Looking Back at the Jay Paper Strike

Editor’s Note: Julius Getman will be available for interviews on May 1 and May 2. Contact USM’s Media Relations Office at the numbers at the top of this release for help in arranging interviews.

Julius Getman, author of the book on the International Paper strike in Jay, “The Betrayal of Local 14: Paperworkers, Politics, and Permanent Replacements,” will visit the University of Southern Maine to talk about the strike at 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, May 2 in the Woodbury Campus Center on USM’s Portland campus.

Eddie Gorham, president of the Maine AFL-CIO, leaders of the Jay strike and members of the Greater Portland Labor Council will share their perspectives on the strike in a discussion following Getman’s talk. An exhibit of photographs depicting Maine Labor History, on view at the Salt Institute last fall, will be displayed in the Campus Center. The discussion will be followed by a reception.

Getman, the Earl E. Sheffield Regents Chair at the University of Texas-Austin School of Law, is considered an authority in labor studies. His book on the 1987-88 International Paper strike presents the strike as one of the most important in recent U.S. labor relations, and describes how flaws in labor law shaped the strike outcome. In his research on the strike, he also found that the strikers became active in bringing environmental problems of the paper industry to public scrutiny, and he found that the strike transformed the Jay community and the lives of the former strikers. Getman is the author of five other books and many articles on labor relations and labor law in leading law journals. Formerly, he was a professor of law at Yale, Stanford and Indiana Universities.

For more information, contact Michael Hillard, associate professor of economics, at USM at 780-4416.