Labor in the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: The Laborers International Union, the Philpott Administration, and Labor Relations at Auburn University, 1972–1978

On October 4, 1978, in the midst of a strike by university maintenance workers, Auburn University President Harry Philpott took a walk. Leaving the familiar red brick and mortar of Auburn’s iconic Samford Hall, Philpott sought to add a personal touch to the University’s negotiations with its dissatisfied employees. Two days earlier, Philpott’s administration sent mailgrams to those on strike, warning that anyone who failed to “return to work by 4:30 P.M. on Wednesday, October 4^th, 1978 … will be terminated and will not be eligible for rehire.” Philpott’s face-to-face meeting with university personnel, however, represented a more personal overture. Attempting to convey a sense of compassion to the Auburn Plainsman, Philpott averred, “I hope it shows that we’re not a big institution that doesn’t care about them.” Whatever the specific content of Philpott’s message, Auburn’s employees returned to work the following day.¹

Neither the pointed mailgram threatening termination nor Philpott’s personal plea sufficiently explains why Auburn’s striking employees buckled and returned to work. The administration’s October 2 ultimatum, Philpott’s paternalistic attempts at mediation two days later, and the eventual return of Auburn’s maintenance personnel to work without major concessions provide only a superficial rendering of labor relations at Auburn. These events were instead the climax of a much longer contest between Auburn and its unionized employees. That the Philpott administration emerged victorious over the Laborers International Union (LIU) and the employees it represented was not a singular incident–as the Plainsman and other local media posited–that witnessed a power-wielding class flex its muscles against striking employees within the confines of a region with a deserved reputation for anti-union sentiment. Rather, the LIU’s failure to win significant concessions in October of 1978 possessed much deeper roots, roots that are evident in two factors that facilitated the success of Auburn University’s opposition to its unionized employees. First, Auburn’s administration held a significant organizational advantage vis-à-vis the LIU and the employees it represented. Second, the Philpott administration benefitted from existing divisions between the academic and non-academic communities at Auburn, divisions that pitted the school’s administration, students, and faculty against its blue-collar, less-educated, and less privileged staff. The Philpott administration’s adept ability to capitalize on these divisions proved integral to its success at ostracizing its striking employees from the rest of the community, in mitigating their bargaining power, and in undermining their strike.

Any scholar attempting to write southern labor history must tread into the oft-contentious debate over the role of race and class in shaping the region’s labor relations. This essay addresses this race versus class paradigm in two ways. First, where evidence allows, it considers the degree to which Auburn’s employees forged a biracial union in a region still coming to terms with a pervading atmosphere of racial antagonism and a history of white supremacy. Following the lead of NAACP labor secretary Herbert Hill’s pointed critique of the late Herbert Gutman’s work on biracial cooperation in southern labor unions, a number of scholars have stressed the centrality of racial divisions amongst American and southern workers, and especially the manner in which race and an inclination to maintain white supremacy have suffocated attempts at biracial cooperation.² Alan Draper, Timothy Minchin, Bruce Nelson, and Robert Norrell have provided convincing evidence that white supremacy often represented an insurmountable hurdle for the proponents of biracial labor cooperation.³ Yet, in spite of these scholars’ findings, southern labor history remains so rich, complex, and multi-layered that there have been moments of possibility–even if they were only fleeting moments–for biracial cooperation. Auburn workers’ experiment with unionization appears to have been one of them. Contrary to the findings of Hill and those of a like mind, extant evidence detailing the inner workings of the LIU at Auburn suggests that the organization achieved biracial cooperation. Furthermore, internal racial...