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'Norma Rae' criticized old ally [Ben Smith]
Crystal Lee Sutton, the late labor hero fictionalized as "Norma Rae," bitterly criticized a prominent labor leader who made his name organizing her North Carolina textile mill, according to an interview in a new book on labor organizing.
Sutton, who died last fall, defied the management of J.P. Stephens' Roanoke Rapids plant, and was fired for backing a union. Bruce Raynor, now the president of the SEIU affiliate Workers United, was then a top organizer at the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, which won the battle to organize the plant and hired Sutton as a full-time staffer.
Sutton — as "Norma Rae" — and a Northern, Jewish labor organizer based in part on Raynor were the central characters in the 1979, Academy Award-winning film on the conflict, and Raynor called Sutton a "great hero" in an essay last year.
But in an interview for a forthcoming book from Yale University Press, Sutton described her relationship with Raynor in intensely negative terms.
"He did not like me at all. He did not like it when the news reporters and all were coming to town, TV reporters, and they were coming to talk to me and to watch me when we were handing out leaflets and all and just talking union. He told me when those reporters came, for me not to talk to them, to send them over to him. And I tried to do it, but they wouldn’t do it. They always said no, we’re here to talk to you and to watch you in this thing. And he would get so angry, very angry, very hateful, and I learned to despise the man because it was all me, me, me. No matter where I was when he came, he tried to cause trouble for me, he was just so hateful," she said, according to Jack Getman's forthcoming "Restoring the Power of Unions: It Takes A Movement," galleys of which were shared with POLITICO by a Raynor foe. "Bruce was a horrible man, and I’ll never understand how he got to become president of that union.”
Getman's book is a glowing account of the hotel workers' union HERE, with which Raynor's UNITE merged several years ago. The merger ended in a bitter civil war and messy divorce, and Getman takes HERE's side in the dispute.
Raynor said in an interview that he has "no earthly idea what to make of" Sutton's reported comments.
He hadn't spoken to Sutton, he said, since the early 1980s when she tired of travel and quit from her job as a full-time union organizer.
"I thought a lot of her," he said. "I had a good relationship with her."
They worked together, he said, on other J.P. Stephens plants and in a bitter battle at a Georgia carpet mill. Raynor would go on, in part based on the high-profile "Norma Rae" campaign, to become president of ACTWU and a major figure in labor politics.
"I have only positive things to say about her," he said. "She was a courageous person amongst many courageous people in Roanoke Rapids who helped bring the union in there. She was a courageous leader, a tough lady, and a good person."
Raynor said he'd "never exchanged an unpleasant word with her" and he blamed the quote on the author, a professor at the University of Texas Law School.
"It’s obviously some kind of a partisan thing," he said. "Whoever this guy is, he doesn’t like us."