"Don't Spend a Nickel on a Mt. Olive Pickle"
Pickle Payments: Dried-Up Trickle-Down Economics That Leave Wage-Earners with Sticks and Stones and Broken Bones
MOUNTING MOUNT OLIVE BOYCOTTS TO CHANGE THE WORLD
Saturday marked another instance, among hundreds of thousands of such cases that take place daily in different corners of the human condition, of unheralded social foment that portends irreversible changes in how we live and what is cooperatively possible for us to do. The situation at hand unfolded in a Kroger parking lot, where a gathering of a few score citizens---cast by authority into the familiar role of miscreants---followed the leadership of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee(FLOC)in threatening a boycott against a union-shop company for purchasing goods from peon-labor operations. The seamy enterprise in question is the Mount Olive Pickle Company the largest purveyor of brined-cucumbers on earth.
The characters attendant on this sunny, steamy, blacktop stage---parading past the eye of God during an interlude in a normal Spring cyclone of wind and rain---represent the panoply of human possibility who collectively correspond with a progressive future. They consist of American labor veterans and other organizers for social justice. Immigrants are a big proportion of people present too. A smattering of citizens merely hopeful about manifesting equity round out the troops arrayed for a battle of banter and meaning.
Eighty-something Jonas is nearly an orginal UAW member, who migrated his charcoal black bottom here from Detroit along with Ford Motor Company, and who envisions the attack on “food workers” as a critical piece in a general attack on labor. Aaron is FLOC’s able and multilingual field commander, handling public relations, logistics, personnel and personality spats, and every measure of mix-up in bringing such a get-together together in the era of Bush. Other veteran beneficiaries of various experiences of working-class solidarity are also present.
Luis and Alfonso and a few other compadres arrive from Vidalia, Georgia---in a rattletrap van only roadworthy because of their ingenius mechanical acuity---fresh from a fiscal disaster caused by a wealthy grower who would not take time from preparing for church to pay them each the $300 they made working sixty hours this week, money they hoped to put into their vehicle, food, and other expenses, as well as in the mail back to Mexico. Gloria is an ‘amnestied’ resident from South of the border, who now advocates AFL-CIO’s UNITE operation in support of workers of the world; she last saw her five children ten years ago, her flight to ‘El Norte’ typical in its sacrifice of family ties in support of family solvency.
Over the years the recent arrivals, taking a stand in the parking lot steambath on Saturday, have come for all the obvious reasons. They leave homes and families not for invasion or plunder but to eat and pay their way in a world economy with no place for workers but as traveling, fungible slaves. Every one of them has abandoned lives as ‘Campesinos’, some of the 1.5 million small Mexican farmers crushed by NAFTA’s impact. FLOC president and co-founder Baldemar Velasquez last October swung through Mexico’s Michoacan province and encountered village after village without men, and with few women of child-bearing age remaining either. They are all here.
While the businesses that suck the life out of these men and women and rack up record profits thereby break “rules” with impunity in order to increase their profits, the United States Government winks and nods at this universal perfidy with ‘programs’ that hearken back to ‘braceros’ and other legalized “wetback” initiatives over the years, that have simultaneously trapped these hard working people in peonage and blamed them for being in the trap. FLOC’s aim, ultimately, is to finesse the need for such peon-promoting “programs” by empowering policies of unity and cohesion among the hemisphere’s laborers, a development that would match the decades-long joinder of those in charge of cash and capital.
The Mount Olive Pickle Company packages more cucumbers than any other producer on the planet, and they utilize the missing adults of Michoacan and other such jurisdictions in their daily doings. A pickle packer may seem an obscure target for an extensive organizing iniative---including union drives, boycotts and threats of boycotts, various direct action and civil disobedience and lobbying efforts---but Mount Olive’s practices are the leading wedge of plans to return agricultural labor, not to the 1950’s in the South, but to the 1850’s, except that contemporary slaves won’t have the chance to eat at ‘Massa’s’ table when they wear out or break down. They’ll discover, instead, that they’ve broken some arbitrary imperative, like keeping a clean room, and with wages illegally withheld, find themselves on a Latin-bound bus full of other deportees.
So long as this pattern continues, every U.S. hourly employee has nothing but cutbacks and give-backs and stretchouts and breadlines in his or her future. FLOC foresees a very different possibility, however. As Aaron, the overall organizer for the day, put it, “imagine the impact if these field hands, mostly in North Carolina, the most anti-union state in America, can fight their way to a decent deal AND union recognition.” FLOC is also backing a campaign at Smithfield Farms, a hog butcher in Eastern N.C. that uses Black and Latino employees in roughly equal numbers, in a conscious effort to divide and conquer working people, lower wages, increase output and profits, and eviscerate any standards of safety or decency which North American workers have won over the years. These two campaigns may seem like unimportant skirmishes to the uninitiated, but their potential transformative value is gigantic.
“Everywhere in ‘industrial food production,’” says Aaron, “whether it’s in a factory such as Smithfield, where they a few hundred workers kill 12,000 hogs a day, or in the massive ‘vegetable patches’ with Mt. Olive contracts---which pay subhuman and sub-minimum wages replete with company stores and company housing that further reduces compensation---the whole point is to keep people at each other’s throats while conditions return to plantation practice.” As such, FLOC also stands for the Black-Brown-Alliance, a program of “Black Workers for Justice”, that sees multiethnic cooperation as a strategic necessity, especially in Dixie. The Amnesty Coalition, which calls for a hemisphere as borderless for labor as it is already for capital, is another venture of FLOC---strategically inseparable from the tactics against Kroger---which supports last Saturday’s sweaty festivities.
For going on two years now, FLOC has been expanding social and political aspects of its labor organizing drives. This interconnectedness---generally foreign to American labor since at least the 1950’s destruction, during both Truman’s and Eisenhauer’s administrations, of the Mineworkers and the Steelworkers big drives---is something that AFL-CIO affiliates, led by SEIU, USWA, and UAW, increasingly are touting as the only hope, not just for American labor unions, but for a sustainable world economy that promises anything but peonage for wage-earners.
Obviously, at least in the short term, there exist cohorts among the apparently rich diversity of human economic types---a surface arguably belied by an underlying structure more deeply polarized---for whom working-class peonage would be beneficial. Trust fund sorts, those who live off of investments, business owners and the managers and technicians of the owners who have identifiable cause to cast their fortunes with the plutocratic corporate elite, such as these can countenance a new edition of slavery as a positive development, at least for their pocketbooks.
But for EVERY OTHER INDIVIDUAL MEMBER OF EVERY OTHER GROUP ON EARTH---in aggregate the overwhelming vast majority of humanity---the unifying tactics and goals of FLOC and its friends are economically and socially indivisible from anything akin to prosperity and justice. This does not suggest that Labor Unions are perfect institutions. This side of heaven and hell, only human institutions are possible for us to create. Our only questions should be, what sorts of institutions are in the best interest of me and mine? What ought I to do to bring about the sorts of connections and organizations that help me and my family?
Increasingly, such small groups of people as the May Day revelers at Kroger are coming to similar conclusions, as occur more and more occasionally now, by MASSIVE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE EXHIBITING UNPARALLELED OUTPOURINGS OF HUMAN ENERGY, for both protest and positive reform---such as a million people ten days ago marching for women’s reproductive rights, and hundreds of millions collectively acting to empower peaceful international relations over the past couple of years. These many grassroots judgements, put simply, add up to the powerful contention that NO DEVELOPMENT THAT DIVIDES THE WORKING PEOPLE OF THE PLANET FROM EACH OTHER CAN POSSIBLY BENEFIT ANY FAMILY THAT CONSISTS OF SAID WORKING FOLK.
This makes sense to me. Aaron, who drank a cup of coffee with me Saturday night, clearly agrees as well. He tossed his pony-tail and laughed at the power possible in the form of workers united across continents and hemispheres to straddle the seas and gird the planet in a new institutional network. His T-shirt expressed more modest, and more tangible, hopes. “UNIONS” leapt from his sternum in black, just below his throat. Underneath, interlocking hands of many hues formed a logo of a lock. “AN ANTI-THEFT DEVICE FOR WORKING FAMILIES!!” was the contrasting, italicized completion of a thought that only in America would working people find anomalous.
I would have to say, as well, “THAT’S MY STORY, AND I’M STICKING TO IT!!”