FERMENT

" ..Union busting has taken a new and more sophisticated form, replacing confrontation with litigation and procrastination; organizing drives are worn down by endless hearings, petitions and postponements; contracts grind on through rounds of charges, counter-charges and appeals.......It's an approach that's capable of disarming even labor's ultimate weapon, the strike. To many management teams, a formerly unionized factory or office restaffed overnight with low-wage , unrepresented 'replacement workers' is the best of all possible corporate worlds....." [ The Goodbye Columbia Campaign , Fedosiuk and Pastreich].

Crazed by the flux density of stories of neglect, filth, malnutrition, danger, sometimes horror, that were covering the pages of the local papers and coming over the Cape's single cable TV channel, the Columbia Corporation filed one charge after another against the union with the National Labor Relations Board.

....Reservoir Home: Total kitchen work hours cut from 60 to 45 hours/week. Food ration cut to $2.35/day. Persons working 10 or more years summarily fired. Lunch consisting of a single thin cold-cut. Facility malodorous. Bedsores. 62 neglected incontinent patients..... ( Abridged from Cape Cod Times, September 28 , 1986)

These 3 prongs of the Goodbye Columbia campaign fork were fine-tined to produce a resonance designated as the "confluence effect"

Bill Pastreich chuckled as he told me about another inventive idea that seems to have paid off. The union got the idea of sending copies of truth squad reports, the findings of DPH inspections, and the conditions of probation to Greenery's stockholders. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, ( whose exact date he didn't recall), it was reported that this had caused Greenery's stock to fall by 2 points, a loss estimated at 34 million $'s .