by Diamond
Whoa, whoa, whoa! We shut that meeting down. This was not part of our job description, and we weren’t supposed to do this. They already had workers to go through there and blow the lint out from under the machines.
Right. We weren’t going to do additional tasks that were outside of our job description without getting paid for it. They had a crew to clean out all of the lint. Don’t put that on us to do.
We shut down a few meetings when we didn’t like something. There were times I may have even gone too far, but they put up with us because it wasn’t about starting trouble just to start trouble. It was about having a high-quality work environment for everyone. The flip side to that was we were responsible to produce excellent work. We did that, and we constantly picked up shifts and worked overtime.
That’s why they weren’t going to fire us.
I remember working twenty-four hours straight. Each shift needed somebody to work, and they came to us. Because one thing they knew about us Hardaway girls, we didn’t have a problem with work. We would work, and we were going to get the job done.
Mm-hmm. Thank God for our mother. She would have food cooked up.
Yes.
Sometimes somebody would have to bring us a plate out there for dinner.
Yes. I remember that. They allowed us to have whatever we needed so we would be happy.
Yes, they did. And back in those days, it was common for us to bring home $1,000 every two weeks. Now, that may not sound like a lot of money today, but back then that was very good money.
Right. It sure was.
You could pay your house payment, your car payment, buy a few extras, save some money. I mean, those were the days back then.
Mm-hmm, yes.
Do you remember that supervisor who was so highly educated that he knew nothing about the machinery? He knew nothing about the looms—he didn’t even know how to start them—and he didn’t know how to tie a weaver’s knot.
Gurl, I remember this one time when that man was walking the weave room floor, I had my machine running good, y’all, and he was trying to show me how to do something. I’m looking at him like, get off my job, I know what I’m doing, you’re making me miss out on money while my machine is stopped.
He went ahead and got off my job.
Hahaha, I’ll bet he did.
So we really enjoyed our work, and we used to work overtime whenever we could.
We didn’t just work over in the weave room. Sometimes we’d be walking through the winding department, going home, and a supervisor would stop us to see if we could work over in that department too.
Yes, that’s right. That highly educated supervisor saw how much overtime we were getting—sometimes we were bringing home more money than the supervisors—and he didn’t like it.
That’s right. By working over in both departments, we were making more money than he was, and he was supposed to be the top-notch supervisor.
He was like, “You’re making that type of money? Oh, no, you don’t. You’re making more money than me.”
This one particular night, we wanted to work over because they needed people.
Yes.
Well, the supervisor with all that education was running that shift and didn’t want us to work over in anybody’s department.
Yes. He was the one who didn’t want us to work over, but another supervisor was the one who went running around telling other department heads not to let us work over.
Okay. So the one with the fancy-pants education was like, “Well, y’all can’t work over on my shifts anymore.”
Right. But the other supervisor was the main person who brought us our checks. He would look at our checks and be like, “There’s no way these girls are making this kind of money.” Then he’d give them to us and we’d keep on going, but we knew he was jealous.
That’s right. So just thinking about it, who in the hell did he think he was?
Yes. Who in the hell did he think he was?
He went over to other departments and told them that the Hardaway girls couldn’t work over in their departments. They’re the ones that wanted to be supervisors; all we were doing was the weaving. We made the money because we put in the time.
So, now the supervisor with all the education needed people for overtime work, but there was such a fuss going on about how our paychecks looked, he didn’t want to give us the opportunity to work over in his department.
So you know what? We went on home. No problem. You may not pay what you owe, but you will reap what you sow.
That’s right.
Well, that next night, y’all, he needed some people to work over, and all of his little friends that he gathered the night before weren’t going to help him out the next night.
Mm-hmm.
So here he comes, looking at us, coming to us wondering if we could work over. And we were like, oh hell, no.
We said the words, “Hell, no.”
We said, “Hell, no.” We knew he needed people, but it wasn’t going to be us two people.
Yes.
Oh, yes, we let him have it. We said, “You figure out how you’re going to run all of these looms because we won’t be running them. Not tonight.”
Yes, we sure did. I remember this vividly, yes.
Production was down that night. He had no one to work over, so he had sections of machine lights lit up in that weave room like a Christmas tree, hahaha.
Hahaha. Yes.
Lights on every machine were on because there wasn’t anybody keeping them running, so they had stopped.
See, we were the reliable people that worked over, and he wasn’t allowing us to take advantage of an opportunity. He allowed all of these other folks to work. They promised him they’d be there, then let him down. Now, here he was running to us.
Mm-hmm, that’s right.
Never, ever, let anybody do that to you. First of all, when you know that you’re good at something and somebody tries to make you think you’re not good, it’s only because they’re envious of you: the money you might be bringing home, your potential, the possible success that might come your way.
They told us no, but when they needed workers, they came back and told us yes.
Mm-hmm.
That’s when we simply looked at them and told them, “Hell, no.”
“Hell, no.”
What I’m saying is, don’t let people use you.
Mm-hmm.
He was trying to use us for his own gain. When we wanted to help him, he didn’t want that.
No, he didn’t. We wanted to work over, and he wouldn’t let us.
He wasn’t going to use us when it was convenient. He better be glad that, at nineteen years of age, I didn’t have the words or the empowerment to say what should have been said. If I was treated that way today, I’d have to take him down.
Hahaha. That’s right.
Those supervisors should have lost their jobs, first of all, for meddling and going to other departments and discussing our pay, then conspiring with other supervisors to keep us from working and making our money.
Exactly right. That situation got out of hand, and we got it back in hand by not allowing them to use their other hand to stop us.
Don’t get us wrong, the company was good to us and a good place to work. I specifically recall one perk: they would have nice steak dinners for the different departments that met certain quotas.
Mm-hmm.
Well, we couldn’t attend this one particular steak dinner because we found out we had chicken pox.
That’s right. We had the chicken pox. It was Silk, y’all, that broke out first. At that time, I was living with Silk, so living in the same household, I broke out too.
See, the chicken pox vaccine was added to the childhood immunization schedule in 1995, which means we probably weren’t vaccinated for it. In fact, back then, it was a normal childhood experience to get the chicken pox. Well, sometimes people got them later in life, and they were generally more severe in adults
. So there we were, with the chicken pox.
Yes. We both got them together. So, on the night of the dinner, they said, “Send somebody up here to get your food.”
They had our steaks and all the fixings packed up for us to come up there, and they brought them out to the car for us.
Right. That’s what they did.
We didn’t even go in the building.
Right. We had the chicken pox; we couldn’t go into the building with it because we didn’t want to spread it to anybody, but they still made sure we got our steak dinners.
That’s right.
That was fun. You know, working in the weave room was really a fun experience.
Yes, it was.
We got to see the machines, how cloth was made, and how the process developed. It was a good experience for us to know how certain things were done.
Then, all of a sudden, around mid-1993, it seems as though things started dwindling down.
Mm-hmm.
They began doing something called “short time.” So instead of working forty hours a week, you might work thirty-two hours a week, or somebody would be rotated out. The person that was rotated out had to draw unemployment for that week.
That’s right. Temporary unemployment.
We didn’t know what was going on, but we knew something wasn’t quite right when we started seeing things like that.
Mm-hmm. That’s when NAFTA came into play.
Right. All of a sudden, Bill Clinton started talking about NAFTA. Now, in case y’all don’t know what NAFTA is, it stands for North American Free Trade Agreement. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? However, in a nutshell, this was an agreement to ship American jobs overseas.
Mm-hmm.
Now that I’m older, and I look back on all of this, it wouldn’t surprise me if old Bill Clinton didn’t get a kickback-paddy-whack for sending jobs overseas.
Mm-hmm.
I can remember hearing talk about it, then Silk started asking, “How is this going to benefit us?”
Right.
This was going to kill our jobs.
What I couldn’t understand for the life of me was how our jobs were being sent overseas for somebody else to work; the products would then come back here; then the American people were expected to have money to be able to pay for the products, but we didn’t have the jobs to make the money.
I’m like, y’all don’t see what’s about to happen here? It didn’t make sense to me from the start. Then, as time progressed, you see how it turned out because a lot of people lost their jobs.
Yes. A lot of people started getting laid off.
Right. There were three parts to this that we saw: American jobs were going overseas; illegal aliens came here and were trained by Americans for the jobs that were left; after they were trained, the Americans that had trained these people were laid off, and the jobs were given to illegal aliens for lower wages.
That’s right. In reality, if an illegal alien wasn’t taking your job, your job was going overseas.
That’s right.
And they started really laying off people in droves. For those who kept their jobs, companies cut the work week down, so people were working four days a week instead of five days or six days.
Right.
Folks were used to rocking a seven-day workweek. Suddenly, they wouldn’t work for three days straight, and they’d have to draw unemployment. So it started getting really, really scarce when Bill Clinton put NAFTA in place.
Now, let me make sure that we specify this: the illegal aliens that we saw were working at the turkey plants and hog plants.
Right. We didn’t know that they were illegal aliens; we thought they were just Mexican folks.
Right.
Companies were laying off regular Americans, especially black Americans who had worked there faithfully for ten or twenty years, and they brought in these illegal aliens for cheap labor.
We didn’t know that at the time, but that’s why they were brought in: for cheap labor.
You know, when you look at all of the American people, white people thrive on having something they build or whatever they have; Hispanic people, they do the same; Asian people, they do the same; but black people, we are always left at the bottom of the totem pole. I’ve always wondered why that is.
In this case, though, it didn’t matter whether you were black or white, you couldn’t get some of those jobs anymore. It was like they were bussing in illegal aliens, and they were taking over.
That’s right.
Those illegal aliens were able to come in and take these jobs; they also built Spanish-speaking communities; they built businesses all while they were taking American jobs.
And then you even had, in some instances, almost twenty to thirty of them in one home, living together, without paying any taxes. I would think about this and wonder how other Americans weren’t seeing this.
So when I would see American people without a job, on the corner, losing their homes, losing their cars, it did not make sense to me, and no one was doing anything about it.
It needs to be said, too, that even though they were living thirty to a house and not paying taxes, they were still taken advantage of because landlords would charge them outrageous rates, by the head, to stay there.
Yes. So, when you hear us talk about illegal immigration—or, excuse me, let me rephrase that: they’re called illegal aliens, and we talk with such passion because we actually saw how it destroyed a lot of families, American families, people that did it the right way.
They broke into the house of America. When you break into the house, you are an illegal alien, not a guest.
Yes.
When you get in line, wait your turn, and do it the right way, you are a legal immigrant.
Mm-hmm. At Burlington, we saw, firsthand, a lot of jobs going overseas because of NAFTA.
Here in the South, manufacturing was pretty much everywhere. It wasn’t like you had to go get a college degree. You could still raise your children and provide for your family from working at one of the mills, in manufacturing.
That’s right.
After NAFTA, most of the manufacturing buildings were closed.
They were closed, and they sat empty.
They were. They were empty because of NAFTA. Anything that’s coming back now is because of President Donald J. Trump.
That’s right. Donald J. Trump.
So, especially in the South, manufacturing was one of the keys to survival. It was very important when it came down to the economics in the South because people worked in manufacturing to take care of their families.
Yes. Also, what I found interesting is that when the other jobs did go overseas, they coerced folks to go back to school.
Mm-hmm.
Well, you had no other choice. If you needed a job, you had to go back to school and take more training to do other jobs.
That’s right.
And all these older people were getting into more debt. Now, they had to use their Social Security to continue to pay off that school debt. And, really, they didn’t get any further ahead than when they had the first job, working in manufacturing.
Yes. That’s right.
I’ll tell you, it devastated the American people, and it left people destitute, with nothing, absolutely nothing.
Exactly. I clearly see that it was a Democrat that signed NAFTA into law, causing jobs to go away; then Democrats told us how we needed to go back to school to become qualified for new positions.
I don’t know what it is about Democrats: They don’t want us to work and have the opportunity to obtain things on our own without getting involved in it and twisting it up. It seems like when they see that you’re doing something and it’s working well, Democrats find a way to put some red tape there to block you or stop you.
I call them left-leaning liberals, and you’re absolutely right. They don’t want the people to thrive; they don’t want the people to prosper; they don’t want the people to be success
ful.
Instead of Bill Clinton having somebody whack him up under the desk, if you know what I mean, he should have been thinking this: Wait a minute, if I sign NAFTA into law, how many millions of people will be out of work?
That’s right.
Because it destroyed whole communities. Companies were doing what they could to keep things going, but it was a hopeless time. At Burlington, they didn’t completely close down, but they closed certain departments, like the weave room, like the cloth room.
Mm-hmm.
They outsourced those tasks, and they sent those jobs overseas.
That’s right.
So those kinds of good jobs were gone.
Let me touch on another thing: When you say manufacturing jobs kept the whole town going, that goes for the grocery stores, small service businesses, the entertainment that was going on in those towns. When the manufacturing businesses were thriving, people were able to open up a business within those communities because people had money to be able to go out and spend.
That’s right.
You see, restaurants, theaters, even beauty salons and specialty shops whittled down and went away.
It affected everything, and it affected everybody.
Yes.
That was one of the great devastations that we will never, ever forget.
You know, speaking of jobs, I remember when you were interested in being a teacher.
Hahaha. Yes. Back in the day, when my son was younger, I used to volunteer in his classroom, and I remember thinking I wanted to be a teacher. So the first thing I did to get my feet wet was volunteer.
Mm-hmm.
So, this one day, I volunteered at my son’s school, but the principal, for some unknown reason, had issues with me.
So this particular day, a teacher had an emergency and had to leave, so the principal needed somebody to volunteer for a class for about an hour until school let out, and he couldn’t find anybody to do it.
So I said, “I’ll do it.”
Well, he wouldn’t let me, and he didn’t want me to do it. I don’t know who he ended up finding, but I ended up not doing it, and that sort of deterred me from even wanting to help or volunteer in anyone’s school. Maybe he thought I was going to take his job.