What The Hell America!

Citing international competition, in late 1985, the corporate giant 3M announced plans to shut down its audio and videotape plant in Freehold, New Jersey, rather than invest in maintenance and new equipment. The facility employed around 400 workers who would lose their jobs as a consequence. Their union, Local 8-760 of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers (OCAW), launched a vigorous effort — at first aimed at convincing 3M to keep the factory open.

Leading the charge was Stanley Fischer, a longtime worker at the Freehold plant and president of OCAW Local 8-760. He was supported by the Labor Institute, a pro-worker research and education nonprofit based in New York. “Stanley has more nerve than anybody I’ve ever met in the labor movement,” says author and Labor Institute director Les Leopold, who worked closely with Fischer on the campaign.

Fischer and Leopold enlisted the aid of rockstar Bruce Springsteen, whose popular song “My Hometown” lamented the closing of a “textile mill” in Freehold twenty years earlier — a reference to the abandoned Karagheusian rug mill, where Springsteen’s father had once worked. Together with Willie Nelson, Springsteen signed an open letter to 3M, published that December in Variety, urging the company to “come up with a humane program that will keep those jobs and those workers in Freehold.”

The campaign soon garnered national media attention, with other high-profile artists and entertainers adding their voices in support. To help raise funds for the Freehold workers, Springsteen and the E Street Band returned to their roots by performing “My Hometown” at the legendary Stone Pony music venue in Asbury Park.

But even “the Boss” could not stop deindustrialization. By January 1986, it was clear that 3M was going to close the Freehold plant no matter what, just as countless other factories were being shuttered across the country.

At the suggestion of visionary labor leader Tony Mazzocchi — an OCAW official who had cofounded the Labor Institute — Fischer and Local 8-760 now called for a nationwide “economic bill of rights” for all workers impacted by plant closings. They demanded that multibillion-dollar corporations like 3M cover health care, childcare, and higher education costs for laid-off employees as they transitioned into new careers. Calling the movement “Hometowns Against Shutdowns,” Fischer began traveling the country to meet with other unionists fighting plant closures in their own communities and to publicize the plight of the Freehold workers.

In late February, just as 3M began its first round of mass layoffs in Freehold, an unexpected jolt of energy came from workers eight thousand miles away in South Africa.

Situated in a Johannesburg suburb, 3M’s South African facility produced a range of products including masking tape and computer tape. Despite having signed onto the “Sullivan Principles” — a voluntary code of corporate social responsibility for US-based multinationals operating in apartheid South Africa despite the global boycott and divestment movement — 3M management systematically discriminated against the plant’s 200 black workers and refused to negotiate with their anti-apartheid union, the South African Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union (SACCAWU).

Such unions regularly faced severe repression at the hands of the apartheid regime simply for trying to organize. But after learning of the struggle of their fellow unionists in New Jersey, on February 28, the entire black workforce at the plant staged an afternoon walkout to protest the layoffs in Freehold, temporarily halting production. Marching and dancing out of the building, they sported T-shirts reading: “Don’t Abandon Freehold, My Hometown” — the same shirts regularly worn by OCAW Local 8-760 members in New Jersey.

“This time, our protest was Africa for the USA, not USA for Africa,” said chief shop steward Amon Msane, referring to the group of artists behind the previous year’s hit single “We Are the World” (which featured Springsteen and was recorded on tape produced at the 3M plant in Freehold).

Msane had organized the walkout after being informed about the Freehold plant closing by SACCAWU president Emma Mashinini, who herself had been told about it by Leopold during a visit to the United States. “3M is an international company. . . . To deal with companies such as 3M, we need to be international in the struggle,” Msane explained. “This exploitation, this uncaring attitude of the 3M company is practiced not only in South Africa but all over the world.”

That June, Msane came to the United States and spent the month touring multiple cities alongside Fischer, fusing the Free South Africa Movement with the Hometowns Against Shutdowns campaign. “We both gained a lot from spending that time together,” Fischer recalls. “We were talking about what apartheid was doing to South Africa and what the multinational corporations were doing in this country and that it was one and the same.”

Speaking to crowds of captivated US union members wherever they went — and showing them a video of the 3M solidarity walkout in South Africa — the two men urged international labor solidarity to combat exploitation and injustice around the globe. “Workers in the United States should take similar actions for workers in South Africa,” Msane said at the time. “We look forward to the day that these links will exist not only in times of trouble, but will be ongoing and be maintained for as long as we exist.”

“He was a real, true labor leader,” Leopold says of Msane. “He saw that this plant closing situation was unjust and he saw it as a way to build a bridge with American workers.”

Meanwhile in South Africa, the apartheid regime launched a full-scale crackdown on the freedom movement, jailing hundreds of black labor leaders without charge. While still in the United States, Msane got a phone call from his wife telling him that police raided their house in the middle of the night looking for him, but fortunately she and their three young children were unharmed.

Msane knew he would likely be arrested upon returning to South Africa, but decided to return anyway. Sure enough, authorities arrested him as soon as he arrived home in early July. But OCAW, the Labor Institute, and other US allies had been preparing for this. They immediately sprang into action by mobilizing a mass letter-writing campaign targeting 3M executives and South African authorities demanding his release.

“We did everything you could imagine to publicize his arrest and put pressure on the South African government,” says Leopold. After one month, the apartheid regime relented and let Msane go.

That fall, Msane tempted fate by taking another trip to the United States to speak at the Labor Notes conference in Detroit along with unionists from El Salvador, the Philippines, Mexico, and Brazil. A few months after returning to South Africa, in February 1987, he was again arrested and detained without charge, though it was clear the apartheid regime hoped to make an example of him due to his increasing international profile.

Once again, OCAW and the Labor Institute organized a public pressure campaign to demand his release. US union members, clergy, and community leaders wrote thousands of letters and staged pickets outside 3M offices and South African consulates. Amnesty International provided crucial support, as did organizer Joel Carr of the American Federation of Grain Millers in Minnesota — where 3M is headquartered.

After holding Msane for an entire year, the South African government finally let him go in February 1988.

Though the Freehold 3M plant was shuttered in May 1986 like so many other factories, OCAW Local 8-760’s energetic campaign successfully secured state funding for a Worker Resource Center (which Fischer ran for several years) to help the laid-off employees get training for new careers. Further, the campaign’s call for an economic bill of rights for workers impacted by plant closures helped lay the groundwork for contemporary demands around a just transition for workers in fossil fuel–related industries.

Reflecting on his fight against factory shutdowns four decades ago, Fischer says it’s “bullshit” for anyone to suggest that deindustrialization in the United States is going to be reversed. “Having worked in that [3M] plant for twenty years, I wouldn’t want it open again — especially as we dismantle [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration] and [the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health], because you still have to work with those nasty chemicals,” he says. “We need to move forward. Let us as workers go along with the technology and education of this century, not drag us back to a technology that existed ages ago and keep us behind.”

In South Africa, after the freedom movement succeeded in abolishing apartheid and establishing a multiracial democracy in 1994, Msane was elected to the Gauteng Provincial Legislature and continued fighting for workers’ rights. When he died in 2020, he was remembered as a “skilled unifier.”

By leading the 3M walkout, touring the United States, and speaking out against apartheid, Leopold says that Msane demonstrated “profound labor solidarity” because he was taking a tremendous risk. Leopold also credits Fischer’s tenacious leadership of the Hometowns Against Shutdowns campaign with setting the stage for the South African workers’ solidarity. “The precondition for international solidarity is you’ve got to be willing to fight,” Leopold explains. “And you’ve got to be willing to support other people who are willing to fight.”

“Without fight and risk,” he continues, “international solidarity is just window dressing.”