The contract includes major concessions from both seasonal and year-round workers. It terminates about 150 union tractor-trailer operators and replaces them with contract workers. The company also won the elimination of overtime pay for farm employees, which the union had gained in the 1970s. Health insurance for seasonal workers will no longer be part of the union plan, union officials report, and co-payments and other health-care costs are 25 percent higher across the board.

“There has been an injustice done to all the workers,” striker Augustine Batista, 49, told the Militant. Batista is a truck driver who has worked for Okeelanta for four seasons and will lose his job at the end of this one. “We were out there fighting for everyone and we ended up losing just about everything. I voted no. I didn’t accept it.”

Many workers said they felt they had no alternative but to accept the contract in order to save the union. “A lot of workers are heartbroken,” said Javier Almazan, the president of Local 2152, in a phone interview after the vote. “But in ratifying the contract, every union member who was on strike will go back to work.”

Tractor-trailer operators whose jobs are being outsourced will work only through the end of the harvest season in February or March, said Almazan. Tractor-trailer trucks are used to transport sugarcane from the fields to the mill.

Like the harvester and other farm equipment operators and laborers in the fields, where the harvest is completely mechanized, these workers will no longer receive premium pay for overtime work, unlike the mill and refinery workers. According to company spokespeople, farm workers are “exempt” from overtime pay under state and federal laws. The union had forced Florida Crystals to pay farm workers a premium for work over 50 hours, as part of winning union representation for field workers after a strike in 1972. This was an exception in the industry.  
 
Bosses left Cuba after revolution
Florida Crystals is part of the sugar empire of the Fanjul family. Its property encompasses 180,000 acres of plantation land in south Florida, three sugar mills, one rice mill, a distribution center, and extensive holdings in the Dominican Republic. The Fanjuls were one of the wealthiest of the capitalist families that dominated the sugar industry in Cuba before 1959. Its property was nationalized after workers and farmers overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship at the time and established a revolutionary government. The Fanjuls’ extensive art collection—now estimated to be worth $20 million to $60 million—was nationalized as well. Along with one of their mansions, it became Cuba’s National Museum of Decorative Arts.

Many workers on the picket line said the Fanjuls used their political influence to get police to limit picketing and control news coverage—keeping news of the strike out of the local Spanish-language press, and distorting coverage to the company’s advantage against the union.

At first strikers crowded onto the shoulder of Route 27 with signs defending the union, but police forced them behind barriers away from the highway.

Under heavy police protection, the company brought several busloads of scabs into the plant past hundreds of chanting strikers from day one of the walkout, workers report.

Almazan told the press that 600 of the 900 union members had signed up for picket duty. But some stayed on the job, along with crews organized by labor contractors. Despite the company’s use of scabs, local union vice president Mike Myers estimated that sugar production was cut to one-third of capacity.

Strikers set up four giant grills to cook food for the hundreds on the picket line. “I don’t know how long we’re going to be on the line, but we’ve got to show the company we’re sticking together,” said Enrique Cibrian, 43, a heavy equipment operator who has worked at the mill for 17 years.  
 
Solidarity from other unions
Solidarity came from sister IAM Local 57 at U.S. Sugar in Clewiston and Pahokee and from UNITE-HERE Local 25-70 at the Point Blank Body Armor garment plant in Oakland Park.

A delegation of garment workers from Point Blank was led by local president Umberto de la Cruz, who spoke to the pickets through a bull horn, summarizing the lessons he had drawn from six months of picket duty fighting for union representation at Point Blank. “You have got to remain united,” he told the strikers.

The visiting unionists were given ribs and introduced to all the pickets, including Burley Adams, a union veteran who helped lead the fight to extend union organization to the farm workers about 32 years ago.

“I stood in this corner in 1972 for the same reason I’m standing on this corner today,” Adams told reporters. He said the workers now faced losing “what took us so long to get.”

The bosses’ last offer was worse than their initial proposal. “There are some things that are non-negotiable,” a company spokesperson told the press. The company withdrew its offer of an early retirement plan, strikers report, and took off the table severance packages to the fired truck drivers, who are seasonal workers, some with decades of seniority. About half of the 700 strikers were seasonal, working only during the five-month sugarcane harvest.

Local 57 faces a similar challenge in its contract negotiations with U.S. Sugar, which has announced the closing of the Bryant mill in Pahokee, Florida, and the elimination of more than 300 union jobs. Production will be concentrated in Clewiston, where the mill and refinery will be expanded and modernized.

Local 57 members struck U.S. Sugar for six days in 1998, holding the line against company demands for cuts in their guaranteed work week.  
 
 
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