Immigrant Workers Attempt to Unionize Iowa Meatpacking Plants

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In These Times, issued a 2-part report last week detailing a groundbreaking unionization effort driven by horrid working conditions at two meatpacking facilities in Iowa, a Tyson Foods pork processing plant in Columbus Junction and a Turkey Growers Cooperative plant in West Liberty. Interviews with 20 workers in the plants corroborate the atrocious reputation of safety and working conditions of the meatpacking industry.

In These Times heard complaints ranging from understaffing to abusive supervisors to punitive attendance policies. Meatpacking workers say a union would also address the breakneck pace of the line and the unremitting production pressures, which they say make injuries all but certain. They lift heavy turkey carcasses onto hooks at West Liberty and cut into pork limbs with dull knives at Tyson. Workers say they have soiled themselves trying to keep the line going by skipping bathroom breaks and suffered cuts and stab wounds from wielding knives elbow-to-elbow.

The union drive, if successful, would cover 2,000 workers between the two plants, the largest unionization effort in the meatpacking industry since 2012. United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 431 and community organization “Escucha Mi Voz” are collaborating on the campaign. Their partnership hints at the potential power unleashed through such collaborations:

Escucha also surveyed workers about their working conditions. According to Escucha, a survey of 927 workers at Tyson and 426 workers at West Liberty Foods revealed that more than 85 percent wanted a union.

A typical workplace union campaign would take years to compile such detailed information, but Escucha offered UFCW Local 431 access to the survey results and invited union staff to table the relief clinics where Escucha was distributing the aid in late December 2022 and early January 2023. Since, worker-organizers with Escucha have been meeting at churches and going door-to-door talking with meatpackers about pandemic relief and workers’ rights.

If any industry needs a strong union effort, it’s meatpacking. In February, the Department of Labor fined one of the largest food sanitation companies $1.5 million for using children to clean meatpacking facilities. This, just one story out of a damning series of exposés from the New York Times that showed prevalent use of undocumented minors in dangerous industries such as meatpacking. And lest we forget, managers at another Iowa Tyson plant bet on which of their workers would get sick from COVID-19 because of the companies’ reckless safety conditions.