A typical example of a runaway plant was the Briggs Manufacturing Corporation. Once an independent giant in the auto parts industry whose owner also owned the Detroit baseball team and ran the ball park as a kind of civic duty, Briggs was purchased by Chrysler in 1953. Nineteen years later, Briggs workers learned that their factory was to be moved to Tennessee within a year. The workers were told that they were guaranteed a job if they moved to Tennessee, too, but their wages would be $2.40 an hour instead of the Detroit rate of $4.30. The stunned workers also learned that Tennessee had a "right-to-work" law which hampered union activity and that the state was granting Chrysler an interest-free loan of $6.5 million. The Detroit workers discovered that they would lose their pensions, group insurance benefits, job security, workman's compensation claims, and numerous other "fringe" benefits. The affected workers were not the "new" workers written about in scholarly journals, but people whose average age was 45 and who had an average of 20 years' seniority. Many of them came from white ethnic groups. One hundred and fifty of these workers organized to fight the company. The insurgents could get no action from the union, so they turned to radical labor attorneys John Taylor and Ron Glotta, who promptly took legal action to protect the workers' financial interests.