Socialist meat packers discuss participation in growing struggles of workers and farmers
BY ANNE PARKER
AND JOHN STIVERS
MINNEAPOLIS-- "We are integrating ourselves into and working with a growing vanguard of workers who are attempting to withstand the employers' attacks in meatpacking and processing plants across North America," said John Benson, reporting to a meeting of socialist meat packers held here September 16-17.
"Over the last few months we have been part of a United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) organizing drive and a contract fight at Dakota Premium Foods in South St. Paul, Minnesota; a union organizing effort at a processing plant in Boston; a fight to defend the union against an employer lockout of workers at Fletcher's Fine Foods in Vancouver, British Columbia; and many other skirmishes. These are all part of the mounting battles between the employers and workers in this industry," added Benson, a slaughterhouse worker and UFCW member from Fresno, California.
"The conditions of intense line speed, increasing on-the-job injuries, lack of training, and daily harassment by the bosses that affronts our dignity is what is fueling the resistance in meatpacking plants on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border, whether in Toronto, Vancouver, the Canadian prairies, New York, Boston, Miami, Omaha, or Des Moines," Benson said.
The meeting of socialist meat packers here was attended by 54 participants who were either members of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States, the Communist League in Canada, or the Young Socialists from both countries. Ten YS members working in packing plants and who are deeply involved in these struggles participated in the meeting.
Norton Sandler, organizer of the SWP's Trade Union Committee, welcomed all the participants and pointed out the meat packers' meeting followed by a few weeks meetings of socialist workers in the International Association of Machinists, the United Steelworkers of America, and the United Transportation Union.
These gatherings took a close look at their particular industries and reaffirmed the party's course of having its members work at the center of production, with two or more of them employed in the same workplace, and in the same union and with common co-workers. These meetings helped lay the foundation for this gathering of North American socialist packinghouse workers. (See August 28 and September 11 issues of the Militant.)
Benson explained that the bosses' attacks and the resulting resistance has created a situation where the kind of explosions and leadership development that has taken place at Dakota Premium Foods can be expected to occur elsewhere. He noted the special place in these fights of immigrant workers, who are drawing on their class-struggle experience to begin to forge, along with other workers, a new fighting vanguard in packinghouses across North America.
On June 1, workers in that South St. Paul plant, the majority of whom are immigrants from Mexico, organized a seven-hour sit-down strike to protest the increase in production line speed, mounting injuries, and the company's policy of forcing injured workers to return to the line. On July 21, the workers voted by a 112-71 margin to be represented by UFCW Local 789. The company is challenging the results of the election and a ruling on that challenge from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is expected soon.
Benson also cited other recent examples of the ways packinghouse workers are resisting the meatpacking bosses.
At a plant in Marshalltown, Iowa, six workers on the kill floor walked off the job and forced the company to add two more workers to their crew, after the bosses initially refused to maintain the previous workforce of eight workers on that particular job.
In a Chicago plant, workers forced the company to back off from its demand that they work the Saturday following Labor Day with no overtime pay. In Toronto, 85 workers at Quality Meats, members of UFCW Local 175/633, signed a solidarity message to the workers fighting to unionize at Dakota Premium Foods.
Unionization struggle in New York
In the discussion, Don Miller described the struggle at the Hunts Point meatpacking industrial park on city-owned property in the Bronx in New York City. There, UFCW and Teamsters union organizers are fighting attempts by the bosses and New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani to use the courts and the cops to prevent union organizers from going onto the property to sign up unorganized workers. Workers at the Nebraska Land packing plant located at Hunts Point recently lost a union representation vote for the Teamsters by a narrow margin. On the day of the vote there was a big cop presence designed to intimidate workers near where the ballots were cast. At the plant where he works, Miller said, more than a dozen workers have been involved in efforts to organize a union.
Mike Bowen, who works at a Massachusetts meat processing plant, reported that as a new hire he ran into an effort by co-workers to sign up workers for the UFCW. "There have been previous efforts to organize the plant," he said. "They all failed. But the conditions are forcing workers to try again. Basic issues like the need for washroom breaks, lack of vacation pay, different and arbitrary pay rates, and injuries are behind this."
Beverly Brown, a member of UFCW Local 1518 in Vancouver, one of 400 workers locked out by Fletcher's Fine Foods, described the solidarity growing up between the Fletcher's workers and 225 strikers at Superior Poultry in nearby Coquitlam who are members of the same UFCW local. "They are threatening to close down Fletcher's if we don't take a 40 percent wage cut and other concessions," Brown explained. "The Superior Poultry workers, who are mostly immigrants, are fighting for their first contract. Some 25 workers from the Fletcher's picket line have gone down to the Superior Poultry line to give their support."
Karen Reeves reported that just last week a young worker at the Farmland processing plant in Albert Lea, Minnesota, was killed when he fell into a tumbler. "The government investigators concluded it was 'human error,'" she said, "but it comes from the speedup and drive for profits.
Sam Small from Washington, D.C., reported on the continuing struggle for unionization at the Smithfield Foods plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. With some 4,500 workers, this plant is the biggest hog cut and kill operation in North America. UFCW organizing drives have been unsuccessful there thus far and union organizers have been subject to widespread harassment and even physical attacks. In August, the UFCW filed a federal lawsuit charging Smithfield and the Bladen County Sheriff's Department with civil rights violations for beatings that union organizers were subjected to by company thugs deputized by the county Sheriff's department.
Job safety is key union question
Many meeting participants described the necessity for the union to fight for adequate training and safety on the job. Vancouver meat packer and Young Socialist Vince Johnson reported that recent new hires like himself were put on jobs that require the use of boning knives without receiving steel mesh gloves or other protective equipment. "I cut myself on the first day," he reported.
"Nobody in my department has adequate safety equipment, he said. "These fights to increase safety on the job and training will help strengthen the union."
Benson pointed out that "your safety on the job is ultimately not just how you hold the knife, as important as that is, but also how the workers stand up to the boss, and organize to defend themselves through the union."
Jim Williams, a UFCW member at the American Meat Packing Company in Chicago, explained that one result of the weakening of the union through the defeat of a 56-week strike in 1985-86 was the pressure on workers not to use the full three weeks they are allotted with a knife trainer. "Workers should fight to use the full three weeks," he said. "The union won this and we shouldn't give it up."
Build UFCW Local 789
Pablo Lomeli, a worker at Dakota Premium Foods, described how new workers like himself are recruited to the union by other fighters. "On my second day I asked a worker who was injured pushing cattle, 'How did you get hurt?' He explained to me that it wasn't only him, but others had also gotten hurt," Lomeli said, "and that was why the workers were trying to form a union. He then told me about the sit-down strike, the election, the NLRB hearings, and how the mood was different since workers took these actions."
Experiences like those Lomeli described take place every day in the plant, "where teams of union builders seek out new people and recruit them to the union, and teach them the union's history," stated Rudy Camino, who also is a union supporter at Dakota Premium.
In reintroducing the discussion on the second day of the meeting, Benson said that with the union representation election victory last July at Dakota Premium Foods, union supporters are "shifting from focusing on an in-plant organizing effort to building UFCW Local 789. We are partisans of this effort to build the union." The challenge, said Benson, is to work with others in the plant and with Local 789 officials to build the structures of this new union bargaining unit. This can only come out of fighting to defend the gains already won and standing up to the company's stalling tactics aimed at delaying contract negotiations. The involvement of an expanding number of workers who collaborate closely with Local 789 officials will be key to putting these new union structures together. Benson said what workers are doing to help prepare and circulate union material in the plant, including Local 789's publication the Workers' Voice, are an example of this kind of work.
Strategic alliance with working farmers
A Militant Labor Forum in South St. Paul on Saturday evening featured speakers Jack Ward, a coal miner and organizer of the steering committee of socialist workers in the United Mine Workers of America, and Jorge González, a union activist involved in the struggle at Dakota Premium Foods.
An important part of the meeting was a message received by the Militant Labor Forum from farmers Don and Ilene Moos. "We also wish to thank those who attended the milk strike in Bloomer, Wisconsin, on September 4," the message read. Two Dakota workers had traveled there to participate in a milk dump protest organized by Wisconsin farmers to protest milk prices that are below their cost of production. "It truly brought the labor worker and farmer a little closer in understanding how very similar we are in many ways." Dairy farmers are getting the lowest price for sale of their milk in 20 years, the Moos explained, and farmers are demanding the government grant a $14.50 floor price per 100 pounds of milk produced with a 3 percent cap on government purchases.
"We have a responsibility to explain to our co-workers how small farmers are exploited," said Benson in his report. "Unlike workers, they own their tools and the product of their labor. They fight to get the highest price for their products on the market to make a profit. But they become debt slaves to the banks and agribusiness. The value they create is stolen through social relations on the land under capitalism," Benson said.
"When workers and small farmers understand how each of the producing classes is exploited, the necessity of an alliance between workers in the factories and producers on the land to carry out a revolutionary struggle for a workers and farmers government becomes clearer. Farmers cannot be recruited to the communist movement simply on the basis of agreement on the need for workers and farmers to fight together. They will join if they understand the need for this alliance to make a socialist revolution," he said.
John Stivers, who works at Quality Meats in Toronto, reported on the participation of socialist meat packers from Detroit and Toronto in an August conference of 60 farmers in St. Mary's, Ontario, sponsored by Catholic Rural Life.
"The participants were trying to figure out the root cause of the crisis facing farmers and farm communities and what to do about it," said Stivers. One participant noted that she had had difficulty selling her hogs during the strike at Quality Meats in Toronto in 1998 while another farmer asked her what she had done to aid the strike.
SWP leader Norton Sandler said it is a life and death question for packing workers to become adept in explaining to their co-workers how small hog and cattle producers are being exploited by the meatpacking companies and to forge alliances with small producers on the land. He said meat packers tend to see the exploitation of other workers more easily than they do that of a small farmer.
Sandler said the bosses try to pit the small farmers against the workers, who they claim are depriving farmers of the opportunity to sell their livestock when they go on strike.
"One quarter of all jobs in Minnesota are connected to agriculture," said Tim Fisher. "As meat packers, we need to know how the cattle get from the farm to the kill floor. We need to know how the beef feedlot system works. We can't understand what the farmer is facing without knowledge of the food industry as a whole. We face speedup on the job in the factories at the expense of our health and safety," said Fisher. "Something similar is happening to farmers. Last year in Minnesota 24 farmers were killed while working."
Recruitment to the communist movement
At a recent event organized by UFCW Local 789, one worker announced that he had a "secret weapon." He pulled out a campaign leaflet for Margaret Trowe, the SWP candidate for vice president in the November election.
This story, reported by Benson in his report, was an illustration of the possibilities opening up for a regroupment of workers and fighting youth today in a revolutionary workers party.
Benson noted the significance of having 10 YS members attending the fraction meeting with equal decision-making votes on reports and for election of the fraction leadership. He stressed the importance of having different generations working together in the plants and the increasing possibilities for building the party and the Young Socialists.
As the socialist workers participate in these struggles, Benson said, they organize to introduce and sell Pathfinder books, the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and New International to fighting workers, farmers, and youth. Gaining a broader view of the world and a scientific understanding of the class struggle is crucial in forging a leadership of the working class. Benson raised the importance of a steady flow of party members of several generations, including those that are also YS members, who leave their job in industry and volunteer for several years to work in Pathfinder's printshop in New York. This is how the communist movement is able to make the books and pamphlets Pathfinder publishes available to working people and youth around the world.
The Socialist Workers Party, in collaboration with Communist Leagues in other countries and the Young Socialists, has launched a campaign sell 1,000 introductory subscriptions to the Militant, 350 subscriptions to Perspectiva Mundial, and 1,500 copies of the new Pathfinder pamphlet, The Working Class & the Transformation of Learning--The Fraud of Education Reform under Capitalism by Jack Barnes. The pamphlet is a basic explanation of the need for a socialist revolution. The campaign runs from September 9 through November 12.
Members of the SWP national UFCW fraction took a goal of selling 35 Militant and 35 Perspectiva Mundial introductory subscriptions, and 50 copies of the new Pathfinder pamphlet to co-workers and an additional 20 Militant and 35 PM subscriptions and 25 new pamphlets to other meat packers. The members of the UFCW fraction of the Communist League in Canada adopted a goal of 12 Militant and three Perspectiva Mundial subscriptions and 15 pamphlets.
At the conclusion of the meeting members from the national UFCW fractions in both countries met separately to elect national fraction steering committees.
Chris Hoeppner, a member of the UFCW in Detroit, and Norton Sandler contributed to this article.
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