Delta Strike: Civil Rights or Just Plain Economics? : Labor: Moving from cotton to catfish has saved many a farmer from foreclosure, but there may still be a touch of the old plantation involved.

Rosa Walker spent eight years filleting catfish at Delta Pride Catfish, Inc.’s processing plant in Indianola, Miss. She stood all day on a cement floor, wielding her razor-sharp fillet knife at a table with 24 other black women, and she was required to cut 800 pounds of fillets during her shift.

In 1989, when Delta Pride’s personnel manager told her not to come back to work, she was making $4.40 an hour and had developed carpal tunnel syndrome, a nerve disorder affecting the hand and wrist brought on by repetitive motion.

The company paid for surgery on her hand--severing the afflicted nerve is the only known relief--but told her she could not come back to work because there were no “light” duties for her.

“They hire you, cripple you, fire you,” Walker said. “They treat people like dogs out there. It’s like being back on the plantation.”

It’s an oft-heard story in Indianola. Delta Pride is the largest employer in rural Sunflower County, deep in the Mississippi Delta. The company hires almost 2,000 people, most of them workers in the processing plant, most of them black women making close to minimum wage.

There is a bitter strike currently in progress against Delta Pride, and striking workers have called for a national boycott of the company’s products. What began as a labor dispute between Local 1529 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, and a catfish processor in an out-of-the-way part of northwestern Mississippi may turn into the first national civil-rights rallying point of the 1990s.

“Your cause is generating more than sympathy; it is generating anger against those who have turned a plant into a plantation,” wrote Jesse Jackson, in a letter of support to the 900 workers who walked off their jobs on Sept. 12.

“That anger will be heard resoundingly at checkout counters across America ringing up ‘no sale’ on Delta Pride products.”

Delta Pride’s management accuses the union of distorting the situation. “This is not a civil-rights issue,” said Larry Joiner, Delta Pride’s president, in a statement released after Joseph Lowery, of the Atlanta-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference, spoke to the strikers.

Instead, Joiner said, “It is an economic issue that plagues the entire farm-raised catfish industry, which is facing rising costs, excess processor capacity and softening sales demand.”

The wholesale price of catfish has, indeed, been low for the past 18 months, cutting into processors’ profits, but people are wrong when they say the Delta Pride strike is not a civil-rights issue, Lowery said. “The civil-rights struggle is now in the arena of the economy. Ninety percent of the workers in the catfish industry are black and 90% of the money in the industry goes to the whites.”

Sunflower County certainly has had its share of civil-rights issues. The White Citizens’ Council was formed in Indianola in 1954, to defend white supremacy in the face of the U.S. Supreme Court’s order to integrate the public schools.The county also has its place on the map of the march toward racial equality. In Ruleville, which is about 20 miles north of Indianola, Fannie Lou Hamer, a heroine of the civil-rights movement, waged her struggles.

The prospect of a boycott of Delta Pride products has sent shock waves through the Delta’s $300 million farm-raised catfish industry. It is particularly worrisome to the dozen or so other processing plants in the area, where the fear is that the public may boycott catfish in general, rather than only Delta Pride’s product.

African-Americans consume a disproportionately large amount of the catfish eaten in this country, so an effective national black boycott could wreak havoc on the industry, a real loss. In the past 20 years, catfish farming has become the most successful aquaculture ever developed in this country.

There is reason to wish the industry continued growth. Satisfying the hunger of the nation’s meat eaters with catfish makes good sense, particularly with health-conscious consumers buying more seafood while overfishing and pollution reduce the nation’s supply of fish caught in the wild.

Catfish turn feed into meat much more efficiently than other kinds of livestock, so fewer resources are used to grow them. Catfish feed is normally unmedicated, so there is no antibiotic residue in the meat as there frequently is with cows, pigs and chickens. The fish are grown in ponds where the water has consistently tested squeaky-clean.

Catfish feed floats, which means that the fish do not root for food in the bottom of the pond--as they do in the wild--and their meat is white, firm and has a neutral, bland flavor.

A sophisticated advertising campaign and growing acceptance by restaurants nationwide induced many Americans to try catfish, and they liked it. The annual U.S. consumption of pond-raised catfish has grown from virtually none in 1970 to about 400 million pounds last year.

In 1981, a group of farmers formed Delta Pride as a cooperative processing plant, with shares allotted on the basis of how many ponds a farmer had. There are currently about 180 farmer/shareholders--farmers who sell their fish to their own corporation.

Delta Pride processed $144 million of catfish in 1989--35% of the total catfish grown in the United States--all raised within a 50-mile radius of the plant. Plant management signed its first union contract in 1987, after a bitter, hard-fought union organizing campaign.

One of the early supporters of a union was Mary Young, who had been gutting fish for four years. “It was pure-dee hell, before the union came along,” she said. “No matter what the reason--you could be sick or your child could be sick, and you could carry in a doctor’s statement--if you took off, you might get fired.

“They’d tell us, ‘I don’t care if your mother’s sick, you’d better be here on this job or else don’t come back.’ They’d treat us any kind of way and whatever happened we could suffer or leave. It was terrible.”

The initial three-year contract ran out this past July, and Delta Pride gave the union its “final” offer in late August. The company offered a 6.5-cents-an-hour pay increase over each of the next three years. Union members rejected the offer Sept. 7, and Delta Pride refused to negotiate further. Five days later, the strike started.

“We have given the best offer we can make without compromising the financial integrity of our company,” said Carolyn Ann Sledge, a spokesperson for Delta Pride. “We offer the highest wage and benefit package in the industry.”

Union representatives disagree. “Wages at a number of other plants are slightly higher than at Delta Pride,” said Joe Price, a union spokesman in Indianola.

“And, we want to establish a health and safety committee, to deal with the high incidence of carpal tunnel syndrome, but unlike other plants, Delta has refused. In other plants where management has been willing to work with us on this, we have lowered the incidence of carpal tunnel by 50%.”

In December, 1989, the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration fined Delta Price $32,800 for violating government health and safety standards in the plant. The company is appealing the fines.

Shortly after the strike began, it got nasty, with violent incidents on both sides of the picket line. Early this month, a federal grand jury indicted a Delta Pride shareholder and his son for offering a $5,000 bribe to one worker on the union’s bargaining committee if she spoke out for ending the strike.

How has the strike affected Delta Pride’s business? “We have completed hiring our work force and we have about 20 more people working here than we did before the strike started,” said Sledge last week. “We have lost some business from the strike, but it’s not appreciable.”

The union concedes Delta Pride has been able to hire a lot of replacement workers, because even minimum wage jobs are scarce in the Delta, and black women have few opportunities to make money.

“I’m not sure they have as many as they say they do, but it’s a sad thing when people have to choose between what they believe in and earning enough to keep themselves and their families alive,” Price said.

“A lot of the replacement workers are people from places 25 or 30 miles away where they have 20% unemployment, so these folks are willing to cross the picket line and take a job for $3.50 an hour.”

The boycott of Delta Pride’s products called for by the union has spread slowly, but surely. Three supermarket chains in St. Louis, Mo., have pulled Delta Pride’s products from their shelves, and a number of Mississippi grocers have done so as well. In Atlanta, the A&P; and Big Star chains have honored the boycott request.

Also in Atlanta, SCLC and union members are leafleting the parking lots of Winn-Dixie supermarkets, requesting customers to ask the stores to honor the boycott, something Winn-Dixie management has so far refused.

Winn-Dixie, according to the union, is the largest purchaser of Delta Pride products in the Southeast. Officials at Winn-Dixie have, so far, refused to honor the boycott. “Long-standing company policy is not to participate in labor disputes between management and employees of our supplies,” said the company.

“Of course, if customers on a large scale stoped buying Delta Pride, we’d have to reevaluate,” said G.E. Clerc, a company spokesman at its Jacksonville, Fl. headquarters.

This transition from agriculture to aquaculture has saved many a Sunflower County farmer from foreclosure. But even with the change from cotton to catfish, the Mississippi Delta faces many of the same problems it has endured for decades, no matter whether you label it civil rights or economics.