“There is serious resistance in the Midwest by meat packers to the bosses’ attempt to increase line speeds, and cut wages and health-care benefits in order to bolster their profits,” said John Pines, a meat packer here. “This includes dozens of efforts to organize packinghouse workers into the meatpacking union, strikes, and contract disputes. These struggles spread from Colorado to Illinois and from Ontario, Canada, to Texas and involve thousands of workers.”

Pines cited the strike of 570 workers at Quality Meat Packers in Toronto, Ontario, who are pressing to win back some of the 40 percent wage and benefits cut they were forced to accept six years ago (see article in this issue).

A strike at the Hunts Point meat market in the Bronx, New York, last spring resulted in the workers winning representation by the UFCW. Efforts to win union recognition have also taken place recently in Chicago, and Buffalo Lake, Minnesota.

There have been numerous efforts by packinghouse workers to organize and strengthen the union in the Midwest over the last half-decade.

One hot spot has been in Nebraska. Thousands of workers have participated in organizing drives there over the last four years. This has included efforts to organize several large plants into UFCW Local 271—including Nebraska Beef, Swift Cudahy, and Swift Northern States (then ConAgra) in Omaha. These plants have workforces of 1,000, 160, and over 400 respectively.

Edwin Fruit, a member of UCFW Local 1149 in Perry, Iowa, recounted the experiences of a recent Socialist Workers Party 2004 election campaign team that traveled through the central meatpacking region of the Upper Midwest. Socialist campaigners got a positive response, he said, including selling dozens of subscriptions to the Militant and its sister publication in Spanish Perspectiva Mundial.

The gathering took place at the same time as workers voted on a proposed contract at the Swift cattle slaughterhouse in Greeley, Colorado (see article in this issue).

“It was reported that workers at Swift yesterday voted by a margin of more than 90 percent for a new union contract that includes a provision that the union will have their own padlock, with separate keys, placed on the switch that controls the production line’s speed,” said Pines. “The relationship of forces in that plant between the bosses and workers will determine how effectively the workers can monitor and prevent the company from jacking up the line speed,” he emphasized. “The speed of the line is the question of questions in packing plants across the country today.”

Pines pointed to the importance of recent reports in the bourgeois press that the productivity rate of U.S. workers is bottoming out. “More and more the bosses are forced to hire new employees to keep up with their production demands, at the same time as they are driving to squeeze more productivity out of the hides of workers,” he said.

Earlier this year, after some workers called UFCW Local 1546 to help bring in the union, a six-month organizing effort took place at Stempede Meats in Bridgeview, Illinois, which has a workforce of 300. The workers lost the election, but the discussion is not over.

“Even though we lost this round in organizing a union at the plant, workers who voted against the UFCW in the election are already talking about how they made a mistake because of the speedup since the union defeat,” said Barbara Winslow, a meat packer who recently participated in the union organizing drive at Stampede. “People want to try again.”

“The central way in which we will be able to strengthen our participation in this resistance,” said Pines, “will be to carry out a radical and rapid shift in our efforts to acquire the skills necessary to work in the meatpacking industry and change jobs as needed. This will enable socialists across generational lines to participate jointly for the coming years in strengthening the unions.”

Pines said that the steering committee that organizes the work of socialist meat packers nationally will lead an effort in the next few months to train every socialist worker in the industry to be a butcher. “We need to be able to handle a knife, know how to do several cuts of meat, and have the flexibility to move from job to job when needed,” said Pines.

Paul Montoya described how he has begun to pick up boning and other cutting skills on the job in New York. “We have to pick up skills to be equipped to respond to the unfolding struggles,” he noted.

“This will mean that any preconceived notions about ‘target factories’ that we have prioritized getting into in the past—because of their size or other factors—must be secondary to getting hired in places where we can rapidly get training to become skilled butchers,” said Dean Richards, a meat packer from San Francisco.

James Harding, a meat packer in Washington, D.C., pointed out “that the most skilled butchers have respect and are looked to for leadership by other workers.”
 
 
Related articles:
Meat packers approve contract in Colorado with a say over line speed
Ohio opens new slaughterhouse in prison  
 
 
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