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However, despite organizers’ assertions of the democratic nature of the union, the legacy of the 1929 Loray Mill strike meant that the community of Gastonia tended to associate labor unions with violence and chaos. Wanda Goble mentioned how people in Gastonia tended to associate unions with “the mafia,” making it difficult to find sympathizers with the campaign outside of the plant. In Gastonia, the violence of the Loray Mill Strike had become synthesized with the story of Jimmy Hoffa and an image of northern labor unions run by mobsters. She

82 _{Letter from J. Austin and R. Hinkley to J. Anand and M. Yonas in Response to MEC1137 Letter, February 29, 1988.}

https://lib.digitalnc.org/record/24414

recalled that “we had to go all the way to Charlotte to get a t-shirt printed, because no place around here would do it.”84 Localized historical trauma made the already difficult task of

organizing a Southern manufacturing plant under the Reagan administration even more difficult. Many of the workers at the Firestone plant were the children, grandchildren, and other relatives of the Loray Mill employees who had lived through the 1929 strike, making its legacy all the more significant. However, the impact of the strike’s violent outcome on the attitude of the workers towards unions was not the same across the board, but instead varied across

generational lines. “We finally got enough younger people in there, because them old people that can still remember all that shooting and stuff, they didn’t want nothing to do with no union,” Phillip Goble said, reflecting on the generation gap between younger workers who tended to favor organizing and older workers who were suspicious of unions because of the legacy of Loray Mill. “They wouldn’t take that crap like the old people would,”85 he remarked, contrasting

the hesitancy of older employees with the younger workers who didn’t have the same memories of the actual strike. Younger employees at the plant would serve as the base for labor organizing efforts.

Fears about union associated violence were not the only fears that inclined Firestone employees against organizing. “Fear is the biggest obstacle we have to overcome. If we could overcome fear, we could organize everything,” Mike Black, a labor organizer for the Charlotte AFL-CIO observed. “But most people believe if they start organizing, they are going to get fired.”86 In some ways, these fears were not unfounded, as management would often use the

threat of potential lay-offs or firings as a means to discourage unionizing. When she was passing

84_{Wanda and Phillip Goble, interviewed by Claude Wilson, King’s Mountain, NC, September 28, 2019.} 85 _Ibid.

out pamphlets calling for unionization, Wanda Goble recalled one incident where “I had a boss- man stand in my face and tell me ‘I will see you fired and walked out of this plant.’”87 Even if

firing a person for involvement in union organizing was technically illegal, the threat of doing so was still deployed by management in an attempt to intimidate workers away from organizing.

Even beyond just lay-offs and firing, management could deploy the threat of shutting down the plant entirely. The fact that manufacturing plant closings were an increasingly common occurrence lent more legitimacy to corporate threats to shut down factories where workers voted to unionize, and it made the already difficult task of labor organizing even more arduous.

Manufacturers spread and encouraged the belief that labor unions were themselves responsible for these plant closings by driving up wages.88 This technique for discouraging unionization was

utilized in Gastonia, as Wanda Goble recalled: “We were threatened to be shut down… we were threatened [that] the treatment unit would be moved to Canada… we were threatened with everything. People were scared to death.”89 The economic circumstances of the 1980s, when

American manufacturing was on the decline and increasingly being sent offshore, lent a credence to these threats which made them hard for workers to ignore.

The threat of a plant shutdown was deployed by Firestone in the build-up to the 1987 union election with the announcement that Oklahoma City plant, which was organized by the United Rubber Workers (URW), was going to be closed down, resulting in the loss of 100 jobs at the Gastonia plant. Management presented this as the outcome of the failure of the United Rubber Workers to make the necessary concessions in their renegotiated contract, but the URW pushed back against this. In an article reporting on the announcement’s impact on the Gastonia

87 _{Wanda and Phillip Goble, interviewed by Claude Wilson, King’s Mountain, NC, September 28, 2019} 88 _{Minchin, Fighting Against the Odds, 160-161}

campaign, URW Public Relations director Curt Brown told The Charlotte Observer, “We’re talking about a plant that’s operating in the black. They told us, ‘we just want more profits.’ Unions don’t close plants. Firestone just got greedy.” 90. Even if the union wasn’t the cause of the

Oklahoma City plant’s shutdown, the threat coincided with the initial defeat of the union in the 1987 election.