People First Profits Last
2016
Screen print, ink on paper, edition of 10
11 x 17 inches (unframed)

From the series New Demands? (2011-2023)

This print is based on a placard used in a 1978 rally in New York City demanding that J.P. Stevens and Co recognize the 1974 unionization vote by workers at its seven textile plants in Roanoke Rapids, NC. In the 1960s and 70s, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the Textile Workers Union of America, and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers joined a broad, interracial coalition of civil rights groups, religious leaders, and politicians to support a unionization campaign by workers at J.P. Stevens and Co., then the second-largest textile manufacturing corporation in the country. The company refused to recognize the union until 1980. In 1988, J.P. Stevens and Co. was sold to three major textile competitors, who soon moved operations their overseas to take advantage of lower labor costs. This is but one example of textile and garment manufacturing leaving the United States en masse in the 1980s and 1990s.

As seen in an archival photo in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union archives
Photo: Robert Chase Heisman