Vol. 72/No. 30      July 28, 2008

Williamson, who works as a trimmer and is a shop steward, was speaking on a panel here the morning of July 11 as part of the Socialist Educational and Active Workers Conference. She and other union fighters and youth on the panel described the recent decades of struggle for workers’ and immigrant rights in the region, including the intensification of a number of these fights the past few years.

Panelists discussed the place of socialist workers as part of the vanguard leading those battles, as well as the growing interest in the Militant, which registers broader shifts in the class struggle in the region.  
 
Earlier battle for union
In 1991 workers at the South St. Paul plant where Williamson works, then known as Long Prairie Packing, had voted to be represented by the UFCW. The union was decertified 14 months later, after it was unable to win a contract.

Following that vote, the bosses forced meat packers to work harder, faster, and for longer hours. On-the-job injuries mounted. These conditions led to a seven-hour sit-down strike in June 2000. The fight sparked by the plantón, as it was referred to in Spanish by many of the participants, was successful in winning a union. It took another two years to win a contract.

Determined to get rid of the union, the Dakota bosses organized a decertification campaign as that initial contract was about to expire in 2007. “Black, Latino, white, and Native American workers resisted the company’s attempt to decertify the union,” said Williamson.

The bosses had tried to increase divisions among workers in the plant, who had been majority Latino. By hiring many workers who were Black, Native American, and white, including some who were on parole, management hoped to put a brake on militancy.

The bosses at Dakota were overconfident, Williamson said. Blinded by their profit drive, they did not take account of changes that have taken place in the working class over the last two years.

On May Day in 2006, the first political general strike in the United States took place, as hundreds of thousands of working people, mostly immigrants, stayed home from work and joined demonstrations for legalization of undocumented workers. At the Dakota plant, some 50 workers did not come to work that day. Hundreds of thousands around the country marched again on May 1, 2007, and tens of thousands did so this year as well.

At Dakota Premium Foods, workers rose to the challenge to defend Local 789 from decertification in 2007. They relaunched the Workers’ Voice, an in-plant newsletter that had first come out during the fight for a union that began in 2000.

Produced at the union hall by workers themselves, the newsletter became an important tool to forge unity and solidarity among workers in the plant. It answered the company’s lies, took up issues discussed at union meetings, and defended workers who came under attack, including Black workers subjected to racist abuse by supervisors.  
 
Decertification defeated
Last January workers voted 152-82 against decertification of the union. It was only after the union-busting effort failed that the bosses began real negotiations for a contract. They offered a 15-cent-per-hour raise with no back pay and 10 cents per hour more for perfect weekly attendance, as well as very restricted access to the plant for union representatives. The employers rejected the union’s demand to slow down the line speed. Workers sent a clear message back in May by rejecting the company’s offer in a 116-5 vote.

An improved contract offer was approved a week later by a 94-51 vote. The agreement included a 40-cent pay raise going back to July 2007, another 40 cents in July 2008, and 35 cents in future years, as well as more union access to the plant. The vote showed that the majority of workers felt substantial gains had been won, said Williamson.

“Workers gained a tremendous amount of confidence, and above all realized that you can win, but only if you fight,” she said.  
 
Response to socialist press
Tom Fiske, a textile worker and member of the SWP in Minneapolis, described the response that teams receive selling the Militant to packinghouse workers in the area. At Dakota Premium’s sister plant in Long Prairie, Minnesota, where workers are also members of UFCW Local 789, he and another Militant supporter sold 40 copies of the paper at a recent shift change.

He described a similar experience at PM Beef in Windom, Minnesota, where he and others sold copies of the Militant in the rain to more than 30 workers coming out of the plant, some of whom bought an extra copy for coworkers. Workers there won a union last summer.

Also speaking on the panel was Robert Silver, a member of the Young Socialists in the Twin Cities who participated in solidarity activities for the Dakota unionists. “Nothing demonstrated politics to me the way the struggle at Dakota Premium did,” he said. Silver also took part in several meetings around the country on the book Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution.

“Young people I talked with saw the fight and victory of workers at Dakota and couldn’t help but draw analogies with the fight and victory of workers in Cuba,” he said.

Silver joined the SWP shortly after the decertification vote was defeated by Local 789 in January. Two others have recently joined the party in Minneapolis as well.  
 
‘Workers are not defeated’
The U.S. government responded to the May Day immigrant rights mobilizations by carrying out nationwide raids on six Swift packing plants in December 2006. They arrested about 1,300 workers. “The party responded with the Militant, selling 1,000 copies of the paper and 100 subscriptions in Iowa and across the Upper Midwest,” said Frank Forrestal, the organizer of the Des Moines branch of the SWP.

“This May’s raid at Agriprocessors, Inc. in Postville, Iowa, reflects the sharpening class conflict in the Midwest,” Forrestal said. “We joined in the spontaneous pickets and protests against the raid that involved immigrants, high school students, and a significant number of U.S.-born workers, Black and white. Thirty subscriptions to the Militant were sold in Waterloo, [Iowa,] the town where the detainees were incarcerated.

“These workers are not defeated,” Forrestal emphasized. “Many of those who were arrested and released with ankle bracelets proudly marched afterward in protests in Waterloo. The demonstrations were spirited and angry.”

“The fights for legalization and for unionization go hand in hand,” said Karen Carlson, a member of the Des Moines branch of the SWP. Carlson, who now works at a packing plant near Des Moines, was employed at the Swift plant in Marshalltown, Iowa, in 2006 when it was raided by immigration cops. She joined in organizing solidarity for her coworkers jailed in the raid.

Julian Santana, a kill floor worker at Dakota, said, “All of us at work depend on our coworkers doing the job well and safely. The goal of communists is to become competent in using a knife so we can engage in politics on the job and in the union movement.” Santana was an organizer of the workshops held at the conference aimed at helping socialist workers spanning several generations improve their skills for that purpose.
 
 
Related articles:
Conference prepares for new class battles
Socialist Educational and Active Workers Conference draws 380 participants
Socialist conference sends greetings to Cuban Five  
 
 
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