Classroom Activities to accompany Piece Work

Respond by writing:

• Interview a parent, grandparent, or other adult about his or her experience in a working class job. This could include any area of manufacturing work such as textiles, furniture, tobacco, plastics, or steel; farm labor such as tobacco, poultry, hog, or corn growing; service work, such as plumbing, carpentry, electrical, heating and air. Compare your interviewee’s experiences with one of the characters in the book.

• Write about your own work experience; consider topics such as working for someone else, working in retail or service jobs, wage earning, working at piece rate, and relationships between/among workers. Compare your experience to one of the characters in the book.

• Write a persona poem in the voice of a character performing a particular job. It may be someone working at Wal-Mart or McDonald’s, or a teacher at school, a mail carrier, accountant or other place of employment. Try to capture their personality by what they say and the words they use to say it.

Respond by searching deeper:

• Research the history of the attempts and failures to unionize textiles in the South.

• Read news articles and commentary about migrant workers in North Carolina. Which industries depend upon migrant workers? Describe the lives of the workers.

• Learn about the fire at the Imperial Foods chicken processing plant in 1991 in Hamlet, NC.

• Learn about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City in 1911.

• Compare the agrarian South with the urban South. How are they different? What values and ways of life in the agrarian South are important to hold onto? What values and ways of life in the urban South are important?

Respond by exploring literature, art, music, or film:

• Read selections from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. How do the lives of the characters in his village in the early 1900’s compare with people today?

• Read Doug Marlette’s The Bridge. Compare the events of the book with the history of textile unions in North Carolina.

• Look at entries from Like a Family, interviews with people living in textile company towns before labor laws and strict regulations. Compare those conditions to conditions in the mills of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries.

• Read selections from Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South. How did the stories of these women’s lives compare to those of the women in Piece Work?

• Listen to James Taylor’s “Millworker.” Look at the necessity---history, economy, and socialization---of the move from farm to mill in the agrarian South. Compare it to the move to China and elsewhere, as manufacturing continues to chase cheap labor.

• Listen to Sweet Honey and the Rock’s “Are My Hands Clean?” What ethical implications does that song suggest? Is this a problem that needs to be solved.

• Watch the film Norma Rae. How is the plant in Piece Work like the Roanoke Rapids plant in the film? How it is different? What advantages do the workers in the Piece Work plant have that the Roanoke Rapids workers do not?

• Watch the China segment in the film, Wal-Mart: The High Price of Low Cost, for a first-hand look at conditions of factories in that country and interviews with workers. Summarize the conditions and respond to them as if you were one of the workers in the film.

Respond with activity:

• Dramatize a selection of poems from Piece Work.

• Trace the history of a t-shirt you own. See if you can find out where the cotton was grown, where the fabric was sewn, and how it got to you.

• Write a song that tells the story of the working people.

• Visit a factory. See first-hand how something is made, from beginning to end. Note the smells, sounds, and activities of the workers.

• Visit a cotton growing farm. Learn about the difficulties cotton farmers face.

• Prepare and serve a banquet such as the one served in “August Night in Red Spring.” Sing.

Examine values questions that rise from the reading and discussion:

• How do our American lifestyles encourage the abuse of workers both in the U.S. and globally?

• What’s more important, work or family? Why? How can one maintain a balance?

• What can we do individually or collectively to ensure ethical working conditions both here and globally?