New York Times - June 26, 1999
MEAT-PLANT STRIKE IS LATEST CASE OF IMMIGRANTS PACKING PICKET LINE By Sam Howe Verhovek
ALLULA, Wash. -- Khamkong Baninthivong, a Laotian immigrant who has quietly worked for 13 and a half years as a meat trimmer at the IBP plant here in eastern Washington, voted to strike because she feels her wage -- $8.28 an hour, 10 cents more than her hourly wage at the plant seven years ago -- is simply too low.
Josefina Alfaro, originally from El Salvador, a U.S. citizen as of two years ago, voted to strike IBP, the world's largest producer of beef and pork products, because she thinks the union will win. "But even if not," said the 45-year-old Mrs. Alfaro, a meat cutter walking the picket line, "it's worth the risk because there are other jobs out there. A lot of places -- hospitals, plants -- they're all looking for people."
And Almir Biscevic, 23, a Bosnian Muslim who fled his war-wracked country with his family three years ago, voted for the strike earlier this month even though he was not quite sure how it all worked. "When I first heard, I was, 'Strike? What is a strike?"' said Biscevic in the English he is struggling to master. "But now I am for it. There's a lot wrong inside that plant. There's not safety. There's not respect."
What began as a wildcat strike earlier this month at the plant, where about 90 percent of the 1,500 workers are immigrants, has quickly mushroomed into a test of wills between IBP and a feisty union whose action is now sanctioned by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
On one level, the work stoppage, approved by a vote of 847-291 in early June, is a notable example of community organizing among workers who cannot even communicate in a common tongue. Rallies here have featured speeches in English and Spanish, with pauses for the words to be translated into Lao, Vietnamese and Serbo-Croatian. As Maria Martinez, a strike leader, put it: "It's not so hard to get people together, because 'Enough is enough' is something you can understand in any language."
But the successful start of the strike also highlights some larger factors clearly at work here in Wallula, including the receptivity that many immigrants feel toward union activity and their growing confidence that, with a strong economy and many employers anxious for workers, the potential benefits of pressing for better wages and working conditions outweigh any risks.
Nor is it an isolated example. This week, for instance, workers at the nation's largest textile complex, Fieldcrest Cannon in Kannapolis, N.C., voted to unionize, according to unofficial returns, a sweeping victory for organized labor after unsuccessful efforts stretching across decades, and one that leaders there attributed in part to the growing number of immigrant workers at the plant.
And earlier this year, winning the biggest unionization drive in half a century, the Service Employees International Union earned the right to represent nearly 75,000 home-care workers in the Los Angeles area. Many of those workers, who care for the elderly and disabled, are immigrants.
"Some of the most significant victories labor has seen in the past 10 years have been among immigrant workers," said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University, pointing to the recent votes as well as ones by asbestos-removal workers and janitors in several big cities.
"One of the reasons is simply that immigrants still tend to live in communities with others who work with them," she said. "Most white workers today who aren't recent immigrants, they're much more scattered in terms of where they live. In that sense, they're much harder to organize."
Many of the workers come from countries with some tradition of union activity and may themselves have been leaders of such efforts, said Fernando Gapasin, an expert on immigrant labor at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Some of these workers are very heads-up about how to organize."
But, he said, some major unions, with leaders who came of age in battles where there were no language barriers among workers, have been slow to respond to the changing dynamics posed by the influx of immigrant workers. Gapasin cited that as one major reason why union membership overall has continued to decline in this country, to under 14 percent of the workforce today from about 35 percent in the mid-1950s.
"Unions are certainly developing strategies to deal with multicultural workforces, but many have been slow to do so," Gapasin said. "It is a weakness for labor."
Some of those problems are in evidence at the strike here in Wallula, an agricultural town near the confluence of the Snake and Columbia Rivers. The action clearly began among the rank-and-file, and was endorsed only belatedly by Teamsters leaders higher up the organizational chain, who waited for several days to sanction an official strike vote.
When a Teamsters official showed up on June 6, two days after several hundred workers had staged a walkout at the plant, a crowd of angry IBP employees unleashed a torrent of complaints about what they felt was a lack of support from union leadership.
The heckling grew so bad that at one point the official, Al Hobart, secretary-treasurer of Local 760 of Yakima, responded in kind. "One of the major issues in your negotiations has been respect," he told the workers, according to a report in The Tri-City Herald, the newspaper here. "You cannot get what you don't give. You have shown me very little today."
Respect is what many workers here say they do want to gain from their strike, and many pointed to what they said were abysmal working conditions at the plant, a hulking concrete complex set amid the farmlands, where hundreds of cattle are shipped in for slaughter daily and the powerful smell of dead meat hangs in the air.
The plant, one of 48 around the country owned by IBP, turns out meat products for human and pet consumption, and also by-products of the slaughter that are used for soap and glue.
Many of the workers on the picket line complained not only of low pay, but also of unsanitary conditions and injuries they suffered on line like cuts, and hand and joint pains stemming from what they said was constant pressure to speed up production.
"The chain, it turns very, very fast," said Kien Nguyen, a 55-year-old flank-steak trimmer, referring to the conveyor belt on which pieces of meat come to his station. "Too fast. The safety is very low." Nguyen, originally from Vietnam, used to work as a newspaper deliverer in Orange County, Calif., and came to Wallula two years ago when a friend told him about jobs available at the plant here. He makes $8.28 an hour.
A 40-year-old Bosnian man, who came here as a refugee just a few months ago and was one of the few striking workers who would not give his name, said: "I know what is hard work. Here, they treat you like a dog. If you get hurt they give you pills and they say, 'What, you can't handle it?"'
A spokesman for IBP at its corporate headquarters in Dakota Dunes, S.D., Don Willoughby, said the workers' complaints about conditions were "typical union rhetoric" used as part of the bargaining process for higher wages. The company has offered a $1.57 an hour pay increase over the next 4 1/2 years, to a plant-wide average of $10.41, with 82 cents per-hour effective immediately, but the union negotiating committee has rejected the deal.
Willoughby said the company paid scrupulous attention to safety concerns, though he turned down a reporter's request for a tour of the plant, which is running on partial operations with about 400 nonstriking workers and supervisors.
"It's nothing against your writing, but our experiences with members of the news media have been less than satisfactory when we've given tours," he said. "People like to visualize the cow out in the pasture and the steak on the plate, but they really don't want to visualize what goes on in-between."
The company did make six nonstriking workers available for interviews, in the presence of a company personnel manager. All said the plant was safe and the company fair, but none would allow their names to be used for fear, they said, of union retaliation.
In some ways, union activity among immigrant workers is nothing new, especially among immigrants. "This is almost 'The Jungle' revisited," said Harley Shaiken, a labor specialist at the University of California at Berkeley, referring to Upton Sinclair's classic expose of abuses in the meat industry.
"At the turn of the century, immigrant workers speaking Slavic, Russian and Polish were at the core of organizing efforts," he said, "and at the end of the century it's immigrant workers speaking Spanish, Laotian, Vietnamese." The company is already looking for new workers, but many workers on strike pointed to local economic conditions in predicting they would prevail with a better contract.
"How are they going to replace 1,000 people just like that?" said 38-year-old Guadalupe Alvarado, a cutter who makes $10.43 an hour after 14 years at the plant. "It takes a year to really train someone. It's not easy to replace us. They know that. They won't admit it, but they know it."