J. P. Stevens

One of the longest labor disputes in American history may end this weekend if the J.P. Stevens Co. and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union agree on a first union contract.

The nation's second largest textile maker and textile workers hope to end a 17-year struggle Sunday with a national settlement. A formal announcement of the agreement is scheduled Monday in Washington.

The contract will probably cover 2,500 workers at J.P.Stevens plants in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., where the union has been bargaining since 1974.

Sources say other principal terms of the agreement include using the Roanoke Rapid's contract as a model for unionizing plants in High Point, N.C., Allendale, S.C., Montgomery, Ala., and anywhere else the union might organize. They added the negotiators are now resolving "final details."

In return, the union would call off its four-year-old national consumer boycott of Stevens products.

Stevens' resistance to the union's organization of more than 34,000 production workers at more than 80 Stevens mills has resulted in 22 National Labor Relations Board rulings against it--making it one of the nation's leading labor law violators.

In April 1978, over 250 Harvard students rallied in behalf of the nationwide boycott of the J.P. Stevens Co. Several local stores and business agreed to boycott, including the Harvard Coop.

Last year the Cambridge City Council unanimously passed a resolution supporting the boycott and directing all city departments and agencies not to buy J.P.Stevens products.

Harvard, however, never joined the boycott. In 1979, President Bok, emphasizing the "heavy administrative burden" that would fall on the University, argued that if universities pressure corporations through boycotts, corporations could be encouraged to interfere with the internal policies of universities.

"I hope they come up with a just solution," Eric Ascherman '81, a member of the Radcliffe-Harvard Democratic-Socialist Organizing Committee, said yesterday.