U.S.-Labour: Guatemalan, U.S. Workers Unite Against Case Farms

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Aug 16 1996 (IPS) - A week-old strike in North Carolina offers a rare sight in U.S. labour relations: white and black U.S. workers uniting with their Guatemalan colleagues to demand better working conditions for immigrants.

Since Aug. 8, more than 450 poultry workers at Case Farms, based in Morganton, North Carolina, have been on strike to protest the lack of response by Case management to their year-old effort to unionise.

The Case workers are also protesting working conditions at the poultry processing plant, from long hours and repetitive work to unsanitary working conditions and dangerously high levels of carbon dioxide.

Unusual for a U.S. strike, some 85 per cent of the workers involved are Guatemalans, who have become Case’s main labour force in recent years, says Mark Panepinto, an organiser for the Labourers International Union of North America.

“The work force (at Case) has moved primarily from poor whites to black workers, and now to Hispanic, mainly Guatemalan workers,” says the Rev. Ken Whittington, pastor of nearby St. Charles Catholic Church. “But the conditions have stayed the same: They’ve always wanted conditions to be the same as slave labour.”

The strike, Panepinto says, unites Latino workers new to Case with white and black workers who have been well acquainted with the poultry firm’s poor labour record.

“American workers are treated with a little more respect, but not much,” Panepinto says. But all the workers have to face fast- moving assembly lines, poorly ventilated rooms, and facilities made unhealthy by an excess of chicken feather and feces, he contends.

By far, the greatest problem workers face, he adds, is repetitive motion syndrome, where workers develop problems in their joints and muscles after performing the same basic motions for eight to 10 hours each day with no respite.

Many Case workers are unable to last longer than two years at the job, with the majority developing tendinitis or other problems linked to carpal tunnel syndrome, Panepinto says.

Whittington, whose church includes many Case workers as members, says that Case management hired a large immigrant work force in the hopes that they would be more compliant to such conditions than U.S. workers. But that plan did not work for long, he adds.

“Case opened a corridor for Guatemalan workers to come here and get jobs, and it was the best thing they could get,” Whittington says. “But after a while, they realised they were being treated pretty badly. They even had to ask permission just to use the bathroom.”

Upset over the plant’s conditions, the Case workers decided in May 1995 to join with the Labourers International Union. The Guatemalans were not worried about the consequences of striking in the United States, Panepinto says,”In Guatemala, they kill people for organising unions.”

But Case chief executive officer Tom Shelton has yet to negotiate with the workers, even though the National Labour Relations Board (NLRB), the federal labour arbiter, ordered them to bargain with the union aspirants two months ago.

Sherry Patterson, a spokeswoman for Case, says that the company’s lawyers have instructed Case not to comment on the workers’ charges or on the status of union negotiations.

Gina Botterill, a spokeswoman for the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, a Chicago-based group which supports the strike, says Case can delay the process considerably by going through the courts.

The court process, Whittington says, is “progressing extremely slowly. When (Case’s owners) negotiate, it will only be because they have to do it.” (Although the NLRB certified the workers’ right to bargain with Case, the government is unable to enforce that order if Case management refuses to negotiate.)

To build up pressure on management, Case workers this week demonstrated against the poultry firm outside plants in Morganton and Winesboro, Ohio.

Panepinto also led a march of about 100 workers outside the Wall Street offices of the Bank of New York, the main lender to Case Farms, on Friday. Bank officials, however, declined to respond or meet with the protesters.

Two Case workers and a seminarian at the St. Charles Church, went on a hunger strike last Monday to protest Case’s inaction.

“I am prepared to starve myself until Case Farms will sit down and bargain with us,” says Alberto Gonzalez, one of the workers. “I will not let the company treat us with such disrespect and injustice.”

Still, few expect the current strike to last as long as the dispute with management. Whittington says he thinks the workers will end both the fast and the strike next week, while continuing other protests and court action against Case.

Despite the unity of the U.S. and Guatemalan workers, Case Farms may be able to use the immigrants’ status against them to break the dispute, Panepinto warns. Some workers, he concedes, are undocumented immigrants, and have already been threatened with deportation if they persist in their campaign.