Motivating the masses

By Hossannah Asuncion

My mother's hands are ugly. Perhaps they were beautiful once, but now they are distorted from 20 years of cutting, carving, and slicing pieces of meat for 8 hours at a time. Her fingers are mangled, and scarred, you'll see no trace of elegance, feminity, or of grace, instead you see the 20 years of her life, where she sacrificed for things far more important than her hands or her body. Hands manipulated to work and work, hands that will look awkward when she holds her future grandchildren, hands that pain her despite all the salves and balms she rubs on them that never penetrate down to root of the pain, to the joints rubbed

"The meat industry is the most dangerous industry, where 1 out of 7 workers is killed or injured."

clean from the cushion of cartilage and swollen from premature arthritis.

Middle America is the forgotten land. For most people, it is landscape flown over on the way to the big cities of the coast. How can cornfields compare to the novelty of bright lights and skyscrapers? We reduce it to the mundane-tractors, corn, and hicks, making it easy for us to ignore this part of our country. We scoff at the lack of urban sophistication, and we laugh at the idea that somehow the Midwest can symbolize us in any way.

For nine weeks starting in June I lived near Omaha, Nebraska, unionizing with the AFL-CIO's (American Federation of Labor And the Congress of Industrial Organization) Union Summer program and the local UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers) 271.

We were building on history; building on the heritage of civilian rights, on Omaha's immigrant saga, and on the legacy of unions weaved into the fabric of our heartland.

Once upon a time in Omaha, German and Irish immigrants worked in the packinghouses and the stockyards. It was on their backs that Omaha was built, it became a large town, and the unions were strong. The immigrants, vulnerable to exploitation found sanctuary among the union. Then the '80s came and the times chipped away at the local unions. Today, Omaha has found its renaissance. The packinghouses are once again finding strength; built this time on a new wave of immigrants, this time the faces are Latino. With that growth, the union is returning, fueled by a new generation of activists.

We were ten college students, most of us out of our element. There was Chris from Texas, Rigel from California, Allie from Connecticut, Marco from Colorado, Tara and Pat from Ohio, Leah from Wisconsin and Ricardo and Lupe, two children of a union organizer, from Iowa. For some of us it was the chance to practice social activism, for others, like me, it was more personal.

The meat industry is the most dangerous industry, where 1 out of 7 workers is killed or injured.

Looking down this room, one saw, creeping slowly, a line of dangling hogs a hundred yards in length; and for every yard there was a man, working as if a demon were after him. Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" came to mind.

As part of our union education we toured a union meat plant in Skylar, Nebraska. The day might have been beautiful. Perhaps the sky was especially grand that day, skies full of texture and clouds and height, skies that bring us closer to heaven than the skies in California allow us to get. I don't remember the landscape on that 45-minute drive, if it was corn or soy fields, or if we passed large shopping plazas, or if we drove through small towns. What I remember is the smell, the stench that reaches you before the sight of the plant, something more potent and more disturbing than second hand smoke, a stench that doesn't stay on your clothes but leaves an imprint on your mind.

Inside we were fitted with scrubs, hard hats and earplugs. All of these things were to protect us from harm, and served to exposed us to an everyday ritual of the workers there.

We first went into the freezer, where there were rows of homogenized workers. We watched the workers from above, on a catwalk that gave us a panoramic view. Their faces were unique, but the uniforms forced away individuality and dare I say humanity.

Members of the AFL/CIO Union Summer Group take time out to pose for a picture while helping American workers to organize. photo courtesy of Hossannah Asuncion

I drew away from the group. I saw my mother working down there. I saw the work that transformed her hands. I saw how my mother and those workers were simply an extension of the conveyor belts, small and large parts moving a machine. It was a moment that made what I was learning and what I was doing there much more profound than a summer internship. Labor rights somehow became the gospel, and I in turn, wanted to ensure no one in my life could ever be exploited again.

We moved to the slaughter floor, once again getting the distant view from above. We saw various machines, and lines of cows moved from one section to another. One area gutted the cows, hung upside down with their hearts still beating as to drain the blood from their bodies. One machine stripped the cows clean of their hides.

In one word it was "carnage." It was the dishonor of mass production, the indulgence of those at the top of the food chain, and it was looking down and having to imagine the mental turbulence of having to work in such conditions.

Labor is the most controllable cost component in production, and unions threaten the profits that come from keeping wages, benefits, and safety and health maintenance down. Essentially, these are things that make the work worthwhile, work one has to do to take care of self and family, and to raise the quality of life. The meat industry is an industry that can break bodies; it shouldn't have the right to break spirits.

There is no glamour in working at a packinghouse. It is strenuous work, work that gets under your nails, in your clothes, in your hair; it is work that does not wash off in the shower at the end of the day. Choosing to work at a packinghouse is a lack of choice. It is the kind of job you get when a criminal record, a lack of education, a lack of status and a lack of opportunities closes most doors. It is a situation that comes out of surviving.

"The meat industry is an industry that can break bodies; it shouldn't have the right to break spirits."

Most of the workers in Omaha are immigrant workers. They come to America and lose their identities. They come from all over Latin America, from all over Mexico-Guadalajara, Michoacan, or Sonora, places as different as California, New York, or Omaha, but here they just become Mexican. To the meat companies they are replaceable workers.

We were in constant contact with the workers. Unions and workers are not separate entities. Workers join unions, and strong unions are strong because of participation from the workers. We hand-billed outside various plants in Omaha, most significantly Con Agra, Co., a Fortune 500 food producer that has sales of 25.4 billion annually.

Hand-billing consists of educating workers about unions, passing out union authorization cards in just a few seconds before they walk or drive away ready to go home after an eight hour shift. For me, another obstacle was language. In high school I took German, but the majority of the other interns were fluent in Spanish. But somehow there was an exchange, I spoke with the little Spanish I knew and we often left each other with smiles.

Hand-billing in Omaha summers isn't pretty. Omaha's summers have the climate of a just showered in room, air so warm and thick it is almost difficult to breathe. Add to that the smell of a plant, the heat rising from tarred streets, and very little shade.

Sometimes workers would pass by in droves, and we could do little more than smile to each person we passed cards out to. Sometimes we had enough time to talk, some would walk away and some stayed.

"Hi, I'm with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. Some of your co-workers contacted us interested in having this place unionized. Unions can mean better wages, better benefits, better working conditions, and actually having a voice," was the essence of our pitch to the workers.

One of the first few days of hand-billing there was one man with eyes I can't forget. His eyes held a terrible amount of sadness, like something spirited beaten tame. His neck was splattered with blood; the hand that held the card had small scars all over from nicks from his knife. He looked at me directly and I could sense the tired in his body. But he listened and when I was through he placed the card against a parked car and signed it.

The Midwest was a place for miracles for me this summer. I saw fireflies for the first time, I saw heavenly skies, and I came home every night exhausted, and content with the most fulfilling work I've ever done.

The Midwest is more innocent. Most of its horizons remain untouched by skyscrapers; its naiveté charms me and stirs me to protect it. This is the heartland of America and exploitation threatens its pulse, conditions that spread out to the rest of our nation. It is politics that threaten every corner, from skyscrapers to redwoods.