Despite high expectations, RCA's presence in Memphis started and ended in labor controversies. After trying and failing to block organizing efforts in Camden and Bloomington, RCA immediately conceded the unionization of the Memphis plant in order to make sure the workers would choose the union of RCA's choice, the International Union of Electrical Workers (the union launched as an anticommunist answer to the UE), rather than risk having both the Memphis and Bloomington assembly plants organized by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. In the advent of a strike at one of the plants, the operations in the other would continue unaffected. As the International president of the IBEW explained in a letter to the International president of the IUE, "The cause of our present problem is, of course, the Company's massive effort to separate the Home Instrument Division for bargaining purposes so that in the future they can whipsaw us against one another to their advantage and to the disadvantage of our collective members." Despite such clarity of vision as to management's intentions, each union baited the other into an ugly jurisdictional dispute that gave the company the upper hand.

Little more than two months after the slaying of Dr. King, Virgil Grace, IUE Local 730's black president, penned a manifesto that reflected the new militancy. "This Local Union has, for almost a year and a half," he wrote, "explored every avenue searching for evidence to substantiate the theory that the management of RCA Memphis is even remotely interested in the individual employee, his problems or his welfare." Unable to "uncover even a shred" of evidence to substantiate this idea, the local leadership found management to be "masters of deception'' who "have been weaving tangled webs, trying desperately to thwart the responsible efforts of the IUE Local 730 to prevent our members from being raped of their dignity and pride." The membership had ordered him to tell the company that the "day of reckoning is at hand." He took the company to task for violating not just the spirit of the contract but the fundamental rules of human decency as well:

The days of slavery and all its attendant misery was abolished a century ago. We will not allow RCA to institute it all over again. RCA must realize that our foreman is not our lord and master and the Corporation does not own us body and soul. We have stood by too long and watched the grievance machinery choke up with garbage, which should have been settled without a grievance. We have been content with crumbs, when the whole cake was rightfully ours. We are not convinced [that] the no strike clause in our National Agreement prohibits this Local Union from taking action against a Company who would not stop short of anything in their mad dash to attain the almighty production quota and, in many cases, more .... We do not hold to the theory that a Company can, because of a no strike clause, do anything it wishes without regard for contractual obligation, moral obligations or the basic principles by which all members of society are governed.