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NEWS & LETTERS, JUNE 2003
Youth
Guatemalans bring fire to Southern labor fights
by Brown Douglas THE MAYA OF MORGANTON: WORK AND COMMUNITY IN THE NUEVO
NEW SOUTH by Leon Fink. University of North Carolina Press, 2003. 254 pp. We are constantly reminded these days of the
overwhelmingly global nature of capital. Not only can we see multi-national
corporations all over the world trying to quench their werewolf hunger for
profit by exploiting human communities, human labor, and the environment. We can
also look around us and see many different types of people that probably
wouldn't find themselves here in the U.S. if it weren't for the ever-new
boundaries and needs produced by the expansion of capital. THE MAYA OF MORGANTON by Leon Fink describes one unlikely community and its struggle against the unfair labor practices of Case Farms poultry processing plant in Morganton, N.C. This community is almost completely composed of indigenous highland Guatemalan Mayans, mainly of the Q'anjob'al, Aguacateco (split between the two main ethnic groups, the Awakateko and Chalchiteko), K'iche', and Mam ethnicities. There were also a handful of Mexican workers that took an active part in the strikes and unionizing campaigns. IN THEIR OWN WORDS Throughout the whole book, Fink allows 100-odd workers, strike leaders, and community members to "speak for themselves" through extensive interviews. It gives the feel of a fluid dialogue between the author and participants, and allows for complexities in the telling of the story straight from the mouths of those involved. The first sign of wildcat worker resistance to conditions at the plant was in May 1993, "when approximately 100 workers stood up in the plant cafeteria and refused to work unless the company addressed a list of alleged abuses--including unpaid hours, the lack of bathroom breaks, poor working materials, and unauthorized company deductions for safety equipment like smocks and gloves, as well as inadequate pay." But it wasn’t until two years later, in 1995, that organized labor got involved. After a dramatic unionization drive and vote, the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) won the right to represent the workers. Throughout the approximately six years of labor struggle that the book covers, management never respected the workers’ decision and took all of the typical steps, from stalling recognition of the union to stymying and breaking off contract talks with the workers. One aspect of the workers’ experience was not unique to them and is a recurring theme in American labor history--the speed-up. In citing a study done by the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, Fink shows that the most frequent complaint of workers, "concerned the ‘dangerously high speed’ of the production line. Combined with the rigidity of work assignments (there was no rotation of jobs at the plant), the line speed only exacerbated repetitive motion injuries frequently reported in most poultry-processing plants." It brings to my mind something very important to Marxist-Humanist theory and history, the automation of the "continuous miner" that miners in West Virginia fought so hard against in the 1950s, when the question of "what kind of labor should man do?" was raised by the miners. The fact that today this same type of automation permeates capitalist production everywhere would seem completely overwhelming if it weren’t for the repeated struggles of rank-and-file workers at the point of production. But interestingly, the unique thing about this book is that its subject matter--or better put, Subject, with a capital "S"--is not the typical rank-and-file worker one might envision. To be sure, many of the miners who initiated the wildcat strikes against automation in the '50s were European immigrants. 'DEAD HELPED THE LIVING' But in capital’s latest stages of globalization in which its hand reaches out blindly across borders to find cheaper and cheaper labor, it has encountered and in many ways uprooted, indigenous peoples from Central America. Many of these people still have a very strong tie to traditional culture, language, and communal ways. This is, I believe, Fink’s focus throughout the book: the interplay between the traditional cultures, and the way in which globalization has eroded or strengthened certain aspects of them. "How the dead helped to organize the living" is a phrase Fink uses to reconcile the phenomenon of a rich and sometimes tragic Mayan history of struggle and repression with a small diaspora in North Carolina fighting a Southern boss at a poultry plant. To do this, he gives some interesting historical and sociological analysis of Morganton, and the workers’ home communities in Guatemala in order to properly situate the events of the book. This meant delving considerably into the social turmoil and civil war that plagued Guatemala throughout the 1980s and '90s. THE MAYA OF MORGANTON helped remind me that while capitalist globalization is busy redrawing borders and repressing human communities on a global scale, it also calls into existence new Subjects of revolt. The complex, multi-dimensional character of an indigenous Mayan community fighting the boss in North Carolina, USA is something that a whole new generation of radical internationalist activists can look to as we try to build a movement against capital and for true human development. |
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