The horror story of Lynchburg’s Peanut Corporation of America only gets more gruesome. This little company that operated out of a backyard garage is involved with the deaths of nine people and illness of 637 others in 44 states and Canada from Salmonella due to egregiously unsanitary working conditions at PCAs plants in Georgia, Texas and Virginia.
Stewart Parnell, the company chief who sold tainted peanut butter in food products used by school children, soldiers and the elderly, took the Fifth when interrogated by a Congressional committee this past week. His firm is now bankrupt, the plants are closed and Parnell faces possible criminal charges and a raft of civil suits.
Media accounts, especially by The Washington Post and Georgia newspapers, note that Parnell’s factories operated under horrific conditions. Rat and other rodent feces were widespread, roofs leaked and allowed defecating birds to fly about inside, salmonella-tainted vats of peanut butter continued on in the production process although company officials knew it.
And workers who complained were fired or otherwise intimidated.
What is amazing is how such treatment of non-union labor, coupled with food processing conditions straight out of the 19th Century, are still tolerated while the Employee Free Choice Act, which would level an uneven playing field when it comes to union elections is the Big Bogeyman across boardrooms and among right wing pundits especially in the South.
This reactionary behavior just shows how things really don’t change in the anti-union South and how workers are “simply luck to have a job, Boy,” and should have no say in how they organize, how they work or what contributions they might make to their safety and that of the company they work for and the public. I know of what I speak. My first job 38 years ago was at a rabidly-anti-union small town newspaper in North Carolina. I was a labor organizer and negotiator at The Virginian-Pilot when it was trying to force the local bargaining unit the recertify in the 1970s (it failed) and later worked twice for anti-labor Media General as a reporter and a manager.
The free choice act would allow workers thinking about exercising their legal right to organize to do so more easily. They would merely have to sign a card. Right now, the local or bargaining unit must hold a formal secret ballot supervised by the government’s NLRB. Problem is, the voting gives management a major and easy target to turn up the screws and intimidate workers into rejecting the union.
Right-wing editorial writers and pundits, putting on their funny glasses, naturally see it the other way. Here’s a gem from a December editorial in the Richmond Times-Dispatch:
“The comically named Employee Free Choice Act, more popularly known as the card check bill, would essentially eliminate the secret ballot from union organizing elections and force companies to accept the unions’ most outlandish demands when negotiating workplace contracts. It would open workers to blatant intimidation by union partisans — forcing employees to declare publicly whether they support efforts to organize.”
The big and secret joke here is that Media General, owner of the newspaper, forces new workers to sign a document saying they have read and condone a “corporate philosophy” that Media General wants to be union-free. This is what has been known as a “Yellow Dog” contract that tries to take away the legal rights of workers to organize. We’re back to “You lucky to have a job, Boy!” Who is intimidating whom here?
Ditto, the pathetic Bacons Rebellion, the formerly erudite e-zine that has been taken over by a bunch of right wing public relations people, marketing salesmen, spin doctors and other hacks. Here’s an excerpt:
” . . . a major U.S. labor leader has already boasted that the passage of the Act will enable unions to gain 15 to 20 million new members in the next 10 years, thus essentially doubling union membership in our country. Labor union dues and revenues would increase by five billion per year resulting in increased union economic and political clout. Instead of simply leveling the playing field, the Wall Street Journal has recently opined that the EFCA would result in “union supremacy.”
Lawdy!
What’s needed in Virginia, especially in this downturn, is a major and sophisticated rethinking of labor relations. Unions should not be seen as a bunch of Hoffa thugs, workers can make important suggestions about safety and efficiency, and they can be partners with management.
For an example, consider a new book called “Why GM Matters,” written by a close friend of mine, Bill Holstein, with whom I have worked on and off for 23 years. Bill is an expert, former foreign correspondent with long experience writing about business in China, Japan, and other places. He was with UPI in Kabul when the Soviets showed up and he knows a lot about American and Japanese car companies. In his timely book, he contrasts how Toyota treats its workers and how GM used to:
“Part of the profound knowledge was based on a deceptively simple axiom. Toyota managers relied on workers to make cars, so it built a manufacturing system around their needs. For Toyota, this had led to a completely different relationship between management and labor. In the bad old ways at GM, management dictated what would be built and with what equipment. It really didn’t care how the workers made the vehicles, consequently, workers didn’t really care how good the cars were.”
I’d like to think that at some point, the Old South can get more sophisticated. But old ways, such as union-bashing by newspapers and “think tanks” along with corporate behavior like that of the Peanut Corporation of America, die hard.
Peter Galuszka
