Union solidarity does not know national borders.
This was abundantly clear today in labor history, the year was 1986.
450 workers in South Africa walked off the job to support laid off workers in New Jersey.
The 3-M plant in Freehold, New Jersey was shutting its doors. The plant produced audio and video tapes, but had decided they could get more profit by shifting production to other non-union plants.
Freehold was where popular working class singer Bruce Springsteen called his hometown.
The plant closing gained wide-scale media attention when Bruce performed a benefit concert for the workers.
He and fellow singer Willie Nelson also took out ads in four newspapers, including the New York Times, asking the plant to reconsider the layoffs.
The New York Labor Institute helped write the ad and news spread quickly from New Jersey reaching another 3-M plant as far away as Elandsfontein, South Africa.
Learning about the fight against the layoffs, every worker at the South African plant walked off the job in solidarity.
They held a half-day strike and rally at a nearby soccer field. Considering the repressive apartheid state they lived under makes this act of solidarity by black South African workers all the more remarkable.
Springsteen’s song My Hometown became an anthem for the strike.
The lyrics include the lines: “Now main street’s whitewashed window’s and vacant stores, seem like their ain’t nobody who wants to come here no more, they’re the closing down the textile mill cross the railroad tracks, foreman says those jobs are going boys, and they ain’t coming back, to your hometown.”
Due to these efforts, the 3M plant in New Jersey remained open, with a reduced work force.
says those jobs are going boys, and they ain’t coming back, to your hometown…
Labor History in 2:00 brought to you by the Illinois Labor History Society and The Rick Smith Show