate distinct topics and discussions among the many minutes of commentary.
Index
There is a master index for most of the TWUA Oral History Project interviews in the collection-level finding aid.
