I was beginning to wonder if I would ever get to the end of this chapter.I included the source of the book at the bottom of this entry,as I am feeling lazy,and did not want to add the over 300 footnotes in the chapter.You also might want to take note when,this polluting bunch(the whole planet,99% have them to thank for the C8 in your blood,) turned to financing and such as their new hobby. Delaware must be a real S$*thole, with this bunch owning the State...

... Out of some 84,000 DuPont workers, there were only 32 independent unions of more than 100 members each; most of the plants had no union at all. The Steelworkers’ drive, led by Elmer Chatak, had been successful in getting the endorsement of the executive boards of 13 of the independent unions, and DuPont Headquarters was clearly getting worried. The rave reviews the Steelworkers paper, Steel Labor, gave Behind the Nylon Curtain and the Nader Report, The Company State, in September, 1975, was equally unwelcome, as was the publicity given in October to charges that DuPont’s laying off of two union officials in Richmond, Virginia, who had been critical of company policies was, according to one of the leaders, George Cobb, “a political move to try to stop the biggest movement against the DuPont Company in the last 20 years.” 210

But what really concerned Shapiro and other managers were the growing ties between DuPont workers and consumer/community advocates like Ralph Nader. In January, 1976, over 300 dissident DuPont workers representing 30 to 40 plants rallied in Richmond under the chairmanship of a laid-off worker, Frank H. Eastman. The rally was an attempt to get workers to use their ownership of stock to vote for a proxy resolution which asked for improved pension benefits for DuPont’s blue-collar workers. At the previous annual meeting, Chairman Shapiro had ruled an employee pension proposal out of order, insisting that pensions were not an issue for a national DuPont decision but should be worked out at local plants. The workers, who argued that the current pension plan allowed management to raise benefits for white-collar workers while offering a token and unequal raise for blue-collar pensioners, knew that Shapiro’s ruling was an attempt to shatter the negotiating strength of the workers into scores of different local plant fragments. When the Richmond local union took the lead in organizing nationwide Du Pont workers’ opposition, Wilmington headquarters handed the Richmond workers an unusual Christmas message: their plant was to be closed down, allegedly because of declining cellophane sales.

Undeterred, the Richmond workers the following month hosted representatives from Du Pont plants as far away as Indiana, Iowa, Alabama and Massachusetts in what one organizer called “the biggest movement in the labor field since John L. Lewis led them out of the coal mines.” 211 Ralph Nader gave a two-and-one-half hour speech and question-and-answer session, charging Delaware with being “a political and corporate plantation. They got the whole system rigged against you,” he said. “To call it paternalism is to be too charitable.” Delaware law protected the DuPonts from reforms, and he urged the workers to lobby for new laws that would guarantee stockholder rights, more worker control over company practices and policies which affected them, and strict disclosure requirements that would reveal how managers and directors of large corporations use depreciation and investment credits to hide their real profits from workers and stockholders. “It’s ridiculous that an international corporation like DuPont is chartered by the State of Delaware.” 212
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/12/part-14-dupont-dynasty-behind-nylon.html