Labor Day is coming up, and though the day has come to be associated with barbecues and mattress sales, the original intent was to celebrate America’s workers.
In fact, in recent years, a popular refrain on social media has been: If you’re excited about your long Labor Day weekend – or any weekend off from work – thank a union.
Michael Garcia, who reports for KETK in Tyler, has spent the last few weeks looking back at the biggest historical labor disputes in East Texas. He said the idea for this series came up last Labor Day, when he realized a lot of people have lost sight of the original purpose of the holiday.
And while people may not think of East Texas as a bastion of union activity, Garcia said that hasn’t always been the case.
“People have always worked, and obviously back in the day, unions were much more popular and there were a lot more fights happening across the country. And that also happened here as well,” he said. “In the 1800s, you saw some particularly violent uprisings where people actually ended up dying. These are things that people don’t really associate with Texas anymore, because a lot of that union activity has died down.
“But it’s still here, and that’s the really incredible thing to me is that there still are a handful of really large unions in our area, actually, and they have gone on strike even up until a couple of years ago.”
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Garcia said workers at Prysmian Group plant in Scottsville went on strike in 2021 over fair wages and benefits, as well as appropriate compensation for the work employees did during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prysmian Group is a cable, energy and telecom manufacturing company.
Garcia also looked into a number of major strikes and other union actions throughout history, including the Sick Chicken Strike from the 1950s.
“Down in Shelby County, the poultry industry has always been pretty big. When the USDA was first created, it didn’t regulate poultry because poultry was still a cottage industry,” he said. “And so when the poultry industry was eventually industrialized, it was completely unregulated. So the work was really grueling.
“Chicken is one kind of meat that you don’t want to get sick, right? You don’t want it to get infected, because then you’ll get salmonella and people will die. Well, eventually, a combination of the daunting work and the unsanitary conditions led to strikes at the two poultry plants down there in Center, and they were supported by their union, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters.”
Garcia said the strikes lasted years.
“One of the plants was able to come to a deal,” he said. “But one of the plants never got back to the table with the union, and they eventually closed down because the AMC, the meat cutters union, organized a national boycott of those two plants. And so that was a really effective strategy for them.”
Garcia said it was interesting to see the connections between labor actions of the past and present through his reporting.
“The first story in this series is about the great Southwest Railroad strike. That was organized by the Knights of Labor, and that started in Marshall, actually. And the Knights of Labor were one of the first desegregated unions. And of course, today every union is going to be like that. And I think that that just speaks to the kind of progress that has been made,” he said.
“In the last story, I talked to Chris Hodge, just a really humble guy who started working at Prysmian Group, understood what the problems were and understood that he could help with that and became the president of that union. It’s interesting because these aren’t particularly politically minded people. They just know that they could help their workplace, they could help their communities, by getting involved with the union.”
