New Orleans      Bill Becker was president of the Arkansas AFL-CIO from 1964 to 1996.  He passed away in 1997, shortly after retiring.  I met Bill in 1970 in the fall after founding ACORN in Little Rock. I used to drop in and see him every month or so, asking advice, having a cup of coffee, shooting the breeze.  He would often wonder then, why I bothered.  I can’t remember what I told him, but I was planting seeds, that sprouted and grew over the years while I was there, as he and the AFL-CIO became perhaps our best ally in the state.  From time to time, even after I moved the headquarters in New Orleans, I would run into him, especially once we started Local 100, then affiliated with SEIU, and joined the state body.  I went with our members to a couple of his state conventions in Hot Springs.

Bill knew I was working and living out of New Orleans after 1978.  It came up that I lived in a neighborhood by the river, now called Bywater.  He mentioned that when he was an organizer with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, he had been part of a terrible strike at a textile plant called Rex-Reuter Manufacturing that occupied a square city block between Dauphine and Burgundy Street in the same neighborhood.  I knew the location well.  It was abandoned or looked that way about a half-mile from down river from where we lived then.  The strike seemed horrific.  He and Jim Youngdahl, at the time a labor lawyer in Arkansas and around the South, had crossed path in the ACW days, including in the city.  They had shared a background with the League for Industrial Democracy, sort of a leaning left, front group and both worked with ACWU largely in this region before ending up in Arkansas, where Jim went to law school and Bill ended up at the Arkansas state fed.  We’re located now on South Main occupying the whole building that used to house the Youngdahl Law Firm in Little Rock.

One thing leads to another, you get to talking and, boom, I get an email from mi companera with a citation to a US Supreme Court decision written by the famed jurist and civil rights legend, Thurgood Marshall, NLRB v. RUTTER-REX MFG. CO. 396 U.S. 258 (1969).  It’s late in the game and almost sixty years ago since the decision by the Court and more than 70 years since the workers lost the strike, but it’s still painful reading.  They won recognition. Went to three bargaining sessions.  Made no progress and went on strike.  The New Orleans-based company wasn’t negotiating in good faith.  Eventually, the union made an unconditional offer to return, which was the heart of the litigation because the company still refused to rehire most of the strikers, leading the union to file unfair labor practice charges.  The NLRB issued a complaint finding the company at fault and ordering them to rehire and made the workers whole with backpay.  The company continued to hardline and delay, so the NLRB won at the appeals court level which awarded a huge level of backpay with interest from that date back to the strike.  The company recalcitrant to the end, appealed to the Supreme Court, which finally ruled 15 years after the strike. It’s almost an exaggeration to say the ruling was bittersweet.  Marshall held that the NLRB had delayed too long in enforcing its back pay order, so cut the backpay clock back to the date of the offer to return at the end of the strike, rather than the date of the Appeals Court ruling upholding the Board.  Some of them got paid, just not much and had to swallow the pill of justice delayed.

I’ve read a lot of NLRB decisions, mostly those dealing with Local 100, so this wasn’t the best or the worst, but about par for the course, and yet more evidence of the slow boat workers sail on the NLRB boat.  I got a call a couple of weeks ago from a regional NLRB compliance officer, finally trying to track down the settlement and compliance on a charge Local 100 filed for garbage workers a half-dozen or more years ago, so long in fact, she had to remind me.

Rutter-Rex is no longer enjoys the address in the 3700 block of Dauphine.  They moved to the Metairie suburb, but miraculously, they are still in business.  Google says they opened up in Columbia, South Carolina in 1955 right after the strike. They make work clothes still it seems, which is also ironic.  In their old location near the corner of my house is now something called the Art Lofts, which offers cheaper, small housing units in some kind of semi-section eight deal for different kinds of cultural workers.  The developer lives in the complex as well in a unique structure.  He has a reputation as a bit of a gentrifier, but though we might not see eye to eye on many things, he’s on the liberal side on national politics and more importantly they used to admire my dog and from time to time ask if they could walk her, so we’re neighborly.

What goes around comes around, but not necessarily in the ways we would expect.