“We were shocked and very happy,” said Jim Kelley, 26, a chicken yard driver at the plant, in an interview with the Militant. “Most of my co-workers couldn’t believe it. On Saturday, the day after the vote, the workers were upbeat, but management made themselves scarce.”

“At a certain point, the majority of us didn’t care if we got fired. We weren’t going to let the bosses continue their abusive treatment just because of one’s immigration status,” added Salvador Sánchez, a worker from Mexico.

“They are ecstatic,” Donna McDonald, president of UFCW Local 271, told the Omaha World-Herald, referring to the new members of the local. McDonald said contract negotiations will begin in approximately one month, when the union will seek a wage increase, more regular work hours, and better treatment.

MBA Poultry is located on the perimeter of a cornfield in the small town of Tecumseh. This rural community of 1,700 residents sits 90 miles south of Omaha. The plant manufactures the Smart Chicken brand from slaughter to packaging and distribution. Most of the workers hail from Latin America and Asia. A smaller percentage are U.S.-born.

“In this town, unless you’re a farmer or a businessman, the only two places to work are the State Penitentiary or MBA,” explained Bryce Fetterolf, an MBA worker since 2002. “At MBA about 80 percent of the workers are Hispanic. I commend my Hispanic co-workers for not letting the pressures blind them. The company tries to scare them, using threats of no-match letters and other things. And in a rural area, where else can you work? Commuting means gas, car, and expense. We all stuck together. They didn’t divide and they didn’t conquer.”

This union victory caps a number of efforts to organize MBA. In 1999, the workers voted down the union by a narrow margin. Another organizing effort in 2001 did not lead to a vote.

The union began this third attempt in September, coming on the heels of its September 2003 victory at the Casa de Oro tortilla plant in Omaha.

“The workers contacted us and said they wanted us to organize the plant,” said Javier Espinoza, a UFCW organizer. “They told us they wanted the union. Through the drive, a workers committee met with us to plan out activities to win their co-workers to the union. Without this committee, a victory couldn’t have happened.”

“We have no afternoon breaks,” said Fetterolf, who regularly attended the workers meetings. “Processing would work 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 or 8:00 p.m.—a 14 hour shift! Yet in the kill department we rarely clocked 40 hours. We have no access to drinking water on the floor, and have only four paid holidays. We are allowed 20 minutes weekly for bathroom breaks, with workers being suspended or fired for exceeding their quota. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. We won the union, and now they can’t run us over any more.”

The company aggressively campaigned to convince the workers that a union plant was not in their interest. “They hung up ‘vote no’ posters,” said Kelley. “They conducted three anti-union meetings, with the president himself speaking at the last one. They hung up three or four letters in the plant, and sent us a ‘Union No’ package in the mail. But we campaigned harder.”

The election at MBA was part of a larger organizing campaign launched by the UFCW in June of 2000. Through this effort, the union looks to organize the roughly 4,000 meat packers who work in the meatpacking industry in the Omaha area. In addition to MBA and Casa de Oro, workers at a smaller dry sausage plant and the Swift & Co. beef slaughterhouse have also won union recognition during this drive. Workers at Nebraska Beef lost a union representation election in 2001.

Workers at Swift & Co. in Omaha, who won union recognition in May 2002 after a hard fight, extended their solidarity and experience to the workers.

“It is important to support these workers because they face the same things we faced when we began our fight for the union,” said a Swift worker with 22 years on the kill floor. “Our union president Donna told us about their workers committee meetings, and between three and five of us would go. We offered our support, and some of our experience. We collected solidarity signatures from our co-workers, and sent messages of support. We traveled down several times to help handbill outside the plant. The president also wrote a leaflet encouraging our co-workers to support the MBA workers by traveling to Tecumseh, and we distributed it inside the Swift plant.”

“On Friday morning, their election day, three of us left Omaha at 2:30 a.m. and headed to Tecumseh,” said Juan Rodriguez, 61, who has worked at Swift for five years. “We were outside the gate with the organizers, yelling ‘Yes! Yes! Sí se puede! Ra-ra-ra!’ We had a sign that said ‘At Swift we voted Union Yes and won.’ At 6:00 a.m. we left for Omaha, and worked our shift on the kill floor. I’m so happy they won, because now there are more of us. We’re growing.”

“Everyone really liked the message of support from the Swift workers,” said Kelley. “I myself handed out a whole bunch, and you could see them floating around the plant.”

Kelley is working on a message of solidarity for the striking coal miners in Utah, which he wants to get some co-workers to sign. “I wanted to hold off on the message until after our election, because I knew our victory would inspire them.”

According to the World-Herald, Local 271 President McDonald told the Omaha daily that “the UFCW plans to bring its organizing efforts back to Omaha meatpacking plants.” After distributing literature and getting workers to sign petition cards at a number of Omaha plants, the article explains, “The union will then target whichever company’s employees are most receptive to its message.”

Lisa Rottach, a member of UFCW Local 271, works on the kill floor at Swift & Co.  
 
 
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