Most of the participants in the meeting were members of the UFCW. Others were working in meatpacking plants not yet organized by a union. A meat packer from Vancouver, Canada, who is a member of the Communist League also took part.

John Benson, a UFCW meat packer at Harris Ranch Beef in Fresno, California, gave the main report to the meeting. He pointed to news articles two days before the gathering stating that the largest growth of income inequality took place during the 1990s, with the wages of the lowest 20 percent actually declining.

"This shows that the capitalist expansion was not generalized," he stated. "The capitalists increased their profits on our backs--based on production-line speedup, many more working injured, indignities inflicted by the bosses on the job every day, and the cutting of sick days and health insurance. These are the conditions that have sparked the resistance we see in the coal industry, in garment and textile, in packing and in broader social movements like the fight against police brutality and in defense of immigrant rights."

Socialist workers can take advantage of these openings by following the lines of proletarian resistance in city and countryside, well beyond developments in their unions or the plants they find themselves in at the moment, Benson said. "A timely response to these developments is crucial if we are going to take full advantage of them," he emphasized.  
 
‘What Is to Be Done?’
"We have to recognize the importance of our propaganda victories," Benson said. He referred to passages by Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin in What Is to Be Done?, one of the founding documents of the Bolshevik movement in Russia. "Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without," Lenin said, "that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelationship between all classes."

Success in expanding the readership of the revolutionary press and books among meat packers is one of the best gauges of the effectiveness of our political work and the degree to which socialist workers are able to carry out the crucial work Lenin described, Benson said.

The socialist meat packers decided to concentrate on meeting their goals in the Militant subscription drive the week immediately after their gathering and to organize other packinghouse workers to attend the June 14–17 Active Workers Conference at Oberlin, Ohio.

Steve Brennan, a packinghouse worker from Vancouver, Canada, described the interest that a layer of workers who recently went through a strike at Superior Poultry and a lockout at Fletcher Fine Foods have developed in both the Militant and Pathfinder books. Brennan said one worker has attended classes at the Pathfinder Bookstore in that city since the end of the Superior Poultry strike. Others have participated in Militant Labor Forum programs in that city.

Bill Sather reported that UFCW partisans are gearing up for a third attempt to win a union representation vote at the plant where he works near Boston. He said the initial impact of the defeat of a previous vote has passed and interest in organizing a union has picked up again.

The ongoing struggle by workers at Dakota Premium Foods in South St. Paul, Minnesota, to win union representation was described by Young Socialist members Bobbi Negrón and Lawrence Mikesh. Both are members of UFCW Local 789 at the plant. Workers at Dakota won a union election a year ago by a wide margin after a sit-down strike, sparked by increased line speed and on-the-job injuries and abusive behavior by management. The local National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) rejected a company appeal of the vote and ratified the UFCW victory. But the company has refused to recognize the union and has stalled union certification through an appeal to the NLRB. Months have passed with no ruling on the case.

Negrón and Mikesh cited numerous in-plant skirmishes this year illustrating the continued strong support for the union and workers’ determination to resist the company’s effort to wear them out. These battles have included "the war of the stickers," with most workers in the kill floor displaying union stickers on their hard hats despite threats and demands by management for their removal. Mikesh noted that union supporters have stepped up activity in the company’s kill floor, helping to set the pace for many others in the plant. This includes delegations of workers who marched to the company office to defend fellow unionists harassed by the bosses or forced to work while injured.

"We can’t just focus on the skirmishes in the plant, however," Negrón said. "Linking up Dakota workers with struggles in other factories and social questions, like actions against police brutality, is essential to take the next steps in our fight for a contract."

The struggle at Dakota was strengthened recently when workers at Long Prairie Packing, in Long Prairie, Minnesota, stopped production in the boning department for an hour and a half, demanding that the bosses slow down the speed of the production line. The workers belong to UFCW Local 789, Negrón said, and the Long Prairie plant is owned by Rosen’s Diversified Inc., the seventh-largest beef packer in the country. The company also owns the Dakota plant (see front page article).

Seven meat packers from Long Prairie bought subscriptions to Perspectiva Mundial during a recent visit by socialists to a trailer park near that factory, said Tom Fiske, a worker in another meatpacking plant in South St. Paul.

Socialists have made advances in getting established in packinghouses in Omaha, Nebraska. Two workers from the area described the UFCW effort to extend union organization to additional plants in that city--a center of the meatpacking industry--and the response they are receiving from workers to socialist propaganda.

In his report, Benson said that at their meeting in September, "socialist packinghouse workers concluded that following the lines of resistance would lead us to work in Long Prairie, and Omaha. But we didn’t know it would also be on to Fort Morgan, Colorado."

A three-day strike by more than 1,200 workers at the Excel slaughterhouse in Fort Morgan took place at the end of February. Workers walked out to protest provisions of a contract offered by Excel, which included meager wage raises and increases in health insurance deductions from paychecks. They went on strike despite opposition by officials of the Teamsters union that organizes the plant. Police arrested two of the strike leaders after the union meeting where a majority approved the walkout, and charged them with "inciting a riot." Socialists visiting the area have found many of these workers are looking for a revolutionary perspective, explained a packinghouse worker from Omaha. A team of socialist miners, meat packers, and garment workers went to Fort Morgan and nearby Greeley, Colorado, in mid May. At plant gates and door-to-door visits, they sold 12 Perspectiva Mundial subscriptions to meat packers in the area.  
 
Workers attracted to Cuban Revolution
Arrin Hawkins, a Young Socialists member and a meat packer in Chicago, was active in a committee that hosted a tour for Cuban youth leaders Yanelis Martínez and Javier Dueñas in April. She explained how she had encouraged co-workers to attend the meetings where the young Cubans spoke. Though they did not make it to any of the speaking engagements, "Three of these workers are now interested in taking part in the Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange coming up in July," she said. "We will try to bring some of them to the Active Workers Conference in Ohio."

Participants from Pittsburgh described how the work of the Socialist Workers Party branch and the Young Socialists there was strengthened over the last two months by their involvement in a fight to reverse the firing of packinghouse worker Omari Musa.

Musa, who is Black, was hired at a plant in January through a temporary agency, in common with many meatpacking workers in the United States today. He was fired while on probation because of racist discrimination widespread at that company, the socialists concluded. In talking with civil rights organizations like the NAACP and others in the labor movement, socialists in Pittsburgh learned of other instances of job discrimination against workers who are Black in the area--especially in relatively better paying jobs from steel mills to packinghouses to the construction trade--and found new openings to collaborate with others fighting racism and defending affirmative action.

As a result of his fight to reverse the firing, Musa was encouraged to attend the national convention of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU), which took place at the end of May in Orlando, Florida. Musa told the meeting here that issues discussed there included the struggle to defend voting rights for African Americans and support for framed-up members of the International Longshoremen’s Association in Charleston, South Carolina, including the building of a June 9 Rally for Racial Justice and Workers’ Rights in Columbia, South Carolina.

Two participants arrived the second day of the meeting from Cincinnati, where they had joined protest activities against the police killing of Timothy Thomas. Chris Hoeppner from Detroit described the sustained character of the protests in Cincinnati and the space that has been taken by workers and young people through the struggle. He reported great interest in socialist literature, including sales of eight Militant subscriptions the previous day at the demonstration.

The discussion at the fraction meeting revealed many ways in which workers from Mexico and other countries are helping to lead workers’ struggles today, from initiatives to take back May Day as a workers’ holiday, to the large protests in California and other states for the right of immigrants to obtain a drivers license.

"The requirement that your drivers license has your unique Social Security number with a digitized photo ID, your current address, and other information is the rulers’ way of introducing a national identity card through the back door, using prejudice and discrimination against immigrants," Benson said in his report.

San Francisco Bay Area meat packer Deborah Liatos said, "Since April there have been weekly actions around immigrant rights. Our coworkers have been discussing this because the lack of drivers licenses has a huge impact on them. Many who participate in these protests are workers, and some carry signs that read, ‘We create the wealth, we demand our rights.’"

"In the Twin Cities, where leaders of the fight for the union at Dakota Premium Foods were among the organizers of a May 6 action of 1,000 around this issue, we were slow to see this protest as part of the broad working-class resistance," Tom Fiske said. As a result socialists did not take part in that meeting. They have since drawn the lessons of that default, and have thrown themselves into this ongoing struggle.

On the evening of June 2, UFCW fraction meeting participants joined others from the Des Moines area in attending a Militant Labor Forum entitled "Cuba and the Coming American Revolution," featuring presentations by Joel Britton, a packinghouse worker from Chicago and longtime SWP leader, and Randy Jasper, a Wisconsin dairy and grain farmer (see article on page 11).

The two had recently participated in events in Cuba celebrating the 40th anniversary of the founding of National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP), and in an international conference on organic agriculture that took place in Havana. They urged the audience to help publicize ANAP’s call to build a World Forum on Food Sovereignty to take place in Havana September 4–7. They explained that an increasing number of workers and small farmers squeezed by falling commodity prices and rising costs in the United States realize that something fundamental is wrong with the system.

"Anyone who participates in this conference of Cuban farmers will have a chance to consider the revolutionary road that the Cuban people took as a realistic option for the working people in this country," stated Britton.

Rachele Fruit is a member of UFCW Local 1625 in Tampa, Florida. Argiris Malapanis is a meat packer in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.  
 
 
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