immigrant meatpackers on the line

Tom Lehman TLEHMAN at lor.net
Sun Jun 27 10:32:02 PDT 1999


Mark Cooper had a really good story in the Nation some years ago about working conditions in the meat packing plants in the mid-west. I'm sure it's archived on the Nation website. The meatpacking business was always rough even when the unions were strong. Now from most reports meatpacking is back to almost turn of the 19th century conditions in the packing and processing plants.

I personally suggested that the AFL-CIO should get involved in the mess in mid-western meatpacking rather than the California strawberry business. Big bucks were spent on the California strawberry campaign with minimal results. The same money used on re-organizing the meatpackers would have payed big dividends.

You might decide to become a vegetarian if you read Cooper's article,

Tom Lehman

Rakesh Bhandari wrote:


> Doug,
>
> What percentage of meatpackers are unionized, and thus in a position to
> call on union leadership to support a strike? Jeez, what percentage of
> meatpackers are non citizen immigrants? Capital seems to be fighting and
> winning its rights to reestablish neo bracero programmes all the time.
>
> How can Greenspan seriously be concerned with wage led inflation (as
> opposed to inflation and ominious debt structures from the wealth effect)
> since the rate at which real wages are increasing has been falling even as
> the unemployment rate further declines?
>
> Greenspan needs to engineer a soft landing for the stock market. To do that
> he is nudging interest rates up now, which gives him the added advantage of
> greater room to use monetary policy in the wake of a not so soft landing.
> It is easier for Greenspan to do this in the idiom of fighting wage led
> inflation than to openly admit that he is trying to ward off the greatest
> equity crash in history, which will bring the world economy down with it.
>
> Yours, Rakesh



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list