During their fight the workers helped lead a number of solidarity rallies in Jefferson and sent out several on-the-road teams to build support, including among workers at other Tyson plants.

The contract includes a four-year wage freeze, the halving of sick time allowances, and a health-care scheme that will shrink coverage and increase workers’ costs up to $4,600 a year. Starting pay for new hires will drop to $9 per hour from the former level of $11.10. Local 538 president Mike Rice told reporters that new hires will also earn no more than $12 an hour, compared with a top rate of $12.90 for existing workers—part of a two-tier structure the company had insisted on. The agreement also phases out the company’s profit-sharing program, a step that will further reduce workers’ annual wages by 5 percent.

The bosses agreed to remove the requirement for documentation excusing workers if they are late for work. It would have opened the way for the bosses to penalize workers by deducting holiday pay, union member Keith Griep told the Militant.

The agreement provides workers with a $1,500 bonus once they have been back on the job for 30 days. “This payment will be taxed by 40 percent so we will only receive $900,” Griep said. At the start of negotiations in December, Tyson had demanded that any workers not recalled after one year would be considered to have been terminated and lose all seniority. After the workers voted 242-74 to reject the contract with this proposal on January 11, the company backtracked, promising that all former strikers would be called back before the company hires any new workers for union jobs.

Workers have spoken frankly of the takebacks in the contract. “We’re going back with something worse than what we walked out with,” Kurtis Kernan told Associated Press. A number have remarked on the fight they waged for close on a year. During the course of the strike only eight workers crossed the picket line, three of them after the vote on January 11. The company countered with replacement workers, eventually increasing the number of scabs to approximately 300, according to several union members. Under the agreement these workers will remain in the plant.

Union president Mike Rice told reporters he expected 100 union members to be back on the job within two weeks starting February 2. Others are supposed to be recalled in order of seniority as positions open up.

Many workers cited the company’s threat to push for decertification of the union as their reason to vote for the contract. The bosses said they would take advantage of a federal law giving replacement workers the right to vote on the decertification of a union that has been out for more than a year.

“The company indicated during negotiations that after February 28 they no longer had to deal with the UFCW,” said Mike French, an executive board member and union negotiator.

“We save the union if we go back to work,” said Sheila Reed, “I want us to go back to work but I didn’t want us to go back under these conditions, which are basically the same thing we walked out on. We’ll make the best of what we can and we’ll take our fight back up in another four years.”

“It’s all about dignity, what you do as a union,” Griep told the Militant. “We didn’t just roll over in the face of a big corporation. We put up a good fight.”

Maurice Williams is a member of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1546 in Chicago.  
 
 
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