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This news story is about the terrible working conditions workers in poultry processing plants face every day and the struggle by workers in one Tennessee plant to achieve fair treatment and dignity through a union organizing drive. The Equal Justice Center's Poultry Workers' Justice Project has been a key participant in this organizing drive, conducting ground-breaking education and solidarity-building among the workers and organizing crucial community support for the workers and the union. One week after the publication of this story, the workers in this plant voted 465 to 18 in favor of being represented by the union, which is now negotiating a fair contract with the company.
September 6, 2005 Union Organizers at Poultry Plants in South Find Newly Sympathetic Ears MORRISTOWN, Tenn. - Hour after hour, Antonia Lopez Paz said, her supervisor at the Koch Foods poultry plant here told women on the deboning line that production demands were so great that they could not go to the bathroom. Sometimes she developed acute pain because she could not go, Ms. Lopez said. And one time when another woman asked for permission, "the supervisor took off his hard hat and told her, 'You can go to the bathroom in this,' " said Ms. Lopez, a Mexican immigrant who moved to this town in East Tennessee three years ago, lured by the company's promise of year-round work. Out of her solitary complaint has grown a thriving unionization drive that fits neatly into the plans of several insurgent unions that hope to revive the labor movement by focusing on low-wage workers and immigrant workers. |
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