`Alcoa Tennessee 1980s strike and worker conditions`

A management meeting during a late-1980s strike, where a worker explains that the strike's underlying cause was 16-hour shifts with denied bathroom breaks, splintered wooden toilet seats, and no toilet paper. Paired with the Honeywell story as parallel evidence that worker dignity (not wages) drives labor unrest.

The other one is Alcoa Tennessee. It's on the Tennessee River near Knoxville, between the airport and Knoxville itself, and it's called Alcoa because back around 1900 Alcoa went down there because they had low-cost electricity to smelt aluminum ore. At the time I think it was the world's largest aluminum can production plant — making aluminum for coke cans and stuff. The people in Tennessee have long memories. I was born in Chattanooga, folks McGee. I'm at the East Tennessee end. Back around 1910 they had a strike, and Alcoa brought in the Pinkerton guards, which is sort of typical of labor relations at the time. Someone among the Pinkerton guards shot at the people who were the Union, the Union that was being locked out, and a couple of people died. Even when I went down there in 1990, the hourly workers still called it the murdering Alcoans. They had a memory from 80 years before about how their grandfathers had been killed by the Pinkerton guards. Pinkerton was the people Alcoa brought in — they were Black Rock, the mercenaries that we pay, the mercenaries who would go in and clean house for the captains of industry 100 years ago. So they called them the murdering Alcoans.