In remembrance of the late Patrick Swayze, I would like to send out a special thank you to all the Nay Sayers out there reminding many families that they don’t matter and money trumps humanity. Why do I say thank you? Well Patrick Swayze wasn’t the only one that died of cancer today. Thankfully, Patrick Swayze had the money to afford his health care, which many of you fail to realize.
Today, Crystal Lee Sutton who fought to unionize southern textile plants because of low wages and poor working conditions died of brain cancer. Even though many of you could care less about a woman who fought to better the conditions of American laborers, she unfortunately died at the hands of an industry that is not only relentless in their greed, but will stop at nothing to further their profits.
From the article on MSN – please see the last two paragraphs
In 1973, Sutton was a 33-year-old mother of three earning $2.65 an hour folding towels at J.P. Stevens when a manager fired her for pro-union activity.
In a final act of defiance before police hauled her out, Sutton, who had worked at the plant for 16 years, wrote “UNION” on a piece of cardboard and climbed onto a table on the plant floor. Other employees responded by shutting down their machines.
Union organizers had targeted J.P. Stevens, then the country’s second-largest textile manufacturer, because the industry was deeply entwined in Southern culture and spread across the region’s small towns. However, North Carolina continues to have one of the lowest percentages of unionized workers in the country.
Bruce Raynor, president of Workers United and executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, worked with Sutton to organize the Stevens plants. In 1974, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union won the right to represent 3,000 employees at seven Roanoke Rapids plants in northeastern North Carolina.
“Crystal was an amazing symbol of workers standing up in the South against overwhelming odds — and standing up and winning,” Raynor said Monday. “The fact that Crystal was a woman in the ’70s, leading a struggle of thousands of other textile workers against very powerful, virulently anti-union mill companies, inspired a whole generation of people — of women workers, workers of color and white workers.”
Raynor said Sutton was also a symbol of the national health care struggle. In a June 2008 interview with The Times-News of Burlington, Sutton said she couldn’t get possible life-saving medicines for two months because her insurance company wouldn’t cover them. She eventually received the drugs.
“How in the world can it take so long to find out (whether they would cover the medicine or not) when it could be a matter of life or death,” she said. “It is almost like, in a way, committing murder.”
So keep enjoying your fair working conditions while you fight against your fellow man as they die, it is your right, for you are an American!