Striking General Foods Engineers to Vote on Contract

Hundreds demonstrated in front of General Foods Corp. regional headquarters in Anaheim Wednesday in support of 65 striking operating engineers who will vote today on a tentative agreement that could end their seven-month-old walkout.

About 65 members of Operators Engineers Local 501 are scheduled to vote on the latest contract offer in Los Angeles tonight. The plant workers, who make $13.39 an hour, rejected a proposed three-year wage freeze and went on strike Oct. 1.

Despite the strike, General Foods’ Oscar Mayer plant in Vernon has continued to operate with replacement workers, company and union officials said.

Union officials and management representatives refused to disclose terms of the proposed contract.

In Anaheim, local spokesman Robert H. Fox called for an end to the “corporate greed of giant corporations” such as General Foods, which bought Oscar Mayer in 1981.

Workers contend another wage freeze is unfair while the company’s president, Jerry M. Hiegel, has just received a 10% salary increase to $529,996 a year, according to Mary Yunt, secretary-treasurer of the Orange County Federation of Labor. Engineers at the plant have not had a wage increase in 4 1/2 years, Yunt said.

Fox said Wednesday’s demonstration, planned two months ago, and a statewide boycott of Oscar Mayer products “finally forced Oscar Mayer officials back to the bargaining table.”

Marvin Clarkson, 54, of Anaheim, a 23-year veteran at the plant, said the new contract will affect the seniority of longtime workers who get first choice for new positions.

“They want to take seniority from us . . . . That’s what people work for, seniority,” he said.

Clarkson’s wife, Sally, said that under the proposed agreement, her husband may be delegated to working the midnight shift, if he is rehired.

“All the workers may not be called back, so we don’t know how many jobs will be open,” she said. Sally Clarkson said the workers who have replaced some of the strikers will be kept on when the strike ends.

“Everyone is very unhappy,” she said, adding that union members had not been told to vote either way by union officials.

General Foods spokesman James Aehl, the corporation’s spokesman, also declined to discuss details of the agreement.

In response to strikers’ complaints that corporate officials are paid exorbitant wages while workers are being asked to cut back, Aehl said, “We pay a competitive wage to our salaried people just as we do with our hourly employees. The fact that the president earns a good amount of money is reflecting the responsibility he has as the chief executive officer with a company that has $2 billion in sales.”

Operating engineers in the Los Angeles area, Aehl said, “are among the highest paid in the industry” with an hourly wage of more than $13.

“That’s not true,” countered Local 501 representative Fred Lowe. “The pay scale for operating engineers is $16 an hour in other parts of (Los Angeles),” he said.

Lowe added the union’s problems with General Foods began when the company took over the Oscar Mayer plant in 1981.

“The wage freeze is strictly a corporation decision to increase profits and not because of hardships,” he said.