January-February, 1999
Company town back at Wayne Farms
by S. Hamer
Laurel, Miss.—Even though the Wayne Farms chicken processing plant has been union for about 10 years, almost half the 800 workers in the plant don't belong to the union. I was down here working on solidarity, on signing people up as union members so that the plant would be united for any struggle we might have.
Right away the Black workers I talked to told me that the company had brought in about 225 Mexican workers, straight from Mexico. Most of them don't speak English at all. The company hires them and has an interpreter to talk to them. Wayne Farms has put up a whole new complex of trailer homes on their private property. They rent each trailer to four workers, two in each room. Each worker pays $40 a week. The trailers aren't near the plant either, so the workers pay $10 a week to get to work in a company van. So before these Mexican workers even get to the plant, they are paying the company a fortune. It's like what they used to call a "company town."
It's even worse inside the plant. They put most of the Mexicans on night shift, and they are running it faster and faster. Some workers are doing the jobs of three or even four people. If they complain or argue, the supervisor says, "If you don't like it, go back to Mexico." The Black workers say that this fear of being deported is held over them all the time. The Black workers say that if they had to go on strike, the company might just run with Mexicans.
Several Black workers I talked to sounded like they thought the Mexicans were a threat to them. You wouldn't think that a big corporation like Continental Grain that owns Wayne Farms could find labor cheaper than what they pay Black workers in Mississippi. But a young Black man came into Personnel; they told him there was no hiring. Then 10 Mexicans came in, and they hired every one of them.
The same thing is going on at a nonunion catfish plant called Heartland in Itta Bena, Miss., but it's much smaller. There are about 100 Mexicans out of 225 workers. They are living on company property, and the company even built them their own church.
Last year I went to Tijuana, Mexico, and I listened to Mexican workers there talk about how the corporations use and abuse them in these border factories. I listened to everything they said, but I never believed I would see it all over again in Mississippi. I asked the workers at Wayne Farms what they thought the union should do. They said that about a year ago the UFCW international sent a union organizer who spoke Spanish. He signed up maybe 70 Mexican workers. But since then, nothing.
The Black workers I talked to want the union to send Spanish-speaking organizers to sign up the Mexican workers, and to help Black workers and Mexican workers talk to each other. They say that's the only way they will ever win anything.
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