Today's Labor Quote: Bruce Springsteen and Willie Nelson

In December 1985, Springsteen and Nelson wrote a letter to 3M, the Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Company, asking them not to shut down the company’s video and audio tape facility in Freehold, New Jersey, Springsteen’s hometown.

″We know that these decisions are always difficult to make,” Springsteen and Nelson wrote, “but we believe that people of good will should be able to sit down and come up with a humane program that will keep those jobs and those workers in Freehold.″

3M went ahead with their plans and on February 28, 1986, in response to the layoff of 450 union members at the factory in New Jersey, every worker at a 3M factory in South Africa, walked off the job in sympathy.