The plant is a cut-and-kill hog operation now called Pine Ridge Farms, Inc., which was bought in January from Iowa Packing Company.

I work at the Tyson plant in Perry, Iowa, which is also a cut-and-kill hog operation. A couple of days after the tragedy, the bosses put up in the cafeteria a blow-up poster of the article in the Des Moines Register on the worker’s death. Above the article, the bosses editorialized that they sympathized with the worker’s family and that this showed how important it is for every worker to work safely.

At a line meeting later in the week, the main floor supervisor went through graphic details of the fatal incident. He lectured workers that no one should take unsafe “shortcuts” and blamed the worker in Des Moines, saying he had taken a shortcut that had cost him his life.

While bosses always tell workers to report unsafe conditions, their emphasis is that safety depends on the individual worker. The employers let themselves off the hook.

Last month, supervisors made workers sign a statement that we are individually responsible for job safety. Our union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, moved to get these statements taken out of our files. According to union officials, our contract has a clause stating that the company is responsible for safety on the job. If that were not the case the company could absolve itself from taking care of on-the-job injuries. Having a union does not guarantee better conditions, but it does provide a vehicle for workers to use our collective strength.

Federal statistics show that more injuries occur in the meatpacking industry than any other U.S. industry. Almost one in 10 packinghouse workers suffers a cumulative trauma injury each year. The Iowa Workforce Development Division of Labor reported that the rate of illness and injury in private companies for 1998 was 9.3 cases per 100 full-time workers. The highest rate, 58.2 per 100 workers, was in meatpacking plants.

There is nothing inherent about this industry, however, that makes it so dangerous. The bosses put workers in the plant on company-organized safety and ergonomics committees, but these committees are a fraud—the bottom line is always production and profit.

Workers labor in close quarters and line speeds are so fast that one can barely do a proper job on each piece of meat. Where I work we get one 15-minute break in the morning, of which five or six minutes are needed to take off and put back on equipment. After lunch we work three or more hours without a break.

Some old-timers report that the union used to have more control of line speed and would deal with problems on the line more quickly. Now if there is a problem, workers have to file a grievance that sometimes takes weeks to settle. Unless the union goes to arbitration, the plant manager is the last resort in settling a grievance.

There is no union at the Pine Ridge Farms plant. We don’t know what pressures Pérez-Rojas was under from the bosses to do his job.

Two and a half years ago, however, a number of workers walked off the job at Iowa Packing, protesting job conditions as well as a supervisor’s verbal abuse and favoritism. The workers were summarily fired. They went to court and a settlement was recently reached under which several got their jobs back with a percentage of back pay. In addition, the administrative law judge in the case ordered the company to post a notice informing workers of their right to organize a union, address their working conditions, and that a company rule that automatically fires them if they go on strike or walk out to address working conditions has been terminated.

The majority of workers at Pine Ridge are immigrants from nations in Latin America, Asia, Africa, Bosnia, and other countries. In the last few years, immigrant workers have been among those taking the lead in resisting the brutal conditions that exist in plants and other industrial workplaces. We have seen this in the successful union organizing drive at Dakota Premium Foods in St. Paul, Minnesota, at meatpacking and poultry plants in Nebraska, in garment shops in Florida, and today at the Co-Op coal mine in Utah.

By fighting, these workers and the ones at Pine Ridge were able to make some gains and push the bosses back a little. Resisting these kinds of conditions and organizing is the only way to help stem the job conditions that led to the death of one of our fellow workers.

Edwin Fruit is a member of UFCW Local 1149 at the Tyson plant in Perry, Iowa.  
 
 
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