St. Agnes church and its sister parish, our Lady of Guadalupe, are the heart of south Omaha, Nebraska. Every Sunday, hundreds of packinghouse workers -- Mexicans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans -- dress up in their best clothes and stream through St. Agnes' doors for Spanish-language mass. The men take off their wide-brimmed sombreros as mothers call out to little girls in frilly dresses who run giggling through the aisles.
On the last Sunday in April, the parish priest, Father DamianZuerlein, began the service by addressing the subject on everyone's mind: thecoming election at the ConAgra beef plant. Standing at the altar, he acknowledgedthe many ConAgra workers in the congregation. "We say, there's nothing new underthe sun -- some people have a great deal, while others have nothing," he said."Our community knows the unequal treatment of the poor, and the time has come tomake a decision."
Then he introduced the plant's union committee. Olga Espinoza, who works onthe kill floor, made her way to the head of the church and described theaccidents she'd seen in her eight years on the line. "We've made our decision andwe won't take one step backwards," she announced. "I want everyone to stand who'sfor the union." A couple of dozen workers slowly rose from the pews.Disappointed, Espinoza huddled at the back of the church with Sergio Sosa, aGuatemalan organizer for Omaha Together One Community (OTOC).
As the mass concluded, Espinoza came forward again to give it another try,asking workers from the plant to come forward to get Father Damian's blessing."Don't be afraid," she urged them. "This is our moment. No one's going to stop usthis time."
Slowly, out of the first pews, men and women began shuffling toward the centeraisle. In a ripple spreading to the back of the church, more people stood andmoved down toward the front. After a few minutes, more than a hundred workerswere on their feet, some with obvious trepidation visible on their faces. Fromthat moment on, their support for the union would no longer be a secret. "We knewif we could stand up in the church on Sunday," Espinoza said later, "we could doit in the plant on Monday."
And that's what happened. The following Wednesday, just two days before actualvoting was due to begin, the company made its final play. Supervisors called amandatory meeting, where workers would listen to a ConAgra vice president tellthem why going union was a bad idea.
A year before, the same speech by the same vice president to many of the sameworkers had turned the tide for the company. Workers had decisively rejected theunion. But this time, when the kill-floor workers walked into the lunchroom, theatmosphere had changed. Almost before the vice president began speaking,employees in attendance say, workers were hooting and yelling.
As the vice president finished recounting how the company had lived up to itspromises of a year ago, Espinoza walked to the front and told the managers shewanted to speak; she and her fellow activists had formulated a list of questions.Pushing her way to the microphone, she commenced. "If you're so concerned aboutus," she all but shouted, "why haven't you fixed the place where Tiberio fell andwas hurt? Are you waiting for someone else to get hurt too?" (Tiberio Chavez, aConAgra worker repairing broken equipment, had fallen from a precarious perchjust beneath the plant's ceiling. His forearm had to be fitted with so many steelpins that he looked a little like the Terminator. An open union supporter, he wasthen fired.)
At first the managers just looked at one another, each waiting for someoneelse to speak. Then Maria Valentin, the community-relations coordinator, tookthe microphone. "She told us she couldn't answer the question right there,"Espinoza recalled, "but she'd give the answer to anyone who came by her officelater on. No one liked that. We began chanting, 'Now! Now!' Then they told usthere wasn't any more time for questions and to go back to work. We just hootedthem down."
That Friday, 251 ConAgra workers voted for the union, with 126 voting against.After the vote, company officials would credit the mass for turning the tideagainst them. They weren't far wrong. It was the moment when the workers' cultureand religious faith combined to create a sense of security that couldn't easilybe broken by the normal repertoire of anti-union tactics.
But the mass was also a visible symbol of something deeper: a long-termcoalition between a union and a community-based organizing project, with a goalthat goes far beyond organizing just that one plant. The United Food andCommercial Workers (UFCW) and Omaha Together One Community want to reorganize thealmost entirely immigrant workforce in the almost entirely nonunion meatpackingindustry throughout the city. And what works in Omaha may work elsewhere too, inthe dozens of one-plant packinghouse towns, where pigs and cows get killed andsliced up into what's for dinner in America.
The people who do that work are, and have always been, immigrants. For ahundred years, straight through the 1970s, those workers were overwhelminglyEuropean, with smaller numbers of African Americans, especially in the South.Today, Spanish is the language on the floor of almost every plant. Most workerscome from Mexico, with smaller numbers from Central America. Refugees fromBosnia, Vietnam, and even the Sudan are a growing presence in some areas, but thevast majority of meatpacking workers are Latinos. A huge demographic shift hastaken place in the meatpacking workforce nationally, and small towns throughoutthe Plains states and the South suddenly have barrios, Mexican grocery stores,and radio stations that play norteño and banda music.
The language of organizing has changed. The problems haven't.
Meatpacking unions in Omaha go back more than a hundred years,and their uneasy relationship with immigrants and workers of color is almost asold. The city's meatpacking industry was built at the turn of the century byimmigrants from Bohemia, Poland, and Lithuania. Because they were Catholics, theChurch played a major role in their battles even then. In the strike of1921-1922, the priest of the Polish church in south Omaha spoke for the strikers.Their main organizer, John Blaha, ran meetings in Czech as well as English.African-American workers were already a significant presence in the plants, andsome were elected officers of local unions.
In the late 1930s, the organizing drives of the United PackinghouseWorkers of America (UPWA) succeeded in unionizing the four largest packers of theday. The union, one of the most radical in the Congress of IndustrialOrganizations (CIO), was built on a tradition of rank-and-file democracy,industrial unionism, and militant struggle. The model worked: Master contractscovering beef and pork processors set a wage standard above that of mostmanufacturing workers.
The UPWA viewed unions as a social-movement, fighting for community demandsoutside the plant as well. Locals organized antidiscrimination committees in theplants and challenged the color lines barring blacks from many bars andrestaurants in south Omaha (policies were later labeled "Communist" in the1950s).
Eventually the UPWA merged with its onetime American Federation of Labor (AFL)rival, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen, and then with the RetailClerks International Union, to form the modern UFCW. Each successive mergercreated a larger but somewhat more conservative union. But the ideas of socialmovement unionism left a lasting imprint in the meatpacking unions -- one thatthe UFCW/OTOC coalition hopes to revive.
By the 1990s, when Latino immigrants began flocking to the plants, theindustry had become unrecognizable. From 1980 to 1982, during the most seriousrecession since the thirties, 30 factories were shuttered and contractconcessions became the order of the day. From the wreckage emerged a new group ofmeat conglomerates -- led by Tyson, ConAgra, and Cargill -- that today accountfor nearly 80 percent of all the cattle and 60 percent of the hogs slaughtered inthe country. In the 1980s, these new conglomerates built new plants far from thebig cities, and cut costs by attacking the union. Strikes such as the one againstHormel in Austin, Minnesota, rocked the meatpacking world, as workers sought tohold on to the master agreements. Today, though the UFCW continues to represent60 percent of the meatpacking workforce nationally, its power to set wagestandards has badly eroded.
The nature of the work inside the plants has changed, too. Prior to 1980,animals were slaughtered in urban packinghouses. Quarters of meat were thenshipped to markets, where skilled butchers cut them into pieces for consumers.The new companies changed that system dramatically. After slaughter, animals arenow cut apart on fast-moving disassembly lines, where an individual worker mightcut out just one bone, hundreds of times a day. Boxes of meat sliced intoconsumer-sized chunks are then shipped to market. The speed of the lines in theplants increased enormously, and as workers repeated the same motions over andover again, injury rates skyrocketed. (Jorge Ramirez, a ConAgra worker who turnedout cartoons for the organizing committee's newsletter, produced one celebrateddrawing that featured a worker chasing a carcass down the line in a little carand, as the line's speed control moves from "fast" to "over the top," runningover another worker in his haste to keep up.)
In Omaha today, the old monopolies have disappeared, their placestaken by the new nonunion plants of ConAgra, Greater Omaha Packing Company,Nebraska Beef, QPI, and MPS. Hourly meatpacking wages had fallen to $4 below themanufacturing average by 1999. The entry-level hourly wage in ConAgra's Omahaplant is $9.20, not much higher than the meatpacking wage of 20 years ago.
The low wages are partly a function of the companies' immigrantstrategy. They've sent recruiting teams to Los Angeles and other establishedimmigrant communities, advertised on radio stations along the Mexican border, andsent buses to pick up recruits as they cross over.
Nebraska Beef was one of the most active recruiters. Last year the JusticeDepartment indicted four upper-level managers for giving workers falseimmigration documents. U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf dismissed the charges inApril, ruling that the witnesses who might have testified for the company weredeported in an immigration raid on December 5, 2000.
On that day, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agents showed up atthe south Omaha factory. Supervisors stopped the line and herded workers into thelunchroom where the agents were waiting. In some departments, company managershelped workers escape, according to Jaime Arias, an employee then inside theplant. He and his friends hid in a cooler among the animal carcasses. "Somepeople stayed there for five hours," he recalls, "and when they finally came outthey were almost dead from the cold." In total, 212 workers -- out of a workforceof less than 1,000 -- were picked up in the raid.
Managers told the remaining workers to report the following day, but some wereafraid to return; they were fired. According to Arias, the company then increasedthe workload of its remaining employees.
With worker discontent at Nebraska clearly running high, the UFCW/OTOCalliance targeted the company for unionization, and encountered an aggressiveanti-union campaign. "One supervisor told me that if we had a union, the companywouldn't make enough money to keep all the workers," says Jose Juan Robles, oneof the union's leaders. He heard other threats of closure and blacklisting, andpromises of wage increases to those who voted against the union.
In an election held last August, the union lost 452-to-345. The National LaborRelations Board, however, invalidated the results after documenting companymisconduct. After the campaign was over, Robles was fired. (Telephone calls toNebraska Beef seeking comment were not returned.)
It quickly became apparent to Omaha's union organizers -- as to theircounterparts elsewhere -- that the old models of organizing are not verysuccessful when dealing with this new workforce. The standard speeches aboutwages and benefits don't inspire workers, who are still sending money to theirfamilies back home, to risk their jobs, much less face deportation. Confrontedwith a brick wall, OTOC began developing a new model: a community-based approachto organizing.
In 1990, Father Zuerlein requested and received the position ofpastor at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in south Omaha. Zuerlein was a leadingfigure among a group of priests who shared a background in liberation theologyand a commitment to help organize the communities of Latino meatpacking workersthroughout the Midwest. Zuerlein soon hooked up with Tom Holler, who'd startedOTOC as a project of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). Founded in the 1940sby organizer Saul Alinsky, the IAF started life by organizing meatpacking workersin Chicago's back-of-the-yards neighborhoods. Early on, it developed a strategicalliance with the Church in struggles for civil rights and economic justice. Butworkplace organizing and union alliances are not typical activities for most IAFaffiliates.
In 1998, as OTOC was groping for an effective strategy, Zuerlein andHoller hired a new organizer, Sergio Sosa. For more than a decade, before movingto the Midwest, Sosa had been a seminarian in Guatemala and an active member ofthe movement that organized Mayan peasants during that nation's genocidal war. InOmaha's meatpacking plants, Sosa encountered an immigrant Latino workforceconsisting of both documented and undocumented workers, often in the samefamilies, who all formed part of a broad network of relationships. The OTOCstrategy called for using those networks to organize first outside the plant --setting up soccer leagues, for instance.
Sosa began holding one-on-one meetings with workers, as he put it, "to createrelations with people, discover their interests, look for talents, identifyleaders and connect those leaders in order to begin to organize. We know whopeople pay attention to, and where they go on Sunday after mass. We spend timetogether. But I think the art is to connect this whole cultural structure ofsocial networks with African Americans, with Anglo Saxons and others, in order tocreate power. Latinos can do many things and this is our moment. But we can't doit alone."
The first OTOC committees, however, were wiped out by Operation Vanguard, the1999 INS raids that targeted every meatpacking plant in Nebraska. It was duringthe ensuing controversy that OTOC developed its relationship with the UFCW. Thesewere, however, two very different cultures. At first, Holler and Zuerlein hadtrouble connecting with local UFCW officials, who "wanted to know who we were andwhy we were so interested in working with them," Zuerlein recalls. But the UFCWwas changing. At the time of the raids, the Omaha local criticized the INS forfailing to allow the union to represent workers caught up in the process. Inother parts of the country, though, the UFCW still supported employer sanctions,which make it a crime for undocumented immigrants to hold a job.
At the same time, other unions with heavily immigrant memberships werespearheading a campaign that led the AFL-CIO to repudiate its historic supportfor sanctions and to call for their repeal. Partly as a result of the union'sexperience in Omaha, UFCW Secretary-Treasurer Joe Hansen announced that the UFCW,too, supported that call.
For their part, the Omaha workers didn't leap into the union's arms. After anextended colloquy with UFCW officials, and a contentious debate among themselves,the OTOC committee voted 13-to-7 to join forces with the union. Those who votedno left OTOC, but an alliance -- of equals -- had been struck between thecommunity organization and the union.
As the alliance took shape, worker committees were organized in each of theseparate plants. Carl Ariston, the organizer assigned by the UFCW to the Omahacampaign, credited the one at ConAgra with the May election victory. While theUFCW had four organizers assigned to the campaign, and OTOC two more, thecampaign wasn't an organizer-driven one (unlike many of those currently mountedby unions). "The committee did most of the work of [getting workers' signatureson union-recognition] cards and getting people active, talking inside the plantand going with organizers on house calls," says Ariston. The committee also wroteand distributed an in-plant newsletter and broadcast union appeals onSpanish-language radio.
The mass, too, was the workers' idea, according to Zuerlein. "They needed aspiritual space where they wouldn't be afraid, and [they knew that] what we'redoing has a long tradition. We're showing them even if they lose their job,they're part of a broader community that will support them."
Although employers often refuse to sign contracts with unionsthat their employees have voted for, there's a good chance that workers will beable to negotiate a first contract with ConAgra. Seventy-eight ConAgra plants arealready under contract, Ariston notes, "and the company doesn't look at unions asevil." At Nebraska Beef, though, getting a first contract may require a war.
But beyond these immediate contract problems, two larger dilemmas arerapidly approaching. As more Omaha plants are organized, hundreds of new Latinomembers are going to pour into UFCW Local 271. Since the closure of Omaha's olderplants, the union now has fewer than 1,000 members, most of whom aren'timmigrants and don't speak Spanish. Its new members come to the union after anorganizing drive that they themselves carried out and helped to steer. They arenot likely to be content simply paying dues as passive members. "These immigrantworkers are going to be a challenge for the union," Zuerlein predicts. Aristonresponds that the UFCW is sending teams of trainers to establish a strongrank-and-file steward structure that will represent workers on the factory floor.
Securing wage increases is the union's other major challenge. The new members'expectations will run headlong into an industry accustomed to relying onimmigrants for cheap labor. "By bringing in minority workers," Ariston says, "thecompanies feel they don't have to be real about wage rates. Because many of theseworkers have had to live with a lot less, the companies believe they'll besatisfied with less."
So the union is confronted with a fight that is both a challenge and anopportunity. Should it fail to mount a successful drive for dramatically betterwages and conditions, alliances such as the one with OTOC won't be enough to winthe long-term loyalty of this new workforce. But if the Omaha model succeeds --and spreads to the other packinghouse towns of the Plains states and the South --the union's new participatory methods of organizing and its broad social agendamay just provide the basis for a major challenge to the entire low-wage economyof meatpacking.
Those were the basic approaches of the UPWA in its heyday, 60 years ago, whenit won master agreements and organized virtually the entire industry. Thathistory may be coming to life again in Omaha.
