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Smithfield, Republic Wins Signal New Era—If We Act |
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Two victories by America’s workers last month are a harbinger of a new era dawning this year, writes Peter Dreier, a professor of politics at Occidental College. At Republic Windows & Doors in Chicago, workers waged a six-day sit-in at the plant to demand back pay and benefits after management announced the plant would close. The workers, members of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), won a $1.75 million settlement.
At the Smithfield packing plant in North Carolina, workers defied years of massive employer harassment when more than 2,000 of them voted for union representation by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). As journalist David Bacon writes in The American Prospect:
That stunning reversal set off celebrations in house trailers and ramshackle homes in Tar Heel, Red Springs, St. Pauls, and all the tiny working-class towns spread from Fayetteville down to the South Carolina border.
Relief and happiness are understandable in North Carolina, where union membership is the lowest in the country. But Smithfield workers were not just celebrating a vote count. They’d just defeated one of the longest, most bitter anti-union campaigns in modern U.S. labor history.
Dreier sees these victories as a prelude to the type of grassroots activism that made the New Deal effective—the changes that happened then couldn’t have happened without Franklin Roosevelt—but they also couldn’t have happened without working people waging a massive push for change. Writes Dreier:
Obama is the first president since Lyndon Johnson to embrace protest and civil disobedience. “Change comes from the bottom up,” Obama said during his campaign. ”That is how workers won the right to organize against violence and intimidation. That’s how women won the right to vote. That’s how young people traveled south to march and to sit in and to be beaten, and some went to jail and some died for freedom’s cause.”
Reform comes about, Obama often reminds his audiences, by “imagining, and then fighting for, and then working for, what did not seem possible before.”
Holding lawmakers and presidents accountable is what makes democracy work. The first step is electing working family candidates. The next step is ensuring those candidates become working family lawmakers. Dreier puts it this way:
As FDR and LBJ did when pushed by circumstance and constituents, Obama can use his bully pulpit to encourage Americans to raise their voices. But if Americans want the country to change direction, as the November election results indicated, they’ll have to follow Obama’s campaign advice and the Republic and Smithfield workers’ example: organize.
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As a UFCW member, I congratulate and welcome our brave brothers and sisters at the Tar Heel Smithfield plant. The only way we’re ever going to defeat corporate greed is to stand up for our rights at work—but it shouldn’t take fifteen years for workers to get justice. It’s not a crime to work for a living, after all. It should be a crime, with appropriate penalties and punishments, to deny workers their rights on the job.
I sincerely hope that Hilda Solis is swiftly appointed as Secretary of Labor so that she can turn the tide back towards working families, and away from the corporations that try to get rich on our backs.
Gut check for many of us, are willing to put more on the line than a letter to the editor? Are we willing to do it when it’s “not my fight”? Can we convince a journey level plumber that what happens to a 17 year old grocery helper at a Kroger store, or a special education assistant or cafeteria staffer in a public school, or a jail staffer matter to them?
It’s sad to hear that the employee’s a the Tar Heel Smithfield plant had to wait that long to be reconized. It is just another example of why the Employee Free Choice Act needs to be passed.