Are Unions Still Relevant?
H. Bradley Stokes
Business Manager/Financial Secretary
Local Union 753
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
AFL-CIO
The following article by Business Manager Stokes appeared in part as an Op-Ed in the Springfield News-Leader
in February 2000.
In the early 1980s, as Unions lost their clout, meat packing plants began relocation to rural nonunion areas to
slash labor costs and get closer to feed and livestock farms. By the 1990s, it was standard industry practice to
import workers through border-state labor recruiters who - for a fee - deliver bus loads of Mexicans to plants
throughout the Midwest, says scholar Mark Grey, associate professor of anthropology of the University of
Northern Iowa.
Welcome to the rural jungle of Missouri, where migrant meat packing workers described to Christopher D.
Cook, for his article “Hog Tied”© (The Progressive, Aug. 1998), conditions distressingly similar to those in
Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel of nearly a century ago.
Meat production in the United States is at record levels - 45.3 billion pounds in 1998, according to the US
Department of Agriculture. The industry once paid workers $30,000 a year, but it now engages a constant
supply of impoverished migrants for whom $6 to $9 an hour seems like a godsend. Meat packers’ real wages
have shrunk $5.74 per hour since 1981, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data using 1998 dollars.
The promise of meat packing is an empty one, delivering not prosperity but poverty and pain. A stunning 32
percent of meat packers are injured each year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics - far more than any
other industry. Employee turnover often runs far more than 100 percent per year. Yet the people keep
coming, and the conditions and the turnover persist.
Says Maria, a fifty-four year old recruit to Missouri from El Paso who packs and lifts thirty-pound boxes of pig
feet, “[N]ow the belt is at full blast with less people working on the line. We were doing pretty well when it was
ten hours [and 5,000 pigs]. Now they are trying to kill us by killing 7,100 [pigs] in eight hours.” Emma, a
packing-line worker from El Paso, says she was denied bathroom trips even when she had morning sickness.
Her supervisor told her to vomit in the garbage can next to the assembly line, she claims.
Workers share sparsely furnished, overcrowded rooms and sleep on wooden pallets. Local Milan, Missouri
landlord Harry Frost confirmed that he rents a four-bedroom house to the company for about $400 a month.
But Premium Standard Farms of Milan, Missouri charges six workers who live in the house $160 each. The
monthly total for that house is $960, a $560 profit for the company!
Rent is just one of countless deductions - including mandatory safety gear - taken from each week’s
paycheck. “There were many people who started at $7.25 an hour who for the first four weeks did not take
home more than $100 a week because of all the pay-backs,” says the Reverend Velda Bell of the United
Methodist Church in nearby Trenton, Missouri.
By any measure, the nineteenth century was an age of revolution. Yet this technological and commercial
revolution, in and of itself, offered few immediate benefits to the people who made these changes physically
possible. The wage-worker whose labor had produced it was forgotten, and as a consequence the workers
who placed our country foremost in material and intellectual progress were poorer than ever before.
George Westinghouse, whose manufacturing concern was based in western Pennsylvania, introduced a
“corporate welfare” managerial strategy that successfully discouraged labor organization by his employees.
Westinghouse voluntarily established the Saturday half-holiday and constructed company towns in order to
house his valued employees. But the company exacted a high price for the benefits. In 1893, for instance,
employees at the Westinghouse Airbrake Company were informed that they could not run for local political
office. After the company imposed a series of wage reductions in the mid -1890s, a number of Westinghouse
workers challenged this policy by organizing local Unions, but they soon found themselves unemployed for their
efforts.
Charles H. Pillard, International President of the IBEW from 1968-1986 once said, “But what does the adversity
that existed one hundred years ago have to do with today? In that century we and our forbears fought and
sacrificed to reduce the hours of labor, to bring workers into an economic class where they and their families
can live in dignity. We have earned benefits which protect us from financial disaster, provide for our retirement,
and make possible the time off to . . . enjoy our share of the good life. We have secured both in our contracts,
and as a matter of public policy [we have promoted] the precept that we are entitled to a safe place to work; and
we have provided for both our social and economic security. Now we see all of these under attack. We see the
systematic dismantling of the security we have won over these past one hundred years. We need to rekindle
the spirit of our founders, because our mission is no different now from what it was then . . . The battleground
may look different, and the weapons used against us may be more sophisticated; but our mission hasn’t
changed. We still strive to earn for our members their rightful place in society.”
H. Bradley Stokes
Business Manager/Financial Secretary
Local Union 753
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
AFL-CIO
The following article by Business Manager Stokes appeared in part as an Op-Ed in the Springfield News-Leader
in February 2000.
In the early 1980s, as Unions lost their clout, meat packing plants began relocation to rural nonunion areas to
slash labor costs and get closer to feed and livestock farms. By the 1990s, it was standard industry practice to
import workers through border-state labor recruiters who - for a fee - deliver bus loads of Mexicans to plants
throughout the Midwest, says scholar Mark Grey, associate professor of anthropology of the University of
Northern Iowa.
Welcome to the rural jungle of Missouri, where migrant meat packing workers described to Christopher D.
Cook, for his article “Hog Tied”© (The Progressive, Aug. 1998), conditions distressingly similar to those in
Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel of nearly a century ago.
Meat production in the United States is at record levels - 45.3 billion pounds in 1998, according to the US
Department of Agriculture. The industry once paid workers $30,000 a year, but it now engages a constant
supply of impoverished migrants for whom $6 to $9 an hour seems like a godsend. Meat packers’ real wages
have shrunk $5.74 per hour since 1981, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data using 1998 dollars.
The promise of meat packing is an empty one, delivering not prosperity but poverty and pain. A stunning 32
percent of meat packers are injured each year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics - far more than any
other industry. Employee turnover often runs far more than 100 percent per year. Yet the people keep
coming, and the conditions and the turnover persist.
Says Maria, a fifty-four year old recruit to Missouri from El Paso who packs and lifts thirty-pound boxes of pig
feet, “[N]ow the belt is at full blast with less people working on the line. We were doing pretty well when it was
ten hours [and 5,000 pigs]. Now they are trying to kill us by killing 7,100 [pigs] in eight hours.” Emma, a
packing-line worker from El Paso, says she was denied bathroom trips even when she had morning sickness.
Her supervisor told her to vomit in the garbage can next to the assembly line, she claims.
Workers share sparsely furnished, overcrowded rooms and sleep on wooden pallets. Local Milan, Missouri
landlord Harry Frost confirmed that he rents a four-bedroom house to the company for about $400 a month.
But Premium Standard Farms of Milan, Missouri charges six workers who live in the house $160 each. The
monthly total for that house is $960, a $560 profit for the company!
Rent is just one of countless deductions - including mandatory safety gear - taken from each week’s
paycheck. “There were many people who started at $7.25 an hour who for the first four weeks did not take
home more than $100 a week because of all the pay-backs,” says the Reverend Velda Bell of the United
Methodist Church in nearby Trenton, Missouri.
By any measure, the nineteenth century was an age of revolution. Yet this technological and commercial
revolution, in and of itself, offered few immediate benefits to the people who made these changes physically
possible. The wage-worker whose labor had produced it was forgotten, and as a consequence the workers
who placed our country foremost in material and intellectual progress were poorer than ever before.
George Westinghouse, whose manufacturing concern was based in western Pennsylvania, introduced a
“corporate welfare” managerial strategy that successfully discouraged labor organization by his employees.
Westinghouse voluntarily established the Saturday half-holiday and constructed company towns in order to
house his valued employees. But the company exacted a high price for the benefits. In 1893, for instance,
employees at the Westinghouse Airbrake Company were informed that they could not run for local political
office. After the company imposed a series of wage reductions in the mid -1890s, a number of Westinghouse
workers challenged this policy by organizing local Unions, but they soon found themselves unemployed for their
efforts.
Charles H. Pillard, International President of the IBEW from 1968-1986 once said, “But what does the adversity
that existed one hundred years ago have to do with today? In that century we and our forbears fought and
sacrificed to reduce the hours of labor, to bring workers into an economic class where they and their families
can live in dignity. We have earned benefits which protect us from financial disaster, provide for our retirement,
and make possible the time off to . . . enjoy our share of the good life. We have secured both in our contracts,
and as a matter of public policy [we have promoted] the precept that we are entitled to a safe place to work; and
we have provided for both our social and economic security. Now we see all of these under attack. We see the
systematic dismantling of the security we have won over these past one hundred years. We need to rekindle
the spirit of our founders, because our mission is no different now from what it was then . . . The battleground
may look different, and the weapons used against us may be more sophisticated; but our mission hasn’t
changed. We still strive to earn for our members their rightful place in society.”
