The president’s supposed attempt to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States through high tariffs — including a 30 percent tariff on South Africa that threatens tens of thousands of jobs there — is challenging many US trade unionists to ponder whether economic nationalism trumps international worker solidarity.
But to understand the real meaning of international solidarity, especially as it relates to deindustrialization, they should look back to the friendship between the United States and South African labor movements in the 1980s, when factory closures were in full swing. At the time, many US unions strongly supported the Free South Africa Movement by boycotting multinational corporations that did business with the apartheid government, like Shell Oil; refusing to handle South African cargo; and divesting their pension funds from companies linked to the country.
Importantly, this solidarity went both ways — particularly when hundreds of South African workers courageously staged a brief but powerful sympathy strike to protest a plant closing in the United States in support of New Jersey workers facing layoffs.
The story behind this work stoppage and its surrounding events reveals how international labor solidarity can be a powerful force in opposition to both corporate greed and oppressive governments, but only when it involves a spirited fight and real risk.
Hometowns Against Shutdowns
Citing international competition, in late 1985, the corporate giant 3M announced plans to shut down its audio and videotape plant in Freehold, New Jersey, rather than invest in maintenance and new equipment. The facility employed around 400 workers who would lose their jobs as a consequence. Their union, Local 8-760 of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers (OCAW), launched a vigorous effort — at first aimed at convincing 3M to keep the factory open.
Leading the charge was Stanley Fischer, a longtime worker at the Freehold plant and president of OCAW Local 8-760. He was supported by the Labor Institute, a pro-worker research and education nonprofit based in New York. “Stanley has more nerve than anybody I’ve ever met in the labor movement,” says author and Labor Institute director Les Leopold, who worked closely with Fischer on the campaign.
Fischer and Leopold enlisted the aid of rockstar Bruce Springsteen, whose popular song “My Hometown” lamented the closing of a “textile mill” in Freehold twenty years earlier — a reference to the abandoned Karagheusian rug mill, where Springsteen’s father had once worked. Together with Willie Nelson, Springsteen signed an open letter to 3M, published that December in Variety, urging the company to “come up with a humane program that will keep those jobs and those workers in Freehold.”