The workers were given no warning of the shutdown. AMPAC told them the company did not have to abide by the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, which requires companies to inform employees 60 days in advance of a plant closing. The bosses at AMPAC claim the law does not apply to them because the plant was closed by an order of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) after inspectors found unsanitary conditions.

In the Exito article, a USDA official is quoted as saying they never ordered the plant closed. According to spokeswoman Carol Blake, the USDA did temporarily revoke AMPAC's license, but when the company submitted a list of actions to improve sanitary conditions at the plant "we were in agreement with the proposals of the company and we were awaiting other measures when...AMPAC decided to close instead of continuing with the process of inspections."

The AMPAC workers are demanding two months severance pay, extension of medical benefits, unpaid vacation pay, and two half-days pay that the company still owes them.  
 
'What happened was not an error'
At a Militant Labor Forum here January 12, workers discussed the fight at AMPAC as well as other labor struggles in the Chicago area. Rufino Pena, a leader of the fight with 27 years at AMPAC, pointed out: "Human beings commit errors, but what happened here was not an error. What happened was horrible.... We had a right to be notified. We have a right to severance pay. We will keep fighting for the two days pay and also vacation pay."

Silvia Contreras, a worker with 18 months in the plant, spoke of the injustice of telling workers, "some with 20 or 30 years in the plant, right before the holidays, that all our benefits are cut off." She said many workers, like herself, are in the middle of medical treatments that they now cannot pay for.

Several workers from the Latino Union, which has supported the AMPAC workers in their struggle, spoke at the forum. Jose Landaverde, director of the Latino Union, described struggles of day laborers in Chicago against the abuses of the temporary agencies, a fight that the Latino Union has helped lead. He pointed to efforts by the Latino Union to link up fights of temporary workers with those of permanent employees, giving as an example the case of a strike at Appetizers, where the Latino Union helped organize workers at a temporary agency to refuse work at Appetizers during the strike.

Joel Britton, an AMPAC worker and Socialist Workers Party leader, pointed to the potential for deepening struggles against the "dog-eat-dog system of capitalism whose crimes we are hearing documented tonight." He gave as examples the struggles of workers in Argentina and the push forward given to the class struggle in the United States by the big influx of immigrants in recent years.

Britton cited the USDA spokesperson's statement in Exito, saying this revelation can be taken advantage of by AMPAC workers to seek official UFCW backing for the fight to punish this meat boss for violating the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.  
 
 
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