Organized Labor wins in Alabama and North Carolina
Organized labor scored two major victories in the South in
recent days as 1,200 workers at the Pilgrim’s Pride poultry plant in
Russellville, Ala., joined the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union
(RWDSU) and the Reynolds American tobacco company in North Carolina finally
agreed to meet with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) to discuss the
needs and concerns of migrant workers.
“Unions may be under attack across the country but working
people still desperately need the security and dignity that comes with a union
voice,” RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum said this week. “This resounding vote
will be heard by poultry workers throughout the South as a message of hope.”
Workers at the JBS-owned plant voted 706 to 292 to join the
union, which is affiliated with the United Food and Commercial Workers. As the
American division of the Brazilian beef and poultry firm JBS, Pilgrim’s Pride
is the largest chicken producer in the United States and a leader in one of
Alabama’s largest industries.
The victory capped one of the largest organizing drives in
Alabama over the past 10 years.
Workers at the plant said respect, not money, was the key
issue for them in joining the union. “We had no respect from management, and
absolutely no voice in anything that affected us,” sanitation department worker
Cheryl Kowalski said in a RWDSU press release. “The bottom line was `do what
you are told or you don’t have a job.’ But the union provided us with a glimmer
of hope.”
The company fought tooth and nail against the union, forcing
workers to attend anti-union meetings, distributing “Vote No” T-shirts and
anti-union literature, and pressuring local businesses to ostracize union
activists.
In North Carolina, tobacco giant Reynolds American’s
agreement to meet with FLOC marks a major step forward in a nearly five-year
campaign to get industry to recognize and deal with health and other issues of
tobacco workers, 90 percent of whom in North Carolina are undocumented migrants,
according to Oxfam.
(To the left is FLOC President and founder Baldemar Velasquez)
FLOC says nearly one out of every four of the 30,000 workers
in North Carolina suffer from nicotine poisoning. Exposure to harmful
pesticides and long hours under the summer sun have also contributed to strokes
and even death. Workers often live in crowded, unsanitary camps or in remote,
substandard trailers. They suffer
these conditions for minimum or sub-minimum pay.
FLOC has been dogged in its efforts to get Reynolds American
to recognize its responsibilities, which the company has rejected in the past
by saying the workers are not its employees but rather of the tobacco farms
that hire them. Those tobacco farms, however, helped Reynolds earn nearly $1
billion in profits during what has been called the Great Recession and the many
billions more it reports in annual international sales.
The path that now leads to a meeting between Reynolds and
FLOC has been one filled with struggle. In recent years, FLOC has waged a
JPMorgan Chase divestment campaign to force the Wall Street powerhouse to put
pressure on the North Carolina company. JPMorgan Chase is a leader in the
consortium of lenders that funnels close to $500 million in credit to Reynolds
American. FLOC leaders also showed up repeatedly at shareholders’ meetings to
press the issue.
The meeting will take the form of an “Industrial Council”
with FLOC and Reynolds representatives present and also representatives from
the North Carolina Growers Association and Phillips Morris’ parent company, the
Altria Group.
Obama’s new promise to young migrants, and the reality of
migrant workers’ lives—both at the workplace and behind bars
President Obama’s promise this week to cease deporting DREAM
Act-eligible immigrant youths came as welcome news to a beleaguered minority in
this nation. Let’s hope it’s more than just a campaign trail gesture and leads
to real solutions.
Certainly those migrants suffering behind bars because they
came to the United States looking for work need some help.
Inmates at the privately run Adams County Correctional
Facility near Natchez, Miss., say last month’s riot at the 2,500-inmate
facility—which claimed the life of one prison guard and caused several
injuries—was the result of a history of neglect and abuse. They told members of
the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance (MIRA) that poor medical care has
led to as many as 11 deaths over the past year. Only one doctor works at the
prison, they said.
Most of the inmates at the facility, which is run by the
Correctional Corporation of America (CCA), are immigrants who were convicted of
re-entering the country without documentation.
(To the right is MIRA Executive Director Bill Chandler)
Roughneck guards, a minority but still palpable presence,
“beat inmates, discriminate against them, and humiliate them constantly,” MIRA
reported in a recent newsletter. The correctional officer who died was
allegedly beaten during the riot after dumping chemicals from a rooftop onto
inmates below, MIRA reported.
Privately run prisons are a growing issue in Mississippi.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has charged the East
Mississippi Correctional Facility near Lost Gap with inadequate staffing and
malfunctioning door locks, exposing employees to assaults from inmates. The
facility is owned by the GEO Group of Boca Raton, Fla., which announced in
April it was discontinuing contracts for East Mississippi and two other
facilities in Mississippi. The company faces more than $100,000 in OSHA fines.
One of those other prisons, the Walnut Grove Youth
Correctional Facility, was at the center of a recent federal class action
lawsuit that resulted in the removal of children there to protect them from
sexual and physical abuse.
Migrant workers on the outside often don’t fare much better
than those serving time in prison. Stolen wages, unpaid overtime,
round-the-clock working shifts, and squalid living conditions led workers at
C.J.’s Seafood in New Orleans recently to go on strike despite a hostile
anti-immigrant and anti-organized labor climate that gets them little sympathy
from local and state officials.
The workers have filed a complaint with the Department of
Labor about their working conditions. C.J.’s Seafood, which reports $20 million
in annual earnings, lists Walmart as its top customer and is currently in a
dispute with DOL over new regulations that insist workers be paid and be paid
fairly.
Back to the graveyard shift at auto plants in the South
and across the country
As a sign of the rebounding automobile industry, General
Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Nissan and Kia have re-instituted the third shift at
plants across the country. Workers will go on the “graveyard” shift at
Hyundai’s Alabama plant in September.
According to Automotive News, 22 of the 83 assembly plants in North America will have three shifts
by the beginning of 2013, a sharp contrast to the early 2000s when only 7
percent of plants maintained a third shift.
Adding the third shift came at the urging of the Obama
Administration, which sees it as a means to add profits to an industry that, at
least among its some of its domestic leaders, required federal bailout money to
survive just a few years ago.
A final note: Good work by Facing South opens door to further scrutiny of North Carolina
kingpin Art Pope
The May-June edition of Academe, the magazine of the American Association of
University Professors, features an article by University of North Carolina
French professor Hassan Melehy on North Carolina right-wing kingpin Art Pope,
who “offers money to fund academic programs in Western civilization and
free-market economics at state universities while his think tanks attack
`radical’ faculty and argue for decreased state funding of higher education.”
Pope, North Carolina’s version of billionaire right-wingers
Charles and David Koch, is coming under increased public scrutiny for his
efforts to inculcate higher education with his own Ayn Randian views. The
reason: Facing South, the crusading
online publication of the North Carolina-based Institute for Southern Studies,
which first exposed Pope’s backroom dealings and manipulations. Good work, Facing
South!
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