Yes. So, I finally decided that the reason that nobody showed up was that
each one was afraid of the other. So, the next meeting that we had, I
went up to a guy and ask him to come to the meeting and he would want to
know who was coming and I would say, "Well, you are the only one from
this shop. There is going to be somebody from viscose and somebody from
engineering." He would say, "O.K.," and I would tell the next fellow the
same thing. At the next meeting, I had about twenty people, but each one
of them was scared of the other one.
Page 7 That's why they
hadn't shown up the first time. But we didn't have anybody in the union
to speak of, we had about 800 when the company called our hand. I was
the temporary President of the group, we were collecting dues, so the
secretary-treasurer worked in the same shop that I did and the foreman
came up to me one day in the spinning room and said, "They want you up
at the front office." I stepped off the platform and I saw this guy who
was the secretary-treasurer step off the other end of the platform and
he saw me and waited on me, he had had the same message, so we knew what
was up before we got there. We walked in the office, the plant manager
was a German, very abrupt, I had a lot of respect for him later on, but
at the time I didn't. He didn't even invite us to sit down. He said,
"What is this that I hear about a union starting up down here?" I looked
at this other boy and he looked at me and I decided that well, it had
hit the fan now and I might as well go on with it. I said, "Well, I
don't know what you've been hearing, there is a union down here, if that
is what you want to know." "Why haven't they been to see me. I thought
they were to bargain with the management?" I said, "Well, that's true,
but I'll be honest with you. The reason that we haven't been to see you
was that we wanted to make sure that we had enough people in the union
that if you fired us when we did come to see you, you weren't going to
be able to make silk, and I'm glad you sent for us, because we are in
that position now." He went through quite a long rigamarole about why
did we need a union, his office was always open and we countered by
telling him that it was a pretty long way from number six spinning room
to his office and by the time that you got there, a telephone call would
always beat you there. We had had a little experience with that.
Finally, I saw that he wasn't
Page 8 going to fire us and I
thought, "Well, we might as well start trying to push our luck a little
bit more," and I said, "Well look, Mr. Nerrin, the fellows are looking
for me back down there in that spinning room and if I don't get back
down there pretty soon, something is liable to happen and I wouldn't
want that." You couldn't have pulled those people out of there with a
locomotive.
[Laughter]