Smithfield Workers Score Big Win!

    it looks like a few of the unions in America are on a roll. the latest union to score a big win is the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, who won the right, after a 16 year battle, to organize at Smithfield Foods in North Carolina.

   Employees at Smithfield Foods’ Bladen County plant voted 2,041 to 1,879 to be represented by a union. The vote was counted tonight by federal officials.

A union victory is considered a coup in North Carolina, which has the lowest rate of unionization in the nation. It is part of a larger struggle to organize meat-packing plants that have moved to the Southeast in the past few decades hoping to escape the reach of unions.

   A good deal for these workers at Smithfield as they work at some very crappy and grueling tasks in a slaughterhouse. It's about time that Smithfield got smacked down a notch or two. They've been scaring their workers into avoiding unions for years.

I.S.S.

Virginia-based Smithfield had earned a national reputation for its hostility to organized labor: A 2005 report by Human Rights Watch had singled out Smithfield for creating a "climate of fear" among workers, including intimidation, harassment and even beatings of suspected activists.
Indeed, such tactics are what caused the two previous union elections at Smithfield to be dismissed:

The results of two previous elections at the plant in the 1990s were thrown out after federal officials declared that the company had harassed and fired union supporters, even forcing an employee to stamp the words "Vote No" on dead hogs.

Technorati Tags: United Food and Commercial Workers Union,Smithfield Foods,Workers,North Carolina,Wages

The Auto Bailout Bill Dies

 

Republicans Let US Auto Fail

by Doctor Who  Thu Dec 11, 2008

As I listen to C-Span it is obvious that the US Auto Bailout is dead!  And let it be clear it is the Senate Republicans who killed it!

After a few speeches Harry Reid will hold a cloture vote on the Bill which Reid expects to fail.  He is then going to close the doors and go home.

Why?  All because the Republicans could not get their amendment to establish by a date certain, pay equity between non-union, foreign car workers and UAW workers building US cars.

The good the bad and the ugly of all this after the jump

The Good:

For once the Dems. played chicken and forced the Repugs to blink.  They held fast against selling out the US UAW worker.  Give credit to Chris Dodd and Deb Stabineau who clearly hung this around the Repubs neck where it belongs.

The Bad:

The Southern Repugs killed this Bill for the sole purpose of favoring foreign car in their home States over US car companies in the Northeast.  The purpose of their little pay equity ploy had nothing to do with saving US auto companies and workers, and everything to do with preventing unions being formed among the foreign car workers in their States.

The Ugly:

As Sen. Dodd so eliquently put it, there is a good chance it will be an ugly day on Wall Street tomorrow and even uglier days ahead for thousands of US autoworkers and the communities in which they live.

Technorati Tags: Auto Bailout,UAW,Chrysler,GM,Ford,Republicans