Workers need a stronger 
voice at the table, or risk
losing more to crafty
corporate behemoths

Work, life, and community formed a living mosaic in communities dominated by a major industry. The demise of such an industry reveals that the psychological and social costs are as important as are the economic losses which draw first and most attention.

The Bates Manufacturing Company in Lewiston, the epicenter of the textile industry in Maine, was the textile giant in the state at mid-twentieth century and represented a classical model of the seamless web between life, work, and community.  

A sense of the “Bates Family” can be gleaned by glancing at the Bates News. Its columns revealed that workers learned of fellow workers and their romances, engagements, weddings, anniversaries, births, illnesses, funerals, promotions, and retirements. They learned of outings, trips, vacations, hobbies, humor, poetry, new employees, photos, parties, military service, sewing classes, and gossip. Not to be omitted were the performances of hockey, softball, golf, bowling, and baseball teams, the company’s recreation field and club house, Boy Scouts from employee families, diamond lapel pins and engraved gold watches for lengthy service to the company, etc., a virtual community in and of itself. The Bates News reached beyond the employees to the stockholders, customers, and friends thus reinforcing the sense of community.

Bates tours for schools, colleges, and civic organizations revealed to them the nature and importance of the industry to the community. Like other large textile manufacturers in the state, Bates was an integral part of the civic and charitable works in the community, and its cultivation of “welfare capitalism” served to tether workers to the mills. Radical labor voices viewed such “welfare capitalism” as “riot insurance,” “industrial feudalism,” and a subtle form of manipulation which veiled class oppression and the great disparities in power between the mill workers and mill owners. Nevertheless, workers, the mills, and the community were woven into a seamless “fabric.”

Bates celebrated the 100th year of its existence in 1950. Ribbon-cuttings, the raising of special anniversary flags, visitations by city officials, special editions of the Lewiston Daily Sun, the Lewiston Evening Journal, Le Messager, and the Bates Magazine, as well as radio broadcasts commemorated the historic event,

Guided tours, exhibition baseball games, golf tournaments, dances, a Chamber of Commerce testimonial dinner, entertainment, door prizes, fashion shows, the appearance of Miss Maine, a  dance at the Lewiston armory, guided tours for the public through the plants added to mix of the celebration.  A heterogeneous parade of people, e.g., an English mayor, German labor leaders, students of a Maine teachers college, business leaders, various government officials, delegates of fraternal orders, friends and neighbors of employees, summer visitors, and residents of textile communities who “always wanted to see what went on in our textile plants,” paraded through factory gates while centennial parties were the order of the day.

Such activities, the pageantry and festive air of the moment, and company- sponsored worker and community recreational and welfare activities, could not, however, disguise the approaching unpleasant undercurrents of regional and global competition that threatened the textile industry and challenged its intricate web of relationships with its workers and the community.

In 1958, Maine’s Congressman, Democrat Frank M. Coffin, articulated the concerns of the industry before the Textile Advisory Committee, (created by President Dwight Eisenhower) and stressed the need to recognize the emerging competition to one of the nation’s major industries. It was not only Japan, Hong Kong, England, Italy, and India, who provided competition, but the potential of scores of nations taking their first steps towards industrialization. Further, the textile export potential of the six European countries which formed the Common Market (European Economic Community) was estimated to undergo dramatic growth. In short, argued the Congressman, the nation was facing the first impact of world industrialization in cotton textiles.

As if to verify Coffin’s concerns, Bates had closed its Androscoggin Mill in Lewiston and its York mill in Saco in 1957. Soon to follow was the closing of Lewiston’s Continental Mills in 1961. The template for decline was being forged.  Generations of workers and their families who had paraded through the factory gates, learned that their way of work and life which seemed timeless and immutable, gave way to the inexorable march of the “creative destruction of capitalism” which is not known for its sentimentality and for fostering the preservation of stable patterns of life, work, and community rich with entrenched emotional attachments.

Employment in the leather and leather products industry peaked at 28,680 in 1967, and was clearly the chief source of employment in the state.

The initial alarm about shoe industry was sounded in 1900 when the Lewiston Journal asked: “IS THE SHOE INDUSTRY GOING WEST?.”  It became a point of concern again in the 1920s, and moved front-and-center in 1950 by B. Morton Havey, executive director of Associated Industries of Maine, who noted that shoes were flowing into the nation “in ever-increasing amounts.” Utilizing a recent trade survey based on United States Department of Commerce data, he informed the delegates of the statewide labor organization (Maine State Federation of Labor) assembled in convention that in 1949, only 9,900 pairs of shoes were imported into the country.

In January of 1950, however, the nation had imported 38,000 pairs of shoes from Czechoslovakia which were valued at $47,000. In February, 153,000 pairs of shoes valued at $126,000 were imported from the same country.  In March, imports of women’s and misses shoes from Czechoslovakia totaled 211,000 pairs which were valued at $240,000.  He asked the delegates, “How long can this increase of imports continue in such leaps and bounds before it hits in our own back yard?”

 The answer was forthcoming in 1969 as the Legislature was reminded that the state’s shoe industry found itself battered by foreign imports.  It was alerted to the fact that over 28,000 state citizens were employed in over 139 factories throughout the state, many of which were located in small town where they supplied the major source of income and employment, and that the imports of leather and vinyl shoes had expanded dramatically from 7.8 million pairs in 1955 to 175 million pairs in 1968. Such early concerns about the threat of foreign imports would rise as the cascade of shoe imports  from Taiwan, South Korea, Italy, Brazil, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, Spain, Yugoslavia, Romania, Japan, Poland, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, India, Greece, Austria, Thailand and El Salvador continued to batter a pillar of Maine manufacturing,

Added to wound inflicted by shoe imports was the decision of domestic leather industry to sell hides to more profitable markets overseas. In 1979, the high price and scarcity of cowhide sparked a major rally of about 2,000-3,000 workers in Lewiston’s Kennedy Park, organized by the national Hide Action Program, a leather industry group, which addressed the problem.  Placards shouted Save Our Hides … And Our Jobs!, Save Our Hides, Keep U.S. Leather Here!, and Our Jobs Are Being Slaughtered.

The Lewiston-Auburn area alone had 22 shoe manufacturing plants and was quick to experience the impact of scarcity of hides. Footwear, and the cattle industry advocates, continued to struggle over the issue. Two major industries in the Twin Cities, symbols of the industrial era, failed to create a firewall of protection and survival.

In 1972 “grass roots” cries of “Buy U.S.” could be heard in Maine which reflected the growing concern about foreign imports and the exportation of American jobs abroad.  National organizations such as The Labor-Management Committee for Fair Foreign Competition carried its message of “Buy American” into Maine as an embryonic economic nationalism was born to protest the uprooting of industries, workers, their lives, and  communities.

With the demise of the textile and shoe industries, uprooted workers became eligible for retraining after their loss of employment. Unemployment benefits, however, could be exhausted before training for a new job was completed. Many faced health problems, and might have to go without health care, or might not be able to pay all their bills, or perhaps compelled to face foreclosure on their homes, or get a call from a collection agency. They might be compelled to seek public assistance, make their way to a food pantry, and struggle with severance pay issues.

Transportation, child care, and relocation services may or may not have been available to the worker who lost his/her means of existence. Maine workers in search of federal protection against foreign competition and the declining shoe industry testified about the psychological and social impact of economic dislocation before governmental authorities stating: “The effect of plant shutdowns on the communities in question is devastating. The potential exists for a dramatic rise in unemployment, food stamp use, welfare, alcoholism, child abuse, and crime: a general demoralization effect . …”  

Such are but glimpses of the generic concerns and pain that followed the decline in Maine’s basic industries. It was clear that economic life could not be readily disconnected from the web-like nature of social existence.  The “dislocated worker” and the “revitalization” of communities became commonplace themes as de-industrialization cast its shadow over “one-mill towns.” The trauma of Maine’s paper industry is but the most recent example of the tremors that beset those who earned the means of their livelihood in the industries associated with the industrial era.  

The view that individuals are architects of their own lives, that success or failure, and one’s place on the economic pyramid are always individual in origin, are readily challenged when workers are caught in the seething cauldron of economic gyrations beyond their control. While free will and personal responsibility are not to be dismissed as explanations for ones economic circumstances, in their exaggerated they form serve to exempt the systemic sources of life circumstances. Even the state, which in a legal sense is a sovereign body with control over its affairs, is required to recognize that decisions that affect its fate and its citizens are often beyond its control.  

The citizens of Lewiston and Auburn need no lessons in the “creative destruction” of capitalism which was reflected in the demise of their local industrial pillars and in the seismic shifts in their established patterns of life and work. Today, job security (increasingly embracing the spectrum of white-collar workers), concerns about income, wealth, and power disparities, the survival of the middle class, and the purity of the democratic process itself, have everywhere fermented to the top of the political pyramid as issues of concern.

It is a time of the unraveling of safety nets, the renaissance of classical liberalism, calls for privatization, deregulation, and new employer offensives against organized labor. It is a time of corporate demands for “flexibility,” and worker concessions (a monotonous refrain heard by workers). It is a time of global corporations, global markets and “global hiring halls” which impact on workers, communities, and the nation itself. Such developments raise questions about the obligations of the modern age economic globe trotters to the workers, communities, and the nation that nurtured them.

Organized labor proudly and rightfully claims that it has played a major role in creating the middle class by demanding a greater share of the wealth that it helps to create, and that it has made capitalism more equitable by checking its arbitrary and capricious actions in the workplace. It further reminded employers that workers were not simply impersonal costs of production to be added to the corporate ledgers along with taxes, insurance, etc., that the “value” of labor was not to be determined solely by supply and demand curves, that workers were not simply units of energy or fodder for profit, and that profit should not be pursued at the expense of the health and safety of workers and their communities.

Labor Day, which symbolizes the dignity and value of labor was inaugurated in Maine in 1891, and simply echoes the sentiment of Maine workers of years ago who were highly conscious of their value and contributions to society, demanded a just share of the wealth that they helped to produce, and a share in the decisions that impacted on their lives. As early as 1831 a worker noted the importance of the “producers” compared with the “non-producers” in the columns of the Easter Argus (Portland):

Will his rusty dollars prostrate the forest, or sow the seed, —navigate the deep sea, or turn the spinning jenny—without the aid of the muscles and sinews of the animal mechanics? Not by “two chalks.” Here, then, begins the entire dependence of opulent indolence upon the industry of the mechanic, the artist, the farmers, the every-day laborer.”  

A few years later, the iconoclastic Portland Pleasure Boat (Portland) echoed the importance of the role of the “producers” in society: Who clears up the wilderness and changes it to fruitful fields?  Why, the workers to be sure. And who reaps the profit of their labors? The drone — and-monopolists, speculators and other idlers.

 Who cultivates the [soil]?  The workers.  And who lives on the firstlings of the flock, and the first fruits of all they produce? The drones. Who builds the mills, cuts, manufactures, and gets the lumber to market?  The workers.  And who reaps all, or nearly all the profits on both labor and lumber?  Why capitalists, land-monopolists, speculators, and those who never put their hands to labor, nor their heads nor hearts to anything but their own selfish interests.  

Who builds all the houses?  The workers.  And who occupies the best of them?  The drones.  In short, who performs all the labor, produces all that is produced, earns every farthing that is paid for taxes, and supplies the whole nation?  The workers, the back-bone bears the burden.  And who possess and enjoy the most and the best of everything that the workers produce?  Why, the drones. And how do the drones manage to get the best of everything without labor? By their craft; by keeping the workers in ignorance; by keeping up a false state in society; by supporting a bad system of government; by robbing men of their right to the soil and forcing them into slavery to capital.

At a time when corporate behemoths, now “persons,” operate under the flags of disparate nations across the globe, their money is “free speech,” and unprecedented technological changes make economic life more precarious than ever, it may be necessary for labor and the nation to revisit and reflect on the meaning of Labor Day and reconnect with its “spiritual” message of the dignity and value of labor and offer workers and their communities a new, stronger, and meaningful voice at the table.

Charles A. Scontras is historian and research assistant at the Bureau of Labor Education, University of Maine, Orono,.