The meeting took place during the Midwest Socialist Conference, and participants in the meat packers' meeting attended an afternoon reception and evening meeting featuring presentations by leaders of the Socialist Workers Party (see last week's Militant). Packinghouse workers from around the country were able to meet workers who are part of struggles in the Chicago area, and who are interested in the socialist movement, as well as young socialists from several cities who traveled to the conference to learn more about the SWP and YS.

AMPAC, Chicago's last hog slaughterhouse, closed its doors in November with no advance notice, with devastating consequences for many workers and their families. Since December those workers have been battling for lost pay and benefits. Britton, who worked at the plant, explained the experiences and leadership lessons that communist workers are drawing as they participate in this fight with their former AMPAC brothers and sisters, most of whom are longtime UFCW members.

In a series of meetings, these workers "have charted a course that has resulted in the boss class paying a price for the shutdown," said Britton. At a Christmas Eve protest in front of the plant, workers carried signs in Spanish, English, and Polish, showing the unity that has been built among workers of different backgrounds. They have developed relations with La Unión Latina, an organizing center for temporary workers in the Chicago area.

Britton reported on plans for an April 17 press conference and protest at the Federal Building in downtown Chicago to announce a lawsuit against the company. The civil suit seeks to penalize AMPAC for violating the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Act (WARN), which requires that 60 days' notice be given to workers in advance of plant closings.

Participants in the meeting of socialist meat packers discussed how they can build support for this fight among other meat packers around the country.  
 
'Elements of a structured leadership'
"Elements of a structured leadership have developed," said Britton. "Two to three dozen workers have taken on responsibilities between the larger mass meetings to ensure that their decisions get carried out and to organize delegations to meet with union officials and attorneys." The meetings function with a "rough and ready workers democracy" and have a lot of authority, Britton noted. "Gaps between word and deed are not popular. Every worker has a say, and is urged to say it. As one leader says, 'Anybody that's got ideas can talk.'"

Communist workers have been part of the workforce at AMPAC for years. During this time, supporters of the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial have sold the communist publications outside the plant gate. These sales have had an impact, Britton said. At the first workers' meeting he attended after being terminated, along with Arrin Hawkins, a fellow AMPAC worker and a leader of the Young Socialists, "we were urged to involve 'those people who sold the papers outside the plant.'"

Some of the socialist workers and Young Socialists participated in the December 24 protest and have set up literature tables outside the halls where the AMPAC workers' meetings were taking place. One time, when the weather was especially cold, workers insisted that the table be moved inside, close to where the meeting was taking place.

A central question in the AMPAC workers' fight revolves around the claim by the company that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the government agency that inspects meat production, forced the plant to close. By denying their responsibility for the closure, the owners are claiming exemption from the WARN Act.

The workers explain that the company ignored numerous USDA warnings, taking no actions over violations for unsanitary conditions cited by the government agency. ¡Exito!, a Spanish language weekly newspaper in Chicago, reported on January 10 that "officials of the USDA said that at no time did the government order the closing of the plant." The article was a direct result of the workers' public protest, said Britton.  
 
Proletarianizing the party's work
Involvement in the AMPAC workers' fight has helped the SWP's branch in Chicago take steps to proletarianize its functioning and strengthen its revolutionary centralism, in turn contributing to the effectiveness of branch members involved in the fight.

The examples include a concentrated effort to reconstitute a fraction of party members in the meat packing industry here. The branch has carried out more consistent political activity in workers districts in the city where the party is seeking to develop a base. The next step will be to find a suitable meeting hall and bookstore in an area where meat packers live and work.

Participants in the meeting recounted a number of examples of involvement in union organizing drives and developing social movements.

A socialist meat packer in Omaha, Nebraska, described the ongoing organizing drive among thousands of meat packers there. At ConAgra, members of the Workers Committee meet weekly, take responsibility for deepening support for the organizing work, defend co-workers, and put out La Neta, Spanish slang for "the truth," a newsletter that responds to company attacks on workers and the union.

While building support for the union in the plants, many workers have taken an interest in other workers' struggles and in the broader perspective that they have found in Pathfinder books and the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial.

On March 13, after a meeting of the ConAgra Workers Committee, eight workers met with Michael Italie, the socialist candidate for Mayor of Miami who was fired for his political views from Goodwill Industries in Miami where he worked as a sewing machine operator. The ConAgra workers had a wide-ranging discussion with Italie and presented him with a petition signed by 28 workers at two plants.

Paul Pederson, a meat packer at a plant in Long Island, New York, reported that he and a meat packer he had worked with at another plant joined the "widows' walk" for black lung benefits for a day. Two women--the widow of a coal miner who died of black lung and the wife of a retired coal miner who suffers from the disease--have walked 525 miles from Charleston, West Virginia, to Washington, D.C., to put the spotlight on the fact that most coal miners with the ailment cannot get the health care they need. Nor do their spouses receive their due benefits. The widows' walk is part of an incipient social movement linked to decades of struggles in the coalfields.  
 
Importance of plant gate sales
Pederson pointed to consistent plant-gate sales of the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and Pathfinder books as crucial for maintaining contact with the worker who joined him on the walk. The plant-gate sale helped to draw him to support other workers' struggles and to regular attendance at Militant Labor Forums, and, in the process, to bring him closer to the communist movement.

Ernie Mailhot from Seattle noted in his report that "we get a good response among workers everywhere we do plant-gate sales." Several meeting participants said that such sales are not regularly organized at the plants where they work. The meeting decided to work with other supporters of these publications to rectify this during the course of the subscription drive for the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial, running from April 13 through June 9.

Distribution of Pathfinder books among co-workers and other meat packers will be an important part of the sales drive. "We are in the final months of the Pathfinder Press campaign to sell $500,000 in books in the 18-month period between January 2001 and July 1, 2002," said Mailhot.

From St. Paul, Minnesota, Tom Fiske reported that co-workers have bought 20 Pathfinder books over the last two months. "These sales come out of attacks by the companies, the imposition of new work rules, and the layoff of 42 workers. The instability of our situation prompts workers to seek answers and lessons from previous struggles."

Since February 1, the members of the national UFCW fraction have sold 47 copies of the new Pathfinder book, From the Escambray to the Congo: In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution by Víctor Dreke. The fraction adopted goals for the upcoming drive of selling 50 subscriptions to each of the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial, and 50 copies of Pathfinder's Cuba and the Coming American Revolution by Jack Barnes. "That title teaches not only about the Cuban revolution but also mainly about the class struggle in the U.S. It is an excellent recruitment tool," said Mailhot.

"The book can also help us in our work to defend the five Cuban revolutionaries who have been framed up and imprisoned by the U.S. government," he said. The socialists explain that the jailed revolutionaries were on an international mission to defend their country and revolution from attacks by the U.S. government and Cuban counterrevolutionary forces based in the United States.

"When we explain who they are and how they have spent their lives," Mailhot said, "many of our co-workers will be extremely impressed with people who rise to that level of commitment and will be interested in learning more about the Cuban revolution."

Mailhot also pointed to the weekly Militant Labor Forum as an institution that workers use and respect. Meat packers who have been involved in strikes and organizing drives have recently spoken alongside other workers at these forums in Boston, Seattle, Chicago, and Des Moines, he said.

Several meat packers at the meeting pointed to the usefulness of going back to the Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Unions by Jack Barnes. This book explains that communist workers in the unions function simultaneously on three different levels: as members of the revolutionary party, as workers seeking to involve other workers in political activity, and as union activists with a revolutionary perspective for the unions.

Rachele Fruit is a meat packer and member of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1625 in Tampa, Florida. Don Reed is a meat packer in Omaha, Nebraska.  
 
 
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