FORT MORGAN, Colo. — Despite temperatures near 100 degrees, Teamsters Local 455 members continue to picket for a decent wage increase and in protest of Cargill’s lockout at its beef slaughterhouse here.
The lockout of 1,700 workers began May 20 after the unionists voted to reject the company’s “last and best” wage offer of $2.15 over five years, an average increase of just 43 cents an hour per year. The company hasn’t budged since then.
Cargill is Fort Morgan’s biggest customer for water and power. City Manager Brent Nation has warned that layoffs might be coming for municipal workers if the lockout continues.
The company, headquartered in Minnesota, is the largest privately held corporation in America by revenue, employing more than 155,000 people across 70 countries. Its annual revenue: $154 billion.
The U.S. cattle herd is at a 75-year low, driving up beef prices. Cargill has said the lockout and lack of production is costing it dearly. But Cargill bosses appear to be in no rush to settle the contract. Locked-out Cargill maintenance workers report outside contractors in the plant say the only work being done is on long delayed maintenance and other projects.
“We are two months into this lockout,” Local 455 Business Agent Servando Payan told the Militant July 15. “We are standing up and asking Cargill for a fair wage. We have good relations with local businesses and people in this community that we are part of.
“Our point is that Cargill workers can’t even afford the products they make, like ground beef, which is a staple budget item for many workers.
“Around the country we see more and more workers standing up to being locked out or going on strike,” he said. “I hate to see anyone out of a job, but I’m proud of our members and others who are standing up.”
Payan said that on July 10 a large and boisterous reception of locked-out union members greeted Colorado Gov. Jared Polis when he visited the picket lines. Workers hoped he could help end the lockout. Polis urged Cargill to return to negotiations.
“Our members have been and still are willing to get back to the table to come to an agreement with Cargill for fair pay,” Payan said.
“We supported the teachers when they went on strike, and they’ve come to our picket line. We welcome all who come here to show support,” he said.
Payan said a group of retired rail workers had joined the picket lines the week before, bringing solidarity messages from rail and other union locals in Nebraska and Colorado (see article in the July 20 Militant).
Payan was pleased when this reporter told him how workers at the JBS Denver Processing plant and King Soopers industrial bakery across the street had responded with interest and support to locked-out Cargill workers when shown the coverage in the Militant the day before.
“I hadn’t heard about this lockout but I’m not surprised. Sounds like the company was waiting for an opportunity and excuse to lock them out,” Todd Gilliam, a member of Operating Engineers Local 1 and a shop steward at King Soopers, told me. He got a copy of the Militant and contributed to the Teamsters. “We all have to do what we can to back the unions.”
We gave his contribution and others we’d been given from workers to Payan for the Teamsters lockout fund.
The reporting team included Socialist Workers Party members Joel Britton and myself, and Communist League member Joe Young from Canada.
Immigration challenges
One big topic of discussion was the recent U.S Supreme Court ruling granting the president the power to end Temporary Protected Status for millions of Haitian and other immigrant workers in this country. There are hundreds of Haitians and other immigrant workers in the three large area packinghouses.
We asked Payan if the union is seeing stepped-up ICE activity in Fort Morgan.
Payan told us the union stays alert for Immigration and Customs Enforcement drive-bys and to date they’ve had no issues with ICE on the picket lines. He said earlier this year Cargill officials told the union they wouldn’t allow ICE agents to enter the plant and disrupt production. But they made it clear that once workers clocked out, what happened in the parking lot or elsewhere was not the company’s concern.
Many U.S.-born workers we spoke with said they support the right of immigrant workers to stay and work here. They say they’ve come to know them and their families.
Cassandra Jackson, with six years at Cargill trimming livers, said she is both African American and Native American. She believes that fellow workers who come from other countries deserve the right to be able to stay and work. “They have the right to seek a better life.”
One locked-out worker originally from Haiti named Wilson spoke in Creole to Jean Luc Duval, an SWP supporter who had joined us from Detroit. “We had no choice but to come here. The political situation in Haiti is such that we cannot live there,” he said. “I was a teacher in Haiti and ran a small school. I was forced to close it and to leave for my safety. I have an application for asylum pending, which is supposed to help extend my ability to stay here.”
Ethmane Kane, another locked-out worker at Cargill, is originally from Mauritania. He spoke in French with Duval and Joe Young, a candidate for the Communist League in Montreal.
“I was deported from Mauritania to a refugee camp in Senegal as a young person. I have passed through 10 countries on my way to this country,” Kane said. “I am a revolutionary artist and make songs about freedom. At least in this country I have free speech.”
What is the road forward?
He invited us to his apartment where a half dozen workers from Mauritania gathered to continue the discussion and to look at some of the books by SWP leaders and other revolutionaries we brought with us. We learned that many workers from Mauritania speak French, but can’t read it.
As one worker explained, “We are from the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. We didn’t go to school, we went to work.”
Kane got We Are Heirs of the World’s Revolutions by Thomas Sankara, who led the popular revolution in Burkina Faso from 1983-87. Mauritania is close to both Guinea-Bissau and Burkina Faso. This was the first book he had ever purchased.
Kane played for us some of his songs on his phone, including a tribute to African revolutionary leaders, including Patrice Lumumba, Sankara and Amílcar Cabral, leader of the independence struggle in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. We passed around the new Pathfinder book by Cuban revolutionary leader Víctor Dreke, Cuba and the Independence War in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde: The Fall of the Last Colonial Empire in Africa.
Kane said he would be interested in seeing a meeting in Greeley to present and discuss Dreke’s book.
We explained that the Socialist Workers Party calls for amnesty for all undocumented workers in the U.S., crucial to uniting the working class. We also told them about an immigrant services center near Greeley we had visited that offers legal help.
They told us the government is building a new ICE facility in nearby Hudson, between the JBS packing plant in Greeley and Cargill. It will be the second ICE detention facility in this region.
The locked-out Teamsters Local 455 workers at Cargill need your support! Contact them at 423 Main Street, Fort Morgan, CO 80701. Phone: (970) 867-7311; Fax: (970) 542-9596, to find out what you can do. Get the word out!
Joel Britton from Oakland contributed to this article.