Norma Rae

I’m inching my way through the movie “Norma Rae”.  It’s just one on my list of movies I feel like I ought to have watched at least once.  I’m not grooving on it too much, although you do have to admire the labor organizers chutzpah (and that is the precise word to use).  I admire anyone with that degree of persistence, even if I disagree with the goals.

Well, in any event, that movie dates from 1979.  And they got their union.  Then I got thinking, North Carolina textiles: were they not decimated around the same time the Rust Belt was forming?  Some time not later than, say, the mid-1990’s?

Actually, here is an excerpt:

By the late 1980s, the apparel segment was no longer the largest market for fibre products, with industrial and home furnishings together representing a larger proportion of the fibre market.^[29] Industry integration and global manufacturing led to many small firms closing for good during the 1970s and 1980s in the United States; during those decades, 95 percent of the looms in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia shut down, and Alabama and Virginia also saw many factories close.

So when Reuben the labor organizer got there, there was already pressure on the industry.  His timing was terrible.  He was leading them into a trap.

It took a couple minutes of digging, but yes, everyone in that plant–some 3,000 people–lost their jobs.  I will admit to feeling a few moments of inappropriate Schadenfreude at that.  This is wrong, as I see it, since people asking to live better lives is a good thing.  Unions are not bad things, and they were absolutely indispensable for a long time in this and other countries.  They were the only block on shameless abuse and regional plutocracies.

My Schadenfreude is not directed at the actual workers.  They were getting used and manipulated on all sides.  It is at the Democrat Triumphalism which this movie represents.  That movie is intended to say, this is why Democrats are good.  This is why we are the party of the working man and woman.  We are on the side of ordinary good people, and opposed to the rich and abusive.

But everything they build crumbles.  It works for a minute, then they prop it up to make it look like it is still working when it starts to fail, then when it fails and they can’t hide it, they blame anyone but themselves.  It is a zombie disease, one that is regrettably infectious, and insanely common.  Everywhere you look, this disease is waiting for you.

It is on the street corners of most major cities, handing out paper poison.