Brown-Lung Cotton-Mill Blues

Setting on my front porch swing

I’m like a man forgotten

Head all filled up with angry thoughts

And lungs filled up with cotton

Fourteen years ago, the Textile Workers Union began their campaign to organize J. P. Stevens, the country’s second largest textile manufacturer. Yet today none of the 44,000 workers in Stevens’s 85 plants is under union contract. Through “massive violations of its employees’ rightsR...