Meatpackers Face Tough Talks Over Wage Cuts
The threat of major worker-management confrontations in the nation’s meatpacking industry is growing as employers attempt to wring more concessions from workers and as workers pledge to reverse the wage-cutting trend.
The industry’s more than 100,000 unionized workers, especially those in slaughtering plants, have tough, bloody jobs that few Americans would envy. And, in the last few years, they have watched their industry decline because of the recession and a national movement away from meats and toward fish and chicken.
Three years ago, major meatpacking companies got union contract concessions that, among other things, dropped the average hourly wage to $8.50 from about $10.50. The cuts were needed, management said, because of the growth of non-union competition, declining profits and, in some cases, substantial losses.
Probably because of continuing high unemployment, especially in cities with large packing plants, the hefty wage cuts did not result in any worker-recruiting problems.
Even Armour, now owned by ConAgra Inc., has been having no trouble finding non-union workers after the United Food and Commercial Workers lost bargaining rights last year. At the time, ConAgra drastically cut wages to about $6 an hour from the industry high of $10.50.
The union’s leaders met in Denver last week to unite against demands of some unionized companies that the low-wage Armour pact be allowed to set an industry pattern.
When negotiations begin in the next few weeks with Swift Independent, John Morrell, Wilson Foods and a few others, the managements will argue that they must compete with the $6 hourly rate paid by Armour and some other non-union firms.
The union will present a mass of figures attempting to show that the industry’s fortunes are improving and that the wage pattern should be set by two major firms--Oscar Mayer and Hormel--with existing contracts that will boost the pay scales to $10 in September. Those contracts don’t expire until next year.
Lewie G. Anderson, director of the union’s packinghouse division, told the union conference in Denver that packinghouse workers have been subjected over the past few years to “employer assaults” that have been “devastating,” primarily to particular locales.
But now the wage-cutting trend, threats of plant closings and anti-union campaigns have “created a major national crisis for the UFCW and its packinghouse membership.”
The crisis, he said, “has now developed into an all-out struggle by the union to stop the meatpackers from turning a highly organized industry into a substantially unorganized industry and to break the packers’ momentum to drive the national wage rate down to $6 an hour.”
The union has started a national boycott of Armour products as well as a variety of other anti-Armour tactics, including asking banks and other institutions that have financial dealings with Armour to pressure the company into what the union calls a “more humane way of doing business.”
But the United Food and Commercial Workers’ national fight isn’t going to be an easy one, since another union is on strike in the Los Angeles area against Oscar Mayer, one of the companies that the union hopes will set a wage pattern.
About 65 members of Operating Engineers Local 501 have been on strike against the company’s Vernon plant since last Oct. 1 after members refused to accept a company proposal for a second three-year wage freeze.
Fred Lowe, Local 501 business representative, said Oscar Mayer’s willingness to accept a prolonged strike at Vernon is a clear message to other unionized workers that they can expect trouble from Oscar Mayer when their contracts expire next year. Local 501 business manager Robert H. Fox said that three years ago, when his members were getting a base rate of $13.39 an hour at Oscar Mayer, “they were at the top of the wage scale for our members doing comparable work.
“Now our members in dairy, retail foods and other industries have moved up to more than $16 an hour, and yet Oscar Mayer wants to keep our members at $13.39 for three more years. We cannot let that happen.”
While meat industry workers are not faced with the prospect of massive layoffs, they are confronting another tragedy of a sort: a sharply declining standard of living. Such declines in pay don’t necessarily show up in government statistics, but the effect can be better understood if one tries to imagine what would happen if his or her paycheck were cut almost in half.
Political Scars
When friends of organized labor voice their disagreement over a union tactic, they may not leave permanent political scars but they do inflict wounds that can be slow to heal. When such arguments go beyond verbal denunciations and involve politicians in angry battle between labor and management, they leave scars that may last for years.
The best recent example of one of those deeper scars can be clearly seen on Arizona’s Democratic Gov. Bruce Babbitt, 46, who is being widely mentioned these days as one of the “new breed of Democrats” and is even considered by some observers as a possible Democratic presidential contender in 1988.
Babbitt has had labor support before, but in the past two years he has made some strong enemies within organized labor because of his role in the bitter, sometimes violent, 21-month-old strike by the United Steelworkers against Phelps-Dodge’s Arizona copper mines.
The company broke with the industry in demanding greater wage cuts than other companies were given. When the union workers resisted by going on strike, Phelps-Dodge hired strikebreakers, broke the union and drastically reduced the strikebreakers’ wages. And it did much of that with Babbitt’s help, union leaders charge.
The governor insists that all he did was to try in vain to be a peacemaker but that he was rebuffed by both sides. And he says he called in the National Guard only to try to prevent picket line violence when the company brought in non-union workers.
But Cass Alvin, a union spokesman, indicated the depth of labor’s anger at the governor when he predicted that, if Babbitt does seek the presidency, “he isn’t going to get any labor support except perhaps from the Teamsters Union, which supported President Reagan, and I even doubt that.
“Babbitt clearly demonstrated during the copper workers’ fight at Phelps-Dodge that he has no interest even in maintaining neutrality between workers and management, much less in helping those workers who were involved in a battle for their economic lives. He openly sided with the company.”
Another recent example of a rift between labor and a longstanding ally was here in Los Angeles on April 5, the day after Murray Kane withdrew from the race for city attorney and endorsed his chief rival, James Hahn, who had already won the support of organized labor.
Lisa Specht, the Westside attorney who stayed in the race (and lost), was infuriated when she heard that William R. Robertson, head of the Los Angeles County AFL-CIO, had met with Kane and urged him to support Hahn.
That wasn’t much of a politically shocking thing. And it shouldn’t even have been shocking when Hahn’s father--Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, a longtime ally of labor--joined Robertson in the meeting with Kane.
But Specht was furious. She charged that “Daddy Hahn and the bosses of big labor pulled out all the stops to save their boy Jimmy’s campaign. They gave (Kane) his marching orders. They told him to endorse Hahn and he did.”
Robertson didn’t respond immediately but said Monday that he was “outraged” by Specht’s “ugly attack on the ‘bosses of big labor.’ ”
Specht’s friends in the political organization of Reps. Howard Berman (D-Panorama City) and Henry Waxman (D-L.A.) tried hard, as did Specht herself, to win labor’s endorsement for her.
“Then, when they didn’t get it,” Robertson said, “Specht denounces us in ugly language as though we were her bitterest enemies instead of political allies she will probably want help from in the future, even though she didn’t get it in the contest for city attorney.”
The union leader laid at least part of the blame for the battle to the Berman-Waxman organization, saying they “acted arrogantly in the whole affair.”
“They threatened to withhold their own endorsement of Mayor Tom Bradley’s reelection campaign unless he remained neutral in the city attorney’s race and even demanded that he agree not to run for governor again. They are what I’d call masters of truly arrogant political pressure.”
Specht herself declined to respond directly to the union leader’s remarks, but Ann Hollister, a staffer for Berman in Washington who managed the Specht race for city attorney, said:
“Lisa (Specht) has the greatest respect for the labor movement and, of course, wanted its endorsement. She is not bitter, fundamentally believes in the same goals of organized labor and certainly wants to work with labor in the future.”
Hollister said the campaign is now over, “and we want to mend any fences that may have broken during the heat of that campaign.”
As the various local and national political battles continue between labor and its allies, the foes of both Democrats and organized labor can only rejoice.
