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Excerpt from Oral History Interview with Eunice Austin, July 2, 1980. Interview H-0107. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) See Entire Interview >>

Employers listen to complaints, then do nothing

The managers at Conover Chair, a furniture maker, allowed employees to make complaints to management, but these complaints never led to any concessions to workers, Austin remembers.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Eunice Austin, July 2, 1980. Interview H-0107. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

JACQUELYN HALL:
What would happen if someone had complaints that they wanted to make to the management? Was there any way that people could make complaints? Did people ever try to make complaints?
EUNICE AUSTIN:
For the last few years I worked, they had a suggestion box, and they would let you make suggestions and put it in the suggestion box. Or if you had complaints, you could… Several times I went to the assistant plant manager and talked to him about some problems.
JACQUELYN HALL:
This was at Ridgeview?
EUNICE AUSTIN:
No, at Conover Chair. But you never did win. [Laughter]
JACQUELYN HALL:
You could talk, but …
EUNICE AUSTIN:
That would be as far as it would get. They'd say, well, they'd see what they could do about it; when they had their supervisor meetings, they'd talk it over. The supervisors would have a meeting every week. I never did get much benefits out of it, though.
JACQUELYN HALL:
What kind of problems did you take to him?
EUNICE AUSTIN:
I just thought I was having to do a little more than I should have to do, because they was adding onto my job all the time. And a lot of the things that I did when I was there, they have changed that altogether now. They don't do it that way. It's making a little more problem on two more girls, but it eased my load a little bit. They didn't have quite as much responsibility in one sense as I had. The job was just a lot of responsibility all the way through.