Union Goes After Latino Support in Battling Meat Firm

A large Southern California food workers union, frustrated by its inability to negotiate a more lucrative contract with Farmer John, on Wednesday began a sophisticated boycott campaign intended to enlist the support of Latino shoppers.

Leaders of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 770, whose contract with Farmer John expired five months ago, said the campaign--undertaken instead of a strike--will exploit the link between Farmer John’s heavily Latino work force and the heavy consumption of pork by Latinos.

Officials of Farmer John--whose Vernon plant is the largest pork-processing facility on the West Coast, slaughtering and processing 1 million pounds a day--condemned the boycott as a dishonest tactic by a weakened, desperate union.

Radio ads, aired Wednesday on several Spanish-language stations, portrayed Farmer John’s 1,000 workers as victims of racially biased management that pays low wages and insufficient attention to safety and job security. Mailings will be sent to targeted census tracts. Latino clergy and civic affairs organizations have given endorsements.

Rosemary Mucklow, executive director of the Western States Meat Assn., said she thought Farmer John has the “reputation and credibility” to “weather the storm.”

Economically, the boycott comes at a difficult time. Pork processors are hurting from a 50% increase in hog prices during the past year. Seven major slaughterhouses have closed so far this year compared to one during all of 1989, the Agriculture Department says.

The campaign is another lesson on the perceived power of the burgeoning Latino consumer market, which has about $20 billion in annual buying income in Los Angeles and Orange counties and spends about $500 million a week nationally in grocery stores alone.

In addition, the campaign illustrates how unions increasingly regard the strike as a weapon of last resort, choosing instead to resolve contract disputes with “corporate campaigns” that put indirect economic pressure on management.

Local 770, which has more than 20,000 members in packing houses and supermarkets, is “prepared to wage a war of attrition,” said Jim Rodriguez, Local 770’s packing house division director. “Spanish-language radio reaches masses of Hispanic consumers at relatively little cost. The union can afford to hammer away at Farmer John for a long time.”

Rodriguez claimed that Latinos buy 70% of Farmer John’s products. The company said it has never studied the ethnic breakdown of its end customers.

The union’s first commercial features a woman talking above mealtime chatter, saying: “The next time your family shares a meal, please think about our families--the families of the workers who are abused by Farmer John.” It ends with a child reciting grace.

The campaign touched a management nerve long before it formally began.

Local 770 had been threatening for months to launch a boycott if management did not bow to contract demands. Last spring, it sent Farmer John’s parent firm, Clougherty Packing Co., a copy of a proposed full-page newspaper ad containing selected quotations from U.S. Department of Agriculture inspection reports, citing problems such as maggot infestation and contamination at Farmer John.

The Clougherty family, which has run the plant for two generations, responded by spending $80,000 to purchase two full-page ads in The Times in mid-April warning consumers of a pending boycott campaign by the union and predicting that the campaign would be misleading. The union now says it may never publish the ad in favor of running more radio spots.

James Harbottle, the USDA’s western regional director of food inspection, said he had seen the threatened ad and felt that “the person looking at it doesn’t get the full story” because “any deficiencies found in the plants we inspect are corrected before the product leaves the factory, and contaminated product is destroyed.”

The labor dispute is an outgrowth of an unsuccessful two-month strike in 1985. Workers came back to work basically accepting management’s demands, including a clause that made union membership voluntary. As a result, while Local 770 remained the recognized bargaining agent, all but about 70 Farmer John employees stopped paying union dues. Most union contracts say employees have to join within 30 days of employment.

When the contract expired early this year, the union sought to restore the “union shop” provision. It also asked for gradual elimination of a two-tier wage system in which employees hired since 1982 have started at $6 an hour, compared to a base wage of nearly $10 an hour for those hired previously. And it asked for annual pay increases of $1 an hour for the next three years.

Management rejected the demands. It said the wage demands would make it impossible to compete with other large pork producers, which have squeezed significant wage concessions out of their employees during the 1980s. It proposed a five-year contract consisting of alternating 18-cent-an-hour pay increases and $500 bonuses.

Local 770 President Rick Icaza said about 80% of Farmer John’s work force is Latino. As evidence of discrimination claimed in the union’s ads, he cited the case of Farmer John worker Porfirio Navarro. Navarro was given a week’s vacation to return to his homeland of El Salvador to care for his father, who had been shot and badly wounded in a robbery. Delayed in returning for another week, he was fired.

An arbitrator earlier this month ruled that Farmer John had unjustly terminated Navarro and ordered him reinstated.

Bernie Clougherty, vice president of the packing company and a son of its co-founder, said, “I don’t see the reasoning behind the union’s (boycott) campaign.” Noting that several companies, including Oscar Mayer, have announced that they are leaving the Vernon area in recent months, Clougherty said Farmer John is one of the last sources of unionized meatpacking jobs. “Let’s say the whole thing (boycott) works,” he said. “Aren’t those members going to be losing jobs?”

One worker, Pat Padilla, a laborer in the plant, said he would rather take that chance.

“We don’t want to strike,” he said. “The man wants to lay us off, fine; at least we can collect (unemployment insurance).”

Teresa Sanchez-Gordon, a lawyer who is executive director of the AFL-CIO’s Labor Immigrant Assistance Project in Los Angeles, said she believes immigrants will heed the boycott because they relate strongly to the nature of the work.

“In Mexico, the meat industry is a large industry, especially in small pueblos . One of the skills immigrants bring with them is the ability to do this kind of work. My father started at Farmer John when he came to this country,” she said.

Meatpacking has become a mecca for immigrant workers as American-born workers gradually leave it because of the physical demands and falling wages.

Meatpacking industry pay was 13% higher than the average manufacturing wage in 1981 but fell to 16% below the average by 1987. Employers forced concessions from unions by threatening plant closures.