Labor v. Stevens

Union clout hits banks

For 15 years, organized labor has tried everything it could think of to crack J.P. Stevens & Co. Inc., the nation's second largest textile maker and citadel of Sunbelt antiunionism. It has used direct organizing campaigns, protests to the National Labor Relations Board and the courts, demonstrations at annual meetings of Stevens stockholders and an attempted nationwide boycott of Stevens products. Nothing has worked. Now the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union is trying a new pressure tactic: isolating Stevens from its friends in the business and financial community. Last week it won a victory of sorts by forcing two Stevens representatives off the board of directors of Manufacturers Hanover Trust, the giant New York City bank.

A.C.T.W.U.'s strategy was simple: unions threatened to withdraw more than $ 1 billion of funds and deposits from the bank if Stevens men continued to sit on the bank's board. So Stevens Chairman James D. Finley and David W. Mitchell, a Stevens director and chairman of Avon Products Inc., announced that they would get off the board when the bank re-elects directors next month. Mitchell pleaded the press of other business, but Finley told a different story to reporters attending the Stevens annual meeting (which was moved to Greenville, S.C., apparently to escape the attention of the television networks clustered within blocks of the Stevens Tower in Manhattan). Said an embittered Finley: "I was pressured into leaving by management and various members of the bank's board. I didn't want to stay where I was not wanted."

The sophisticated switch in labor's tactics was coordinated by Ray Rogers, A.C.T.W.U.'s corporate campaign director, who is out to get other financiers to break their links with Stevens. His next goal is to force Mitchell, R. Manning Brown Jr., chairman of New York Life Insurance Co., and E, Virgil Conway, chairman of the Seamen's Bank for Savings in New York, to quit the Stevens board. That may not force Stevens to sign a union contract quickly, but management is under financial as well as personal pressure. The boycott may be telling. Though Stevens' sales have been rising, profits dropped 14% in the past fiscal year, ending in October, and another 7% in the first quarter of fiscal 1978; the stock is selling for about $14 a share, far below its book value of $38.

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