The Maya of Morganton

Work and Community in the Nuevo New South

Leon Fink

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780807862414
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The arrival of several hundred Guatemalan-born workers in a Morganton, North Carolina, poultry plant sets the stage for this dramatic story of human struggle in an age of globalization. When laborers' concerns about safety and fairness spark a strike and, ultimately, a unionizing campaign at Case Farms, the resulting decade-long standoff pits a recalcitrant New South employer against an unlikely coalition of antagonists. Mayan refugees from war-torn Guatemala, Mexican workers, and a diverse group of local allies join forces with the Laborers union. The ensuing clash becomes a testing ground for "new labor" workplace and legal strategies. In the process, the nation's fastest-growing immigrant region encounters a new struggle for social justice. Using scores of interviews, Leon Fink gives voice to a remarkably resilient people. He shows that, paradoxically, what sustains these global travelers are the ties of local community. Whether one is finding a job, going to church, joining a soccer team, or building a union, kin and linguistic connections to the place of one's birth prove crucial in negotiating today's global marketplace. A story set at the intersection of globalization and community, two words not often linked, The Maya of Morganton addresses fundamental questions about the changing face of labor in the United States.

1

The Way It Is in Morganton

Like many aspiring southern towns, Morganton, North Carolina, offers a contradictory impression to the inquiring outsider. In one reflection, it turns the face of tradition and familiarity toward an otherwise anomic and ever-changing world. In the early 1970s, for example, a refugee from New England arrived in North Carolina with her law school-teaching husband and soon set to writing about “a town with a heart, a people who reflect an inner happiness.” “An unparalleled shift in population is under way in America,” declared Marion Lieberman in a regular column, “Morganton on My Mind,” published in the local weekly News-Herald. Like herself, she believed, “many are coming back to—or discovering for the first time—the serenity and comfort of a small town.” ¹ And, no doubt, to an erstwhile city dweller, there is a distinct folksiness to social relations in Morganton. It is still a place where, during the summer’s heat, one can find a few older white folk gathered under a shade tree with fans, happy to treat a visitor to a lemonade and an unhurried discussion of events hither and yon. There is talk of a friend working in the nearby village, Glen Alpine, they call “Glenpin”; of the dangers of air-conditioning as a cause of pneumonia and an irritant to “arthuritis”; of the recent Fourth of July celebrated with “a big kadoo uptown”; and of a new local professional “rasslin’ ” hall featuring “a bunch of boys from Burke County.” The down-home hospitality of the community extends to its religious institutions: on the outskirts of town, for instance, local Methodists invite passersby to join “the perfect church for those who aren’t.”

Yet, it is not so much old country charm but modern, urban innovation that one senses in the gleaming steeples and glistening mansions of Union Street, which initially bisects the town east and west and ultimately leads past shopping malls and a municipal greenway. With good reason, Morganton prefers to see itself as a dynamic, progressive community that has repeatedly embraced economic and social changes invading what was once an agricultural village nestled in the Catawba River Valley at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Named after Revolutionary War hero Daniel Morgan, who led a combination of regular troops and local militia to a stunning victory at the Battle of Cowpens, the town, the oldest settlement in the western part of the state, was commissioned in 1784 as the seat of Burke County. In the course of its history, Morganton was a stopping-off point for legendary frontiersmen Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett as well as the birthplace of its most famous latter-day representative, Watergate inquisitor Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr. Economically, the area initially served as both a transportation and a commercial gateway connecting the plantation South to new western markets. That slaves should compose more than a quarter of the Burke County population in 1860 testified to the wealth and influence of a coterie of leading local families.² By the late nineteenth century, agriculture was joined by industry, as the lumbering trade, furniture factories, and to a lesser extent textile mills increasingly absorbed the local labor force. Drexel Furniture, for example, destined to become a state and national industry leader, got its start in Morganton in 1903.

The biggest spur to economic development, however, did not arrive until after World War II with the construction in 1960-61 of an Interstate 40 link across Burke County. A local Chamber of Commerce report boasted in 1964 that “since 1960, twelve new industries located in Morganton or within its environs.” Included among the new, humming enterprises of that decade were several furniture firms, a shoe company, a fish hatchery, a knitting mill, a machine tool operation, and Breeden’s Poultry and Egg, Inc., which later became Case Farms. Altogether, local industry boomed in the postwar period; as late as 1995 about 47 percent of the Burke County labor force was engaged in manufacturing. Aside from industry, the local economy depended on government workers (more than in any other city outside the state capital in Raleigh) centered in the psychiatric Broughton Hospital, established in 1882 as the Western North Carolina Insane Asylum; the Western Carolina Center, which has served since 1963 as a research and diagnostic center for the severely mentally disabled; the state school for the deaf, established in 1894; Western Piedmont Community College, established in 1968; and the Western Correctional Center, a model state prison that promised “private rooms for each inmate (or resident)” when it opened in 1972.³

Although in the Civil War Morganton had paid dearly for its adherence to the Lost Cause—the town was ransacked by Union general George Stoneman’s raiders in 1865—local leaders (including several descendants of the older slaveholding elite) proved more nimble in dealing with latter-day race relations. Thanks to the uncommonly large local public sector, African Americans in Morganton gained access to steadier and higher-paying jobs than were commonly available elsewhere. Prior planning by local church and political leaders—including Senator Ervin’s daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Ervin, who served on the school board—ensured that integration of the local high school proceeded without incident in the mid-1960s, years ahead of most of its North Carolina neighbors.⁴ Rev. W. Flemon McIntosh Jr., a popular black schoolteacher and football coach who helped smooth the town’s desegregation effort, proudly called Morganton a “conservative-progressive community . . . we make each step safe and sound, in the best interest of everybody.” ⁵ Yet, the very economic and educational opportunities that opened to local African Americans in the 1960s also led many of them to go elsewhere: by 1990 blacks represented less than 7 percent of the local population.⁶ “I lost two of my own children to that,” sighed McIntosh with a smile.⁷

Downtown Morganton, looking down Union Street.
Photo courtesy of Pam Walker.

Socially, the town and its environs have played host to a variety of newcomers over the years. While remaining, like its western North Carolina neighbors, largely a demographic offspring of early British Protestants and Scotch-Irish pioneers, the area has, in fact, absorbed three rather uncommon immigrant colonies in the past century. At the turn of the twentieth century several hundred French-speaking Waldensians—a Calvinist sect that had undergone numerous repressions and dislocations—made their way to Burke County, thickly settling in a community they named Valdese (famous for furniture, hosiery, textiles, and bakery products). Then, beginning in the late 1970s, some five hundred Laotian Hmong families—refugees from the Vietnam War who had originally been airlifted to Minneapolis, Minnesota—also resettled in Morganton, with help from area churches and federal monies.⁸ The latest immigrant wave, which started almost unnoticed in the late 1980s but has grown irrepressibly since, speaks with a Spanish accent. At once a reflection of a larger Latino, especially Mexican, migration affecting the entire United States (and nowhere more dramatically than among the formerly ethnically insular southeastern states), Morganton’s newest immigrants present the distinctive profile of being majority indigenous Maya from Guatemala. Though spanning the globe in their diversity, the area’s three twentieth-century immigrant groups—counting the Waldensians, the Hmong/Laotians, and, most recently, the Guatemalans—share at least two qualities in common. They are all people of the mountains, and they each have experienced a past of group persecution.

In short, Morganton has just cause to think of itself as a southern town, but with a difference. John Vail, who ran the area legal services office (1988- 97), provided one useful snapshot of the town in the years immediately prior to the Guatemalan arrival. A New Jersey native, Vail selected Morganton as a desirable family location for its “higher demographics”—there was more money and education in Morganton, and the politics there struck him as more enlightened than in most places in the region, a claim symbolized by unwavering local support for a democratic city council and regular reelection since 1985 of a Jewish mayor, Mel Cohen.

To be sure, Morganton also fit expected southern political-economic proprieties: old wealth centered in real estate interests and powerful law firms exercised disproportionate weight in public affairs. Labor unions, a political anathema across North Carolina and long beaten down in the town’s furniture-making sector, survived in only one workplace, a small firm making carbon fiber products.⁹ Indeed, as one local schoolteacher, who would himself soon try to help organize the new immigrant workers, put it, general reaction to the word “union” in North Carolina was “worse than ‘AIDS,’ worse than ‘cancer.’ ” ¹⁰ Given the state’s dominant political culture, it is perhaps not surprising that a young Sam Ervin served as commander of a National Guard unit called in to quell the Gastonia textile workers’ strike of 1929. As Jean C. Ervin, the ninety-two-year-old sister of the town’s most distinguished native son, recalled, “[Sam] was hit by a rock [thrown] by one of the strikers, good thing he was wearing a helmet!” ¹¹

In such a modestly sized but upwardly aspiring community, the local poultry plant was, as John Vail remembered it, the town’s “dirty little secret.” To be sure, Breeden’s Poultry company had begun innocuously enough. Tom Breeden, a local barber, had, with the help of his wife, started up a little weekend poultry business in the mid-1950s. As one recent study of the poultry labor force indicates, “Raising chickens for eggs and meat had been, for decades, a supplementary household or domestic producer operation, fueled mainly by women and child family labor, whose symbols had been Mother Hen and the farm wife’s ‘egg money.”’¹² Before long, Breeden had extended his local poultry and egg hobby into a thriving, full-time “New York dress business”—“they’d dress the birds—leave the feet and everything but take the feathers off, ice them down and put them into barrels, then haul them to New York and sell them.” In these early years of the industry, according to Charles Ramsey, who had learned the poultry dressing business while a student at Berea College and went to work for Breeden in 1962, the work was “hand done—[we] killed by hand, picked them on old drumpickers where you’d hold them by the feet. Over the years we made equipment in our own shop, [including one machine] where you use your foot with a spring to cut their feet off. We managed to make stuff to peel the gizzards, things to harvest the oil glands. . . . I can remember when you could run eighty birds a minute, it would take about eighty people to run those eighty birds.” The 1960s and 1970s, said Ramsey, who was Breeden’s plant manager from 1975 on, saw a tide of inventions applied to the production process. “When I left [in 1995] they were running 120 birds with about forty people, so you can see how far the plant has come in forty years, there’s equipment to do every job now.” In short, what began as a marginal operation had grown over a few decades into a substantial business enterprise. As if to complete its arrival on the area’s stage, a Breeden daughter married an Erwin, one of the oldest and most successful families in the Catawba Valley. Yet, the material success of the poultry plant could not efface its unfavorable local reputation. Not only did the plant emit a noxious stench, but also the labor force regularly absorbed and regurgitated local employees of last resort, allegedly including Broughton Hospital patients and alcoholics.

Breeden’s problems with labor recruitment were part and parcel of the peculiar dynamism of this post-World War II industry. Prior to that time, as Herbert Hoover’s “a chicken in every pot” campaign promise suggested, chickens generally needed extended stewing. But postwar entrepreneurs like Arthur W. Perdue combined new processing techniques, name-brand recognition, and integrated control of egg growers, farmers, feed producers, and processors under one corporate roof to virtually revolutionize what became known, by the early 1960s, as the “broiler” industry. In subsequent years, the marketing of fast-food chicken—spearheaded by the preeminence of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) in the 1960s and accelerated by McDonald’s introduction of Chicken McNuggets in the 1980s—and rising health concerns about red meat created an explosive demand for chicken products that continues to the present day. Two facts summarize the recent trends: in 1992 U.S. consumption of chicken surpassed the consumption of beef, and whereas as late as 1980 most chicken was sold whole, by 2000 nearly 90 percent of the chicken sold in the United States had been cut into pieces.¹³

Market success, however, has bred a demand for labor not easily satisfied through conventional sources. For one, a search for a uniform-sized chicken—required for both assembly-line (or, rather, disassembly-line) production processes and fast-food automatic frying vats—has placed a continuing premium on locating processing plants near rural growing areas. Second, since a consolidation move in the 1980s (eight large processors now control two-thirds of the U.S. market), production has concentrated in the South, where mild weather and low land and labor costs maximize managerial initiative. Moreover, as big and small producers alike fight it out for market control, a still-competitive industry has succeeded in keeping a tight lid on wage costs. Since the early 1970s the poultry wage, the lowest in the entire food industry, has languished at roughly 60 percent that of the U.S. manufacturing average. Through a combination of regional incentives, by the end of the 1990s approximately half of all poultry processing had concentrated in four low-wage, anti-union states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina.¹⁴

From the beginning of the industry’s development in the 1950s and 1960s, low land and labor costs favored location in southern states, and that trend continues. Once the surplus labor of depressed, southern farming areas was tapped out in the 1980s, however—against the backdrop of a generally booming Sunbelt economy (offering other, usually more pleasant as well as more remunerative options to the traditional factory labor force)—poultry employers proved both desperate (and adventuresome) in seeking a new low-wage recruitment base. The answer came swiftly. Latino workers represented less than 10 percent of the overall poultry labor force in 1988, but by 1993 this aggregate figure had jumped to 25 percent. In Morganton, and in other poultry centers like the tristate Delaware-Maryland-Virginia peninsula (home to Perdue Farms), the demographic change would be even more dramatic.¹⁵

Almost from the beginning of the Breeden plant’s expansion came a search for new labor. The late sixties witnessed the entry of African American workers into a formerly all-white labor force; by the mid-1980s nearly a quarter of the workforce was black. “There was feelings there,” remembered Ramsey, “but we didn’t have a lot of troubles.” The trouble was more in keeping the plant running. “Burke County has all kinds of furniture industry,” explained Ramsey,

they’ve got all kinds of [textile] mills. So they got very competitive for the help, and locally you wouldn’t have enough people in Burke County to fill the jobs. I’ve gone in on days where you needed to be running two quad lines of birds, and you wouldn’t have enough to run but maybe a line and a half because you couldn’t get the people to handle it. So then we started running buses; we used to bus people from down in Lincolnton [fifty miles away] and different places like that. As a matter of fact, we had people living as far away as Cleveland County, and they’d take the bus home in the afternoon.

Too many were also taking the bus elsewhere. For many workers, Ramsey said, poultry work proved to be an entry-level job, equipping new recruits with an industrial work ethic that they could use to their own advantage. Poultry workers “could bring their lunch in the morning, and if they wanted to go somewhere else they could find a job, take their lunch with them and be at work somewhere else the next day.”

Katherine Harbison, just seventeen years old when she first took a job “pulling craws” (extracting the windpipe from the chicken neck) at Breeden’s after she and a few other African American friends dropped out of high school in the late 1970s, indirectly confirmed Ramsey’s complaint that local workers did possess some minimal choice over their work assignments. Resenting the extended workdays that the company had adopted in the face of a shrinking labor pool, Harbison recalled, “me and these other couple of girls got together at lunchtime and we decided we was going to punch out...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 - The Way It Is in Morganton
• 2 - Flight of the Happy Farmers
• 3 - How the Dead Helped to Organize the Living
• 4 - No One Leader
• 5 - The Workers Are Ready
• 6 - Changing Places
• 7 - Sticking Together
• Notes
• Glossary of Spanish Terms