—ON THE PICKET LINE—

Maggie Trowe, Editor

 

Brooklyn warehouse workers vote to join Steelworkers union

NEW YORK — Workers at two B&H Photo Video warehouses in Brooklyn voted 200-88 Nov. 4 to join the United Steelworkers union.

“It was a higher vote than I expected,” Javier Jordan, who works at the Navy Yard site, told the Militant Nov. 15. “We voted for the union because the wages are too low and there’s a lot of discrimination.” Workers are also demanding improved job safety, medical insurance and an end to forced overtime.

Backed by the Laundry Workers Center United and the Steelworkers, the workers made their yearlong fight for union recognition public with a rally Oct. 11 outside the company’s superstore in Midtown Manhattan.

Following the rally, Jordan said, B&H used bribes and threats to pressure workers not to back the union. When the company then fired those who refused to renounce the union, workers responded by striking at the Navy Yard and Bushwick warehouses. The company backed off. Three days before the Nov. 4 vote, workers held another rally outside the superstore.

— Seth Galinsky and Emma Johnson

Chicago fast-food workers back dairy workers’ fight for safety

CHICAGO — Some 100 people — half of them fast-food workers fighting for $15 and a union — joined a picket line at a downtown McDonald’s here Nov. 16 to draw public attention to the unsafe conditions that dairy farmworkers face at farms that supply Washington state milk processor Darigold.

Marching at the front of the protest was Nubia Guajardo, wife of 27-year-old Randy Vasquez, who drowned Feb. 24 in Mabton, Washington, when the front-loader truck he was driving on night shift fell into a manure pond.

Chicago was the first stop in a four-city tour to deliver thousands of petitions to some of the largest Darigold customers — McDonald’s, Kroger, Walmart and Safeway/Albertsons — demanding the dairy producer operate safely at the farms.

“Randy was an experienced dairy worker,” Guajardo told the Militant. “He had been working at Darigold for six months, but had five years’ experience in the industry. The problem is the manure pond looks just like the dirt roadway. Ponds need to be fenced off and labeled.”

“We are here to show solidarity and sympathy for Nubia,” McDonald’s worker Michelle Lewis of Fight for $15 told the crowd. “We want to let her know that she is not alone. No one should die doing their job. What happened to Randy just underscores why we have to step up and fight for our rights.”

“In the restaurants it’s common for the machines to be in disrepair and for management to skimp on training,” Lewis told the Militant. “A friend lost the tip of her finger at a pizza place. For months before her accident workers had been telling management to fix the machine.”

— John Hawkins

New Zealand meat workers gain against AFFCO’s anti-union drive

AUCKLAND, New Zealand — Meat workers won a battle in an ongoing war Nov. 18 when the Employment Court ruled in favor of a Meat Workers Union case against AFFCO New Zealand Ltd. The ruling affects the workforce at eight AFFCO plants on the North Island, including some 1,000 union members. The company has said it will appeal.

This is “a significant win,” Justin Kaimoana, Meat Workers Union Shed Secretary at the AFFCO works in Wairoa, a rural town 330 miles southeast of here, told the Militant in a Nov. 22 phone interview. Some 200 workers at the Wairoa plant were locked out Sept. 9 after they refused to sign the company’s “Individual Employment Agreements.” They have led resistance to AFFCO’s anti-union offensive with regular rallies, protests and appeals for solidarity.

In a summary of the ruling, the court said the company had “acted unlawfully” in requiring workers at AFFCO plants to sign such agreements while “collective bargaining with the Union” was underway.

The ruling means that “workers at all plants who want to are supposed to go back on the original collective agreement,” Warren Allison, acting MWU organizer at the Napier tannery, said by phone Nov. 24. Workers there refused to sign the individual agreements.

Workers at Wairoa soundly rejected the company’s proposal to put them together on a “special night shift” as a condition for returning to work, said MWU organizing director Darien Fenton on the Maori-language television news program Te Karere Nov. 26. “We said ‘no’ in no uncertain terms,” veteran butcher Hilton Rohe told the Militant Dec. 1.

“We’re willing to work, but under the right conditions,” Wairoa meat worker Stacey Taurima told Te Karere from the grounds of Parliament in Wellington at the time of the ruling. She was among 30 from Wairoa who went there to publicize their fight.

— Patrick Brown

 
 
Related articles:
Spirits high in Wis. UAW strike against two-tier wages at Kohler
Black Friday: Walmart workers demand $15 an hour
SKorea: 100,000 protest attacks on workers’ rights
 
 
 
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