The vote was a close 560-512, following an intense anti-union campaign by the company.

Nakisha West, a wirecutter, voted yes for “fairness and accountability.” She and her co-workers use scorching heat and precision-cutting tools to turn polysilicon crystals, or boules, into slim squares, known as wafers, for solar panels.

“It’s a very dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it,” she said.

It’s been more than a decade since that “somebody” was a worker in the U.S.; nearly all the world’s wafers are produced in China. But in January 2025, Corning received $325 million from the federal government to build a solar plant across the street from its semiconductor plant in Hemlock, Michigan, which employs more than 1,000 more workers.

The Hemlock Semiconductor plant is one of only two plants in the U.S. that produce the solar-grade polysilicon. Because it produces this material domestically, Corning is insulated from the effects of the 15 percent tariffs that the Trump administration imposed in August on imported products made with polysilicon.

The 1,380 Corning workers represent the largest victorious union drive in a manufacturing plant since the United Auto Workers unionized a Volkswagen assembly plant in Tennessee in 2024. The Steelworkers also notched a big organizing victory in 2023 with 1,400 school bus manufacturing workers at a Blue Bird factory in Georgia.

Corning employs 12,000 production workers in the U.S., in the fields of glass and ceramics, life sciences (laboratory tools), fiber optics, and solar. Its products include Gorilla Glass, ceramics for catalytic converters, optical communications cables, automotive glass, and iPhone screens.

The Steelworkers have long represented workers in several other Corning plants. After this win, the union now represents 4,400 Corning workers at facilities in New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Kentucky, Virginia, and now Michigan.

But the company has increasingly been moving its operations to non-union facilities. Its fiber optic business is rapidly expanding, fueled by demand from data centers.

HARD FLOPS

The work at Corning is grueling and dangerous. The solar factory runs on a heavy production schedule, operating 24 hours a day, with workers on 12-hour shifts. They alternate between working two weeks on day shift and two weeks on night shift.

Another practice of Corning management, known as “hard flops,” means workers can suddenly be forced to go from night to day shift with very little notice. This, on top of the already brutal working hours, leads to more accidents, injuries, and write-ups.

Workers have to fulfill a strict daily quota of processing bricks into wafers. Workers say the task is difficult to accomplish when wirecutting machines break down frequently—repairing the machine can take an entire shift. When they don’t meet the quota, they get reprimanded and written up for poor performance.

West said workers were often disciplined for things that weren’t their fault, creating a high-turnover environment. “You ought to know who you’re hiring, put them in the right place,” she said. “Don’t set them up for failure. The job is very hard. We needed stability there.”

Many workers cited health and safety as major factors in their decision to support the union drive.

The factory itself was being built around her, West said, during her entire 11 months at Corning. It felt dangerous that her department would be operating wiresaws while contractors were still on site constructing the building.

Several fires and chemical leaks have occurred in the pulling department, West and others said. Workers there operate massive ingot pullers—two-story-tall machines that grow crystalline silicon inside a vacuum-sealed furnace.

Pulling is the most dangerous and potentially explosive department. A major accident there in March injured nine workers, adding urgency to the union drive.

BROKEN PROMISES

Workers also said the company has a long record of broken promises. For example, workers earn profit-sharing, but management recently changed that benefit to “goal sharing,” based on quarterly rather than end-of-year profits. This drastically reduced the added benefit workers had been promised.

“Their word wasn’t bond,” said West. “If it was, we wouldn't go through this.”

Glen Dowdy, a finishing operator, said management has constantly changed the rules and refused to give employees a handbook of its policies. “They just care about money and numbers,” said Dowdy. “That the hourly employees aren’t being treated fairly doesn’t mean jack to them.”

Changes to paid time off and sick leave policies incensed workers. Management forced workers to use sick leave in increments of six or 12 hours at a time, Dowdy and West said, even if workers only needed one or two hours for an appointment.

Under Michigan’s Earned Sick Time Act, all private sector workers are eligible to earn an hour of sick leave for every 30 hours worked, and can use up to 72 hours each year. However, Corning’s policies were causing workers to burn through their leave.

When workers began organizing, they studied how Corning paid similar workers at its other plants. They found out that Corning employees in New York, who are members of the Steelworkers, earn several dollars an hour more than the workers in Michigan, who generally start at $20 an hour.

A UNION IS BORN

The organizing drive began in March, Dowdy recounted, when five workers from the pulling department reached out to the union after the accident. Two weeks later, those workers had brought in 25 more people.

Workers built support by distributing leaflets and having daily conversations with their fellow workers. Often they did home visits and held meetings after working a 12-hour shift.

When the union drive erupted in the spring of this year, management begged workers for a second chance. “It was five months too late,” Dowdy said.

The Steelworkers filed for an election on August 11, and voting began three weeks later.

As soon as the union filed, Corning hired 120 new employees, presumably an attempt to dilute the pool of pro-union workers and increase the number of people the organizing committee would need to reach before the vote.

And Corning ran an intense campaign to break the union drive, as it has at other plants. The workers were prepared for what to expect, because of lessons shared by USW organizers and workers from a fiber optic factory in North Carolina, where the company had successfully thwarted a recent organizing drive.

At the Michigan plant, management held in-plant meetings about the union twice a day. The Global Vice President of Human Resources flew in from New York to meet with workers. Twenty televisions were installed in common areas—including in the breakroom, at timeclocks, and even in production areas—to push anti-union propaganda around the clock.

Workers said they were illegally polled by management on how they planned to vote. Two days before the election, two workers were walked out of the factory for talking to a union organizer. They were reinstated when the union filed an unfair labor practice charge and demanded their return.

LIKE A SHOCKWAVE

Victory in the plant was “like a big shockwave,” Dowdy said. “Management is not walking around arrogant anymore.”

The win also has implications further south, as Corning focuses its expansion in areas where unions have a much weaker presence.

Besides solar manufacturing, Corning is a major player in the buildout of A.I. data centers because of its longstanding position in fiber optics manufacturing. The newest data centers use enormous amounts of fiber optic cable to transmit data through their servers.

Much of its expansion is happening in North Carolina, where the company has operated for a half-century and already has 5,000 fiber optics-related jobs across seven facilities, as well as its headquarters for optical communications. In right-to-work North Carolina, only 2.4 percent of workers belong to unions—the lowest rate in the country.

Through a new $6 billion deal with Meta to supply its A.I. infrastructure growth, Corning is expanding its non-union facility in Hickory, North Carolina—60 miles northwest of Charlotte— which will become the largest fiber optic plant in the world.

Corning also announced an agreement with Nvidia in May to build three new facilities in North Carolina and Texas, adding 3,000 workers. An additional 1,000 jobs in North Carolina are promised from a multi-billion-dollar agreement with Amazon in June.

The Steelworkers have been targeting Corning’s North Carolina facilities; the union already represents workers at the Wilmington facility, which opened in 1967. The union lost a vote among 110 workers at the warehouse in Tarboro in 2024, and filed for an election at a fiber optic plant in Winston-Salem in June but then called off the vote to take more time to shore up support.

The union will be looking to use the momentum from its Michigan win to encourage North Carolina workers to stand up to the union-busting and win a union at plants that are essential to the ambitions of the world’s most powerful tech companies.

The landmark collective bargaining agreement went into effect on July 1, nearly two years after workers won union representation, joining Unifor Local 252, motivated by low wages and unsafe working conditions.

As punishment two years ago, Walmart bumped the pay of every logistics worker in Canada—except those who unionized. This was an effective maneuver to halt further union drives.

“Walmart gave all the wage increases to all the non-union folks, and everything fell apart,” said Angela Drew Kimelman, a Unifor organizer who worked on organizing campaigns at multiple warehouses, including one in Cornwall, near Montreal.

But now, the new contract prevents Walmart from raising wages at other warehouses without doing the same at this one. The unionized workers have received a matching raise, and back pay for the months when other warehouse workers received raises that they didn’t.

Unifor has restarted its organizing efforts at other Ontario warehouses.

‘QUITE THE EYE-OPENER’

In past union drives, Walmart has closed facilities rather than deal with a union. So far, no such threat has emerged for this warehouse.

Instead, two months into the contract, members are moving forward with contract education and implementation, for both workers and the boss.

For the first time, the workers have the protections of a contractual disciplinary procedure. “If you’re at another distribution center and they walk you out, you’re pretty much on your own, at the mercy of the employer,” said Rodolfo Pilozo, a 30-year Walmart worker and member of Unifor’s organizing and negotiations committees.

Kathryn Cespite, an eight-year worker at the warehouse, acted as an interim steward with a co-worker in the contract’s first week. “That was quite the eye-opener,” she said. A manager tried to discipline a worker without letting him tell his side of the story.

STALLING TACTICS

It took 18 months of negotiations to reach a deal. Walmart used stalling tactics, like offering very few dates for negotiations.

“I believe they were intentionally trying to drag out the process, and frustrate the membership into decertifying us,” said Shayne Fields, Unifor’s lead negotiator. There was a decertification petition, he said, and workers reported that Walmart was covertly supporting it, but it never got much traction.

The company also brought in temp workers, implying a threat to replace union workers.

“Walmart was feeding people a lot of misinformation,” Cespite said. “I let the union representatives know what was being said in meetings, and then the union was able to counter it.

“They were taking advantage of people’s lack of knowledge about what unions are,” she said. “One of the challenges we’re running into is that a lot of the people don’t have any experience with unions and don’t know what it’s all about.”

Now that the contract is in place, “we have two years to educate ourselves and others,” said Pilozo. “It’s not just the president of Local 252, or of the national union. It’s us, collectively; we can make changes.”

WHY WALMART GAVE IN

Ontario’s labor laws helped. The law includes a conciliation process for first contracts. First there’s mediation, and then disputes can move to settlement through arbitration. Unifor’s lead negotiator, Fields, filed the paperwork to move that process forward, which started an external clock that pressured Walmart to settle.

Geography also helped. Labor scholar Benjamin Fong argues it would be “a huge pain for Walmart” to relocate this regional distribution center, which serves most of Ontario and Quebec, because the area is hemmed in by the Great Lakes and the layout of Toronto. Walmart already closed its distribution centers in Quebec, which has even stronger labor laws.

Walmart worker Simon Hayford thinks the company settled because executives were worried about more warehouses joining the union, and they didn’t want to draw more attention to the unionized one. He and Pilozo have been participating in Unifor’s efforts to organize other Walmart warehouses.

“I’ve talked with some of the other warehouse guys, and they say ‘We’re making the same money so why would we do it?’” Hayford said. But he anticipates the other benefits the contract provides, like an improved safety committee and protection against unfair terminations, will show the value of the union over time.

“I was there. I lost my friends,” said Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants. “Our union made a sacred promise to ensure that such a tragedy is never repeated.” She described the Trump administration’s attempts to privatize airport security as a danger to the public as well as the 55,000 members of her union.

At the time of the September 11 attacks, airport security relied on a patchwork of private contractors, “driven by corporate bottom lines and cost-cutting,” Nelson wrote in a July letter to Congress.

“We don’t have to theorize about what that may look like because we have been through this before and witnessed the devastating and deadly consequences,” said Government Employees (AFGE) President Everett Kelley on July 21, after a new privatization scheme, TSA Gold+, was revealed.

With the creation of TSA in 2001, all workers became direct employees of the federal government, with uniform standards across airports. The workers unionized in 2011, becoming members of AFGE Council 100, which now represents 47,000.

ATTACKING THE UNION

Since coming into office in 2025, the Trump administration has been trying to get rid of the union at TSA, and privatize airport security. Union members say the administration is following the plans laid out in the right-wing Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership.

Darrell English, president of AFGE Local 777, said rich contracts are being dangled for tech companies to come in and replace workers. Local 777 represents 2,500 Transportation Security Officers at 19 airports in Illinois and Wisconsin.

“They’re giving these contracts to these billionaires for their technology,” said English, a lead officer with 21 years at the agency. “And that technology is going to reduce the staffing levels at airports for TSA officers.

“It's all about gaining that money, the financial contracts, through TSA,” he said.

Kelley called the privatization plans a “major departure and step backwards from the aviation screening security system that Congress created in the wake of the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks.”

Nelson wrote to Congress urging rejection of David Cummins, a nominee for TSA director who is committed to privatization and opposes collective bargaining at TSA. Cummins was confirmed by the Senate 51-47 on August 7.

PARTIAL WIN

The unions notched a partial win when Cummins backed down from “TSA Gold+,” much touted by the Trump administration and his predecessor, Ha Nguyen McNeill.

AFGE leaders said they only learned about the TSA Gold+ program from the press in July, even though it had been in development for many months. When the government didn’t respond to a request for relevant documents, AFGE sued for their release.

The program would have allowed airports to completely privatize their security operations, including bringing in their own equipment. “TSA Gold+ would have put private contractors in control not only of security screening functions but the screening technology itself,” said Nelson.

But airport managers were skeptical. Only three airports seemed to be on track to implement it, in Tampa, Des Moines, and Charleston, South Carolina. Then the largest, Tampa International Airport, announced August 24 that after a months-long evaluation, it would be sticking with the existing TSA workforce.

That same day, Cummins announced the end of TSA Gold+, but privatization plans would go forward under a new scheme: Horizon 25 Strategy. It includes expanding the small, already existing Screening Partnership Program (SPP), where screeners work for a private company. The largest airport to use it is San Francisco.

The Trump administration’s proposed 2027 budget would cut thousands of TSO jobs. According to the union, the budget would eliminate 14 percent of the workforce, or 8,400 positions. The administration’s plan, the union said in July, is that private contractors would replace 4,500 screening workers “through a proposed mandatory expansion of the Screening Partnership Program to include all small and non-hub airports.”

Only 20 of the country’s 440 commercial airports now use private screening under the SPP, which was rolled out in 2004. But that would expand to 220 under the administration’s proposal, the union reported.

MAKING STABLE JOBS

It’s taken nearly 25 years to make airport screener jobs stable and livable. First there was a decade of organizing to win union representation for TSOs, and then in 2012 they secured a contract. Then in 2023, under the Biden administration, the TSA workforce was finally included in the federal workers’ pay schedule. Some got a pay bump of 30 percent. (Federal worker unions do not negotiate their pay; it is set by Congress.)

The new pay scale reduced turnover, which had been the worst in the federal government at 20 to 25 percent a year.

But when Trump came in for a second term, he went on a full-on attack against federal unions and declared void AFGE’s contract with TSA. In January, a judge halted the administration’s latest attempt to cancel the contract, which runs through 2031.

“We had the contract taken away from us numerous times,” said English. “Then you had the shutdowns. And now privatization. It's all a continuation of one thing after another.”

During the government shutdowns this spring, airport screeners went for as long as six weeks without pay. Many couldn’t get to their jobs, struggling to pay for gas or childcare. The worker shortage meant airports became snarled and tense with long lines.

Screeners “are still recovering from the shutdowns that occurred in April because of the devastation, the financial devastation they were put through,” English said. Some workers are still not sure they ever got their correct back pay. “It got to the point where after the second [shutdown], people stopped really checking. It was too hard to find out exactly… so, they cut their losses short,” he said.

“It still left a bitter taste in their throat… and the fact that they don’t understand how things are going to work out in the future, especially with this Horizon 25 plan,” English said. Some workers felt the instability was too much and left for other jobs.

It’s also a deterrent to recruitment, he said. “A lot of people don’t want to get into the agency because of the possibility of that occurring again.”

The administration has used the backed-up traffic during the shutdown to argue for airport security privatization, since privatized employees workers would be paid by a long-term contract with the federal government and wouldn’t be affected by periodic shutdowns.

This is a ruse, because the government could have paid the screeners during the government shutdowns, but chose not to. In fact, in March, after six weeks, the administration ordered them paid even while the shutdown continued.

Today at Chicago’s Midway Airport, TSOs and flight attendants will commemorate. They’ll also argue for a public, unionized workforce to run airport security.

English said that unity across unions will be essential to win. “We’re going to need to bond together to be able to push back on a lot of things that are being rolled out. TSA alone is not going to be able to do it. But together, I’m sure that this could be fixed.”

UAW President Shawn Fain called for unions to align their contracts with the Big 3 to build leverage and create a crisis for the billionaire class. It was a new day in the UAW, and a wider labor renewal felt possible.

May 2028 is now only a year and a half away. Are unions getting in gear for a season of strikes and labor action around then, as contracts expire in manufacturing, education, logistics, grocery, and the building trades?

Some are. Labor Notes has found 830,000 workers with contracts planned or expected to expire from March to July 2028 (see illustration below).

These include 150,000 auto workers at the Big 3, 153,000 Postal Workers (APWU), though they are unlikely to strike, 95,000 grocery workers with the Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), and 77,000 K-12 educators with the California Teachers Association.

“Together, we can turn May Day into a national day of reckoning,” Fain wrote last year, taking stock of the progress towards this goal. “If more union workers stand up together, we will all have more power to win what we’re owed.”

FIGHTING ON NEW TERRAIN

What we are owed has been growing, amid Trump’s extreme attacks on workers and unions.

Notable contract expirations in 2028.

One million federal workers have lost their right to collective bargaining. The National Labor Relations Board and other federal agencies meant to protect workers have been left unable to fulfill their essential roles. Tens of thousands of immigrant workers, including union members, have been stripped of their legal status and rights, subjected to criminalization and detention.

May Day 2028 wasn’t initially about fighting Trump’s billionaire power grab. But since Trump took office, the terrain has shifted. Mass protests have become more frequent, and more urgently needed to stem the volley of attacks on workers and on democratic elections.

Massive weekend protests that drew millions, organized by Indivisible and No Kings, haven’t been able to reverse Trump’s attacks, though they are important training grounds to welcome new activists. (Bring your union banner!) The next big one, “No Kings: Vote Early,” is scheduled for October 17. It will include block parties, rallies, and walks to the polls.

But the lessons from these mobilizations have started to shift tactics to include large economic disruptions. Today’s resistance movement recognizes that one-off weekend protests aren’t enough.

Unions are powerful members of a resistance coalition not only because they are robust voter turnout operations, but more importantly because they can channel the structural power of workers in key industries to grind the system to a halt.

In January, when Trump sent a swarm of federal agents into the Twin Cities on a rampage, he lit a match to the tinder that unions and community groups had been laying through decades of coalition work. People’s resistance spread into school walkouts, sit-ins, demonstrations, and strikes.

“We modeled our ‘ICE Out’ work similarly to how we prepare to go on strike—leaders in each building and regional leads who work together to cover the city,” said St. Paul educator Mara Solis. “Each school had parent captains to work with our educator captains.”

These escalating actions grew into a mass uprising that nearly shut down a large metro area. Federal agents beat a retreat from the terror spectacles in Twin Cities streets after January 23, when at least 100,000 people marched through downtown Minneapolis and nearly 1 million across the state skipped work to participate in a massive political strike, including nonunion construction workers and restaurant workers who called out from popular downtown venues and supermarkets.

It showed how, when unions act like movement organizations, nonunion workers can join them in common cause, which is necessary in a country where 90 percent of the population working for a private-sector employer earns a living in a nonunion workplace.

If the Twin Cities offered an example of layer after layer of society erupting into open rebellion, how can that be replicated nationally? We already have a rendezvous date for massive economic disruption, in the months leading up to the next presidential election.

DURABLE ORGANIZATION

May 2028 might still seem like a long time from now, given the urgency of the current crises. But as we witnessed with Black Lives Matter protests, it took years for grassroots activism to culminate in a major wave of protests, with effects that went on resonating for years more.

With union contracts set to expire in a presidential year, there’s an opening to coordinate bold demands and worker action to defend democracy, as well as to win economic gains.

Workers can put pressure on their employers to call for free and open elections. They can build broad alliances to pressure the state and employers for strong pensions, Medicare for All, a shorter workweek, and taxing the rich.

In times of crisis, new organizations can spring up like FEMA tents in disaster areas, and fold away just as quickly until the next crisis. But movement-building isn’t the same thing as crisis management. To win real change and defend it, you have to keep applying pressure over years; that takes durable organizations that become rooted in people’s lives.

The May Day Strong coalition of unions and grassroots organizations, formed in March 2025, is organizing under the banner of “workers over billionaires” to concentrate resistance efforts on the tech oligarchs who prop up Trump’s MAGA coalition, and to defend the vote ahead of the midterm and presidential elections.

This coalition could take the lessons from the Twin Cities and spread them nationwide. If some unions strike together, other union and nonunion workers can join in other ways, like using sickouts and disruptions to shut things down. Workers at airports and other key economic nodes might have to skip work if they find “abnormally dangerous” working conditions.

This level of mass organizing will require unions spending down their vast financial reserves to support workers without union strike funds, which could include legal defense funds and mutual aid networks.

If your union has bargaining this year or next, it might not be realistic to line up your contract to expire again in 2028. But one possibility is organizing to win sympathy strike language that permits union workers to honor each other’s picket lines. Article 9 of the Teamsters National Master Freight agreement and other Teamster contracts offer a model to emulate.

STANDING UP TO TRUMP

Meanwhile, Republicans are launching fishing expeditions against unions backing President Trump’s political opponents. The initial targets of Homeland Security spying and subpoenas of financial records were Minnesota unions plus the Communications Workers (CWA) and Service Employees (SEIU).

Now, according to the Guardian, House Republicans are also investigating the American Federation of Teachers, the United Auto Workers, SMART Transportation Division, and two railroad arms of the Teamsters: the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, and the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees Division.

And Trump is threatening the integrity of the November elections.

The May Day Strong coalition is holding 750 “Solidarity Schools” and actions from late August through mid-September nationwide, bringing together labor organizers and community members to confront the authoritarian threat we face.

The trainings are geared towards equipping people with the tools to conduct election defense. Participants learn how to monitor poll sites, and they play out scenarios for how we could respond if federal agents and others attempt to undermine democratic elections through deception, disruption, or suppression of the vote.

The scale of action the labor movement will be able to muster on May Day 2028 depends on the organizing we do now.

Trump’s Operation Metro Surge was a direct attack on our union. We represent 8,000 property service workers, security guards, janitors, airport workers, and Uber/Lyft drivers in the Twin Cities metro area, and the vast majority of our members are immigrants and people of color. Thirty of our members were abducted by ICE during the onslaught. Rideshare drivers had their windows smashed and were dragged through them by agents who detained them, their cars abandoned on the road behind the airport. Other airport workers, despite having badges indicating full background checks, were repeatedly stopped and harassed for no apparent reason other than that they looked East African. Latino members were stuck in the stores where they work, in some cases for hours on end, as ICE agents circled outside.

It was clear that our union had to do everything possible to support our members in this time of incredible fear and pressure. During the first month, we focused on mutual aid. We helped put together a support system of community volunteers to give members who were afraid to leave the house a ride to work, many in the middle of the night. We pushed employers to let people take leaves of absence or change their shifts. To be clear, people weren’t staying home because of their work or immigration status. They were staying home because we could see that federal agents were stopping and arresting people because of their skin color or accent, regardless of status.

Though we were still on the defensive, we were able to organize two public actions on December 3 and 20. In both cases, we were concerned that ICE would attack us. But people’s courage prevailed. ICE didn’t come, and we got valuable information about how fed up the public was. We learned that members of other unions and community organizations were morally outraged by the invasion. The belligerent ICE presence had made people more willing to speak up for themselves and their neighbors.

By the new year, the work of providing services and mutual aid had started to exhaust us. When ICE murdered Renée Good, it was a wake-up call that we can’t service our way out of an authoritarian occupation of our city. We had to go on offense—create some real pressure on those who were making the decision to occupy our city.

This Is How We Win: A Guide to Building Working-Class Uprisings, edited by Sarah Lazare and Amie Stager, is available from Haymarket Books.

When community and faith groups first made the call in early to mid-January for a day of “no work, no school, no shopping,” we held an emergency meeting of our stewards. It was conducted over Zoom, because people were so afraid to leave their own homes. But 95 percent of the folks on that call said clearly that they planned to not go to work on the day of economic shutdown. It was a measure of how sick and tired everybody was. Plus the December protests boosted our confidence that others in the Twin Cities would join the call.

How did we get to that spot, where members were willing to take action together? In our union’s contract fights for the last decade, we’ve prepared ourselves and gone on strike many times. Members and stewards know that in the United States, withholding our labor is a key part of our power as workers. Obviously we go to the ballot box. Obviously we hold our politicians accountable by pressuring them. We try everything that we can to advance a workers’ agenda. But the best way to get results in a fight with the boss is to withhold our labor. And so, having practiced that, people had that muscle when the moment came.

We had also done internal work in coalition with others to sharpen our analysis of how the Trump administration, through its federal occupations, was implementing a playbook that we’ve seen many times around the world from wannabe dictators. Many of our immigrant members have seen firsthand what happened in their home countries when dictators took over, and it wasn’t pretty. And we know the way to beat these authoritarian, power-hungry types: with large-scale mobilizations that disrupt the status quo. Our stewards not only had the experience of organizing strikes, but they also had an analysis that we were facing an existential decision: go down the path to a dictatorship or take a stand to maintain our democracy and make it better.

The strength of the community, faith groups, and labor acting together made it possible for our members, many immigrant members, to make the decision not to go to work on January 23. The unions that seriously engaged and educated members about their rights in this moment were a very significant group. Over 1,200 of our members and at least 15,000 union workers overall were absent from the job that day or effectively shut down their employers’ operations in advance, according to our internal assessment. But countless other workers not represented by a union were among the estimated 100,000 people who marched that day. There were so many folks marching that organizers rented the Timberwolves stadium to provide a place for people to warm up, and it couldn’t hold a fraction of the marchers!

What we did in Minnesota wasn’t a general strike, but it was a big test of our community’s willingness to nonviolently disrupt the economy. By taking this action together, we expanded people’s conception of what we are capable of when we’re under federal assault. We’re building a new muscle, one that we’ll need in the near future. We have decades of labor law and contracts meant to make workers’ collective action as weak and limited as possible. A lot of obstacles have been set up. But if people are unified, our power is far beyond the limitations of the law.

Look at the way that the actual decision to withdraw the occupying forces was made by the regime. It gives a snapshot of an underlying theory of power. On January 23, the local economy was shut down in a manner that hadn’t been seen in the Twin Cities since the 1950s. This was a real flex of worker power that shook the business community out of complacency.

The Trump administration had ordered the ICE occupation of Minnesota in part as a form of political punishment: to retaliate against Governor Tim Walz, but also against our whole state, because of the progressive reputation we have, thanks to state-level pro-worker advances like free school lunches and paid time off for sickness and crisis. But neither the human toll of the occupation nor the economic damage—the state of Minnesota’s lawsuit against the federal government now alleges more than $600 million in business losses and $243 million in lost wages due to Operation Metro Surge—were sufficient to pressure businesses to call for change.

But after the day of action on January 23 and then CBP’s murder of Alex Pretti the next day, the CEOs of sixty Minnesota-based companies, including Target, General Mills, and Best Buy, released a letter calling for an immediate de-escalation. Activists were rightfully upset with how weakly worded this corporate letter was. But it no doubt figured in the Trump administration’s calculations when CBP official Greg Bovino was transferred out of the state (he was later reportedly forcibly retired) and Trump himself said, “We’re going to de-escalate a little bit.”

It wasn’t just the letter that made the administration shift its policy. January 23 created a national conversation about the power of regular people to fight back. And the murder of Pretti sparked widespread opposition to ICE. All eyes were on Minnesota, thanks to the sacrifices of so many people responding to ICE raids every day. All these factors forced an eventual drawdown.

Activists had been approaching Target and other major companies in the Twin Cities for months, making their voices heard in stores and corporate lobbies, holding press conferences, and moving online petitions to pressure them to publicly break from the Trump administration on the ICE occupation. The corporations were studiously silent. The first time that they broke that silence was after the day of “no work, no school, no shopping.” That’s also when we got a retreat from the Trump regime.

That really tells you who Trump listens to. He’s perfectly happy in moments of chaos and crisis. But if workers fight back against his corporate enablers and push them to break their silence, we can start to turn the corner. Just like the lunch-counter sit-ins during the civil rights movement made segregation a problem for a major business (Woolworth’s), the mass mobilizations in the Twin Cities prompted Minnesota’s Fortune 500 corporations to respond.

The biggest lesson that we can learn from Minnesota is that we can win. I had started to lose hope back in October. We in the United States seemed far from being able to play the incredibly important role that the labor movement has in almost every other country that has successfully prevented authoritarian consolidation in the last fifty years. But I believe that in January, we saw the power of a community standing up. This wasn’t in the history books about the 1960s or the 1930s. This wasn’t in newspaper articles about Argentina or France. This was right here in the Upper Midwest. To see the community move with so much power and unity is really inspiring.

Service and mutual aid are so important. We couldn’t do anything other than that when this kind of occupation starts. But labor had a role to play in the pivot to a more offensive stance, when we were ready to shut down the economy and hold major corporations accountable. Unions alone can’t stop authoritarianism. But during key moments, we can help give some direction and structure to these beautiful social movements that will succeed in stopping the slide toward dictatorship.

My first piece of advice to workers in unions is to begin your preparations now. If you have your own contract fights, that’s an opportunity to strengthen your muscles. The more that you’ve got the muscle of striking for your own contracts, the more that you’ll be ready to stand up and defend yourselves and your rights against our own government.

Number two, start the planning with your closest union allies and community partners. The strength and coordination among you will determine what is and isn’t possible if you have to confront an ICE occupation or the theft of an election or the massive defunding of public institutions that workers have fought for over decades.

How do you do that? Sit down with the other organizations in your community that are the most hungry—that have a real base of working-class people, whether they be unions or churches or community organizations—and begin planning what you would do if this kind of a confrontation comes. It doesn’t matter if you guess exactly right about what sort of confrontation will be needed. The muscles will still be useful.

Discussions should include these questions: What does effective nonviolent disruption look like for us? If you’re a group of churches, how can congregations and clergy contribute to such disruption? What does it look like in the hospital industry? What does it look like in the gig economy? What does it look like at an airport? What does it look like in a school? These are questions that I think each group of workers and each community organization should be thinking about.

All we have is our labor. When we use it together, winning is within our grasp. And we need to start practicing now.

Greg Nammacher is president of SEIU Local 26. The book is available here.

Quieren que su empleador, el Centro Médico de la Universidad de Vermont, se una al programa “Leche con Dignidad”.

“Hemos escuchado sus historias. Han venido a nuestras manifestaciones,” dijo la asistente administrativa Melissa Lavallee, secretaría del sindicato Support Staff United (Personal de Apoyo Unidos), AFT-VT. “Estamos haciendo por nuestros vecinos lo que hacen por nosotros.”

Leche con Dignidad, un marco elaborado por trabajadores agrícolas a través del proyecto organizativo Justicia Migrante, requiere que granjas afiliadas se comprometan a cumplir con normas laborales. Se basa en el Programa de Alimentos Justos, desarrollado por la Coalición de Trabajadores de Immokalee, que organiza a los cosechadores de tomates en Florida.

Los trabajadores agricultores afiliados reciben mejores salarios, tiempo de enfermedad remunerado, protección contra la disciplina si deben dejar de realizar una tarea que podría poner su seguridad en “peligro grave e inmediato”, y educación sobre sus derechos bajo el acuerdo.

Justicia Migrante logró una importante victoria en 2017 cuando Ben & Jerry’s—que produce más de 500 pintas de helado al día en sus instalaciones de St. Albans, Vermont—firmó un acuerdo para abastecerse de leche proveniente de granjas que cumplen con las normas laborales de Leche con Dignidad. La cadena de supermercados Hannaford ha sido presionada para unirse, pero aún no se ha comprometido.

Los trabajadores agrícolas y sus defensores se enfocaron en el Centro Médico de la Universidad de Vermont con buena razón: “Todos los días, el Centro Médico de la UVM atiende a miles de pacientes y trabajadores. Es, sin duda, una de las mayores instituciones compradoras de productos lácteos en el estado,” afirmó Will Lambek, organizador de Justicia Migrante. “Al unirse al programa de Leche con Dignidad, el hospital puede desempeñar un papel de liderazgo, inspirando a otras instituciones—incluyendo hospitales, escuelas y universidades—a seguir su ejemplo,” dijo.

Organizadores de Leche con Dignidad intentaron que el centro médico se uniera al programa alrededor de 2022, pero sin éxito. “Justicia Migrante no tenía por sí sola la fuerza suficiente para dar este paso importante,” afirmó Lambek. “Por eso es tan importante contar con los trabajadores [del hospital] como aliados en esta lucha.”

“Algunos no entienden: ‘¿Que tienen que ver con nosotros las condiciones laborales de los trabajadores agrícolas?” dijo Lavallee. “Yo crecí en una granja en Vermont, y es el trabajo más duro que existe. Sus condiciones de trabajo están creando nuestra comida. Por que querriamos alimentos producidos en condiciones pésimas?”

AL LIMITE

Los trabajadores en el sector de la salud están más sobrecargados que nunca. En todo el país, 52 hospitales y sistemas de salud han anunciado recortes de plantilla desde enero. Trump echó más leña al fuego con su ofensiva en dos frentes: los recortes a Medicaid y la revocación de los permisos de trabajo para inmigrantes en países incluyendo a Cuba, Haití, Nicaragua y Venezuela, muchos quienes trabajan en el sector de la salud.

Los miembros de Personal de Apoyo Unidos han estado negociando por su segundo contrato desde abril. Entre sus prioridades centrales figura una diferencia salarial para cuando la plantilla caiga por debajo del 80% de la programada. También están luchando por más tiempo remunerado para recuperarse de lesiones sufridas en el trabajo: “A mis compañeros les han golpeado en la cara. Han sufrido fracturas de costillas y roturas de dedos,” dijo Saer McCillian, asistente de enfermería licensiada, a Vermont Business.

Brett Rhodes, un asistente de enfermería quien ahora es el vicepresidente organizativo del sindicato, primero decidió organizarse en 2022 después de ver que tan diferente parecían las cosas para el personal de enfermería en comparación con los asistentes de enfermería.

“El personal de enfermería tenía un sindicato. No sabía mucho de ello, solo sabía que recibían más respeto y más personal,” afirmó. “Cuando decían algo, se les escuchaba. Parecía que podían resolver sus problemas.”.

En un turno habitual, un asistente de enfermería debe monitorear la frecuencia cardiaca, la presión arterial, la frecuencia respiratoria, y la temperatura del paciente; deben cambiarlo de posición para prevenir úlceras; vigilar sus niveles de glucosa en la sangre y cualquier cambio en su estado mental; y ayudarle a comer y beber. También acompañan al paciente al baño y lo traen de vuelta de forma segura, y si es necesario, lo asean después de ir al baño.

Ahora imagínese que se suman otros nueve pacientes a esa ecuación. Esa es la carga promedio a que los asistentes de enfermería deben atender durante un turno, moviéndose entre habitaciones y balanceando muchas necesidades a la vez.

Y el trabajo conlleva un desgaste emocional: “Levantar a los pacientes es difícil,” dijo Rhodes. “Ser golpeado por pacientes desorientados es difícil. Pero esas cosas se te olvidan.” Lo que realmente le queda grabado es esto: “He tenido que acompañar a pacientes que se estaban muriendo. He estado ahí en el momento de su muerte. Eso es lo que realmente no se olvida.”

Rhodes empezó a hablar con sus compañeros y formaron un comité organizador. “Mi mamá es enfermera. Mi padrastro es enfermero. Mi abuela fue enfermera,” dijo. “Siempre quise hacer algo que me permitiera ayudar a la gente. Y siento que la labor sindical es una parte de eso”, dijo.

En enero de 2023, los trabajadores votaron para formar Personal de Apoyo Unidos.

‘’NO ES EL MISMO VERMONT’

En febrero, Steven Tendo, un miembro del Personal de Apoyo Unido, fue puesto bajo custodia de ICE.

Tendo, un pastor y asistente de enfermería de Uganda, huyó de su país natal tras ser torturado por su labor de educación cívica. También es diabetico, y dijo que se le negó su medicación durante tres días mientras estuvo detenido por ICE.

“Seguí las reglas. Me integre bien en la comunidad. Jamas incumpli las condiciones de mi estancia ni de mi supervision,” afirmó Tendo a Mother Jones en el momento. “Tengo tanto miedo. No puedo volver.”

Tras la indignación pública, Tendo fue puesto en libertad, pero se le obligó a presentarse periódicamente ante ICE, corriendo el riesgo de ser detenido en cualquier momento.

“Vamos con él cada vez que tiene que presentarse,” afirmó Rhodes.

Luchas compartidas como esta han fortalecido los vínculos entre los miembros de Justicia Migrante y los de AFT-VT. “Dentro de los últimos dos años, hemos colaborado mucho [en respuesta a] los ataques contra los inmigrantes,” dijo Lambek.

A pesar del sombrío panorama político, la lucha ha hecho una gran diferencia. “El Vermont que yo conocí cuando llegué no es el Vermont que tenemos ahora,” dijo Thelma Gómez, ex trabajadora de la industria lechera quien ahora organiza con Justicia Migrante.

“Cuando yo llegue, la gente no podía salirse de los ranchos,” dijo Gómez. “Luchamos por licencias de conducir, [para que] la gente pudiera salir a las tiendas, salir a la escuela, salir de las sombras.”

La campaña de Leche con Dignidad representa otro avance enorme. “Dentro del programa se paga el salario mínimo, que no ha sido así en otros ranchos,” dijo Gómez. (Los trabajadores en el estado son exentos de las regulaciones de salario mínimo.) “Cuando pasan accidentes puedes acceder al workers comp. También hay reglas de cero tolerancia si hay acoso sexual, violencia o amenazas. Hubiera sido algo que a mi me hubiera gustado tener.”

They want their employer, the University of Vermont Medical Center, to join the Milk with Dignity program.

“We’ve been in spaces with folks, seen them, heard their stories. They’ve come to our rallies,” said administrative assistant Melissa Lavallee, secretary of the union, Support Staff United (AFT-VT). “We’re doing for our neighbors what they do for us.”

Milk with Dignity, a framework authored by farmworkers through the local organizing project Migrant Justice, requires affiliated farms to commit to a number of labor standards. It’s modeled off of the Fair Food Program developed by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which organizes tomato pickers in Florida.

Farmworkers receive better wages, paid sick time, protection from discipline should they stop performing a task that could put their safety and “serious and immediate danger,” and education on their rights under the agreement.

Migrant Justice notched a big win in 2017 when Ben & Jerry’s—which produces more than 500 pints of ice cream a day in its facility in St. Albans, Vermont—signed an agreement to source dairy from farms that comply with Milk With Dignity’s labor standards. Grocery chain Hannaford has faced years of pressure, but has yet to commit.

Farmworkers and advocates set their sights on the University of Vermont Medical Center for good reason: “Every day, UVM Medical Center serves thousands of patients and workers. It is undoubtedly one of the largest institutional sourcers of dairy in the state,” said Will Lambek, an organizer with Migrant Justice. “By joining Milk with Dignity, the hospital can play a leadership role, inspiring other institutions—including hospitals, schools, and universities—to follow suit,” he said.

Organizers tried to bring the medical center to the table around 2022, but were unsuccessful. “Migrant Justice did not on its own have enough power to take on this important step,” Lambek said. “That’s why it’s so important to have [hospital] workers as allies in this fight.”

“Some don’t understand: ‘What does a farmer’s working conditions have to do with us?’” Lavallee said. “I grew up on a farm in Vermont, and it is the hardest work. Their working conditions are creating our food. Why would we want food created in terrible conditions?”

STRETCHED THIN

Health care workers are stretched thinner than ever. Across the country, 52 hospitals and health systems have announced staffing cuts since January. Trump is adding fuel to the fire with his two-pronged assault: Medicaid cuts, and the revocation of work permits for immigrants from countries including Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, many of whom work in health care.

Support Staff United members have been in bargaining for their second contract since April. Among their key priorities is a safe staffing pay differential, to be paid when staffing drops below 80 percent of what is scheduled. They also want to see more paid time off to recover from injuries sustained at work: “My co-workers have been punched in the face. They’ve had ribs fractured. They’ve had fingers broken,” LNA Saer McCillian told Vermont Business.

Brett Rhodes, a nursing assistant who is now the union’s vice president of organizing, first decided to organize in 2022 after seeing how different things seemed for nurses compared to nursing assistants.

“The nurses had a union. I didn’t really know much about it, I just knew they were getting more respect and more staff,” he said. “When they said something, it had more weight to it. It seemed like they could solve their problems.”

On a typical shift, a nursing assistant must monitor a patient’s heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and body temperature, reposition them to prevent bed sores, monitor their blood sugar and any changes to their mental state, and help them eat and drink. They also shuttle the patient to and from the bathroom safely, and if necessary, clean them up after a bowel movement.

Now try adding nine other patients to the mix. That’s the average load that nursing assistants must attend to in a shift, weaving between rooms and balancing many competing needs.

And the job takes an emotional toll: “Lifting patients is hard,” said Rhodes. “Getting hit by confused patients is hard. But you forget about that stuff.” What sticks with him: “I’ve had to sit with patients who were dying, I’ve been with patients as they died. That’s the stuff that doesn’t really leave you.”

Rhodes got to talking with co-workers, and they formed an organizing committee. “My mom’s a nurse. My stepdad’s a nurse. My grandma was a nurse,” he said. “I always wanted to do something where I could help people. And I feel like the union work is an extension of that.”

‘NOT THE SAME VERMONT’

In February, Support Staff United member Steven Tendo was taken into ICE custody.

Tendo, a pastor and nursing assistant from Uganda, had fled his home country after being tortured for his civic education work. He is also a diabetic, and said he was denied his medication for three days in ICE detention.

“I followed the rules. I’ve done great in the community. I’ve never abused any of the conditions of the stay or of my supervision,” Tendo told Mother Jones at the time. “I’m so scared, I cannot go back.”

Following the outcry, Tendo was released, but forced to attend regular check-ins with ICE where he could be detained at any moment.

“We go with him every time he has a check-in,” Rhodes said.

Shared struggles like this one have deepened the relationships between Migrant Justice and AFT-VT members. “Over the last two years, we’ve collaborated a lot [in response to] attacks against immigrants,” Lambek said.

Despite the grim political moment, organizing here has made a big difference. “The Vermont I knew when I arrived is not the Vermont we have today,” said Thelma Gómez, a former dairy worker who now organizes with Migrant Justice.

“When I arrived, [workers] couldn’t leave the farms,” Gómez said. “We fought for drivers licenses so people could go to stores, go to school, and leave the shadows.”

The Milk with Dignity campaign represents another major stride. “Under the program, you have to make the minimum wage, which is not required on other farms,” Gómez said. (Farmworkers in the state are exempt from minimum wage regulations.) “When there are accidents you can get workers comp. And there are also zero-tolerance rules for sexual harassment, violence, or threats. It’s something I would have wanted when I got here.”

They speculated that someone on the morning shift might have gotten injured. Then two mid-level supervisors came outside in tears. Plant supervisors told workers the plant was closing permanently, effective immediately.

Inside, the early-morning shift had just ended when the workers were informed it would be their last. The cafeteria erupted into chaos. Plant supervisors stood guard by the doors, workers said, while everyone received their closure paperwork.

“People were crying, shaking,” Tante said. “When we were leaving the parking lot, there were so many car accidents. People were so upset.”

“They gave no reason, nothing,” said Ahoro Asselissime. “People have no job. No money to pay our bills. For 11 years, I made money for them. And now they’re not doing anything for me.”

DISASTER FOR COMMUNITY

Joslin is home to just 56 residents. But 2,500 workers from Africa, Latin America, and Burma toiled at the meatpacking plant there, butchering cattle for Tyson, one of the world’s largest meatpacking companies. The workers were represented by Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1546.

Most of the workers live in the Quad Cities, clustered around the Illinois-Iowa border 160 miles west of Chicago. Everyone there knows someone who works at Tyson, the area’s ninth-largest employer. The closure announcement sent the community into a tailspin.

Tante, originally from Togo, had the job of determining the age of cattle by checking the size of their teeth. An overhead conveyor would move carcasses, suspended by their ankles, along the chain. Tante checked the teeth, sprinted up a set of stairs to mark the cattle’s ankles with ink, then sprinted back down to catch the next carcass.

Simultaneously, other workers drained blood from the animal by slicing the neck with knives. If Tante didn’t work fast enough or was off-pace with the other workers, she said, she could get cut by their knives.

PALTRY SEVERANCE

The laid-off workers will be paid for 36 hours a week until October, but that’s far less than they had been making with overtime.

“I got $500 this week,” said Asselissime. “My rent is $925. I have to put gas in my car, buy food for my kids. Everything is so expensive now.” Prior to the closure, Asselissime could expect around $900 a week.

“I’ve been sounding the alarm about how Tyson treats their workers for years,” said Nana Ouro-Agoro, founder of Akwaaba, a nonprofit organization that provides support to the Quad Cities’ immigrant population.

Originally from Togo, Ouro-Agoro came to the Quad Cities after winning the immigration lottery in 2008. She learned that many of her neighbors worked at Tyson, where they were frequently injured on the job and afraid to speak out. Workers told her they were being treated “worse than the cattle.”

“It was hard for me to sleep at night, hearing my fellow immigrants were working hard, getting injured, and nothing was being done,” she said.

Akwaaba helped Tyson workers with translation services and resources to help them assert their rights, including when Tyson abruptly fired dozens of Togolese workers as alleged retaliation for reporting injuries and sexual harassment. Now, about 500 of their clients—roughly 1 in 4—are out of work.

And because so much of the local economy depends on income from Tyson workers, “we’re going to see a crisis in every sector,” Ouro-Agoro said.

ONE MONOPOLY AFTER ANOTHER

It’s been a profitable few years for Tyson. So why shutter the plant? Tyson cites the nationwide cattle shortage.

Cattle stock in the United States is at a 75-year low. The costs of raising cattle have gone up significantly for ranchers, in part due to drought and higher prices for fertilizer and diesel, exacerbated by the war on Iran.

But the crisis facing Tyson workers and cattle ranchers alike is driven by one major factor: corporate consolidation. The “Big Four”—Tyson, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef—own over 80 percent of the U.S. beef industry.

The Big Four have, according to multiple court decisions, colluded to fix prices for just about everything, from the price customers pay at the grocery store to the price cattle ranchers receive for their livestock.

Yet despite the strain placed on cattle herds, U.S. beef production in real terms has remained relatively steady, due to the heavier weight of today’s cattle compared to decades ago.

Tyson isn’t the only one closing plants. JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, closed a facility in Memphis in June, laying off 200. JBS also announced plans to close a 1,500-worker processing plant in Souderton, Pennsylvania, but efforts from union and political leaders pushed JBS to convert the plant to a smaller facility, saving 400 jobs.

With nearly 4,000 meatpacking jobs cut just this summer, is the cattle shortage really to blame?

As of the most recent fiscal quarter, Tyson’s operating income is up 8 percent, or $547 million, over last year. Tyson attributes the increase to growth in its chicken and prepared foods segments.

Tyson CEO Donnie King took home nearly $35 million in total compensation last year, 781 times more than the median Tyson worker and double the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio among S&P 500 companies.

While cattle shortages could be cutting into beef profits (Tyson reported a third-quarter beef operating loss of $138 million), overall the company is making money hand over fist. And as the meatpackers squeeze cattle producers, the shortage itself is a problem of the Big Four’s own making.

But meatpacker consolidation is only one piece of the puzzle. The meatpackers may claim that they are also the victims of collusion—by the grocery giants.

Walmart, Amazon, Kroger, and Albertsons can collude to lower prices paid to meatpackers too. Estimates place Walmart at between 20 and 25 percent ownership of the grocery industry, while Amazon (thanks to its acquisition of Whole Foods) is now the second-largest grocery retailer in the U.S.

Grocers are pushing down prices paid to packers, while packers are slashing prices paid to ranchers. In 1980, cattle producers took home $0.63 of every consumer beef dollar and the packers and retailers took home a combined $0.37. As of 2021, that number is exactly flipped, according to More Perfect Union. All the while, workers and consumers get the shortest end of the stick; price collusion lines the pockets of meatpacking and grocery store executives, while depressing worker wages and inflating consumer prices.

UNION PENS AGREEMENT

After the Joslin plant closure, the union released the following statement: “UFCW Local 1546 has a long-standing and proud union partnership with Tyson Foods, and we were extremely disappointed in not receiving advance notice of this news. If given the opportunity, we could have sat down and found an economic solution to keep this plant operating, but sadly our voice was silenced.”

Four days after the company’s closure announcement, Local 1546 President Robert O’Toole signed an agreement with Tyson, which includes severance pay of one to four weeks, depending on years of service, on top of the two months of payments.

The UFCW agrees to “not to take any steps or action to… interfere in any way with the orderly closing of the Plant, and the Union agrees not to support any such steps or action by others.”

Many workers feel their union leadership has left them hung out to dry. “The union doesn’t care about us, Tyson doesn’t care about us,” said Asselissime. “A lot of immigrants work for this company, from Mexico, from Africa. That’s why they don’t care.”

Some workers were already mobilizing independently. The day after Tyson announced the closure, laid-off workers rallied outside the plant gates with community supporters and political groups. The workers demanded Tyson make a plan to keep the plant open; if that wasn’t possible, they wanted six months of severance pay, not two.

At various points in its history, the UFCW has taken up key fights against the packers. In 2007, it spearheaded a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security after ICE raids detained 12,000 workers at six meatpacking plants. And in 2008, after a 16-year battle, it organized the world’s largest pork processing plant, the Smithfield plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina.

But in recent years, the International union seems to have changed its tune, tying itself to the meat cartels in exchange for short-term, modest gains. Now Tyson workers say that labor-management “partnership” is swinging back at the members, with little response from union leadership.

“The union hasn’t said anything, aside from telling us to go apply for unemployment,” said Tante. “I thought the union should defend us, so I was surprised they didn’t do anything. The union could have fought for us to get more severance, but they didn’t.”

PROTESTS CONTINUE

Several hundred maintenance workers who remain in the plant are reportedly dismantling equipment and preparing the plant for demolition.

Meatpackers are notorious for refusing to sell plants to other packers, wanting to stifle competition. In 2018, for example, when Tyson closed a plant in Cherokee, Iowa, it refused to sell until the next owners agreed to limit the number of cattle they would slaughter there.

While some workers might move and get jobs at other plants, Tyson has not outlined formal transfer rights or relocation stipends (in previous plant closures, relocation bonuses have been up to $15,000). JBS has held mass hiring events in the Quad Cities for those willing to relocate to Nebraska or Utah.

Veronica Ceballos, originally from Mexico, worked at Tyson for 19 years, commuting on rural backroads through harsh Iowa winters. Even after she injured her back working on the line, she transferred to a different position and continued working. Since her children are now adults, she says, she has the flexibility to relocate if necessary. But she worries for co-workers who don’t have that option.

Several hundred Tyson workers and their families have continued organizing protests and rallies, calling on Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker to invoke eminent domain to bring the plant under state ownership and re-open its doors, and on Tyson to increase severance pay to six months. On September 3, workers and community supporters will caravan to Springfield to march on the state capitol building at noon.

“There are people who’ve worked at Tyson for 20 years, 30 years. People with health issues, people who are sick, people who can no longer work elsewhere,” Asselissime said in a speech at a rally of about 100 workers on August 27. “We need fair severance pay, so we can have a future.”

Caitlyn Clark is a national organizer at Essential Workers for Democracy (www.ew4d.org), an organization dedicated to rank and file member education and empowerment for workers in grocery, meatpacking, and retail.