FORT MORGAN, Colo. — Some 1,700 International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 455 members who work at the giant Cargill meat processing plant here have been locked out by the company’s profit-drive bosses since May 20. The company has significant influence in the town as the biggest employer with money to throw around. Cargill workers are over 10% of the city’s population.
Cargill bosses got the city to deny the union the right to set up rent-a-toilets for the strikers for weeks.
Over 85% of Local 455 members had voted to reject the Cargill bosses’ measly “last and final” wage offer that averages 43 cents an hour for the next five years. But consumer prices jumped at an annual rate of 4.2% in May to its highest level in more than three years.
The Teamsters are also fighting to win contract-protected rights to go to the bathroom on the job and to get the company to pay for mandatory company-issued safety boots. The cost of the boots is currently taken out of workers’ paychecks.
I’m a retired railroad conductor and member of the SMART union’s Transportation Division who came here from Lincoln, Nebraska, along with my brother, Paul Swanson, who had been an officer of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees Division of the Teamsters in Denver, to bring solidarity to the locked-out workers.
At the Teamsters’ Fort Morgan union hall July 7 we were welcomed by union representative Servando Payan. “Unionists from the area here and city representatives have recently been visiting the picket lines to show support,” Payan said. He explained hundreds of Cargill workers picket in shifts every four hours in temperatures in the high 90s.
“Bosses use their lockouts as weapons against the workers, to force concessions from unions. They are aimed at wearing down, dividing and demoralizing workers,” Paul Swanson said. “Solidarity from the labor movement is key for workers to advance and turn the table against Cargill.”
We joined Local 455 members on their picket line, along with a couple of other unionists who had come to join us. This included Gene Thompson, BMWED vice general chairman from Alliance, Nebraska, and Doug Hord, an electrician from nearby Greeley, where packinghouse workers at the huge JBS plant won an important strike earlier this year.
We delivered messages of solidarity to the locked-out meatpackers from Kim Quick, president of Teamsters Local 554 in Omaha, and the local’s members, and from Jakob Forsgren, vice general chairman of the BMWED in Lincoln. Teamsters Local 554 was formed in 1937 as part of the powerful over-the-road truck driver organizing effort that substantially strengthened the union in the Midwest.
To support locked-out Teamsters Local 455 workers at Cargill, contact them at 423 Main Street, Fort Morgan, CO 80701. Phone: (970) 867-7311; Fax: (970)542-9596