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NEWS & LETTERS, April 2004Quebecor drive for union and respectOlive Branch, Miss.--We’ve been organizing for about six months at the Olive Branch plant of Quebecor, a printing company based in Canada. There are 400 workers at this plant on three shifts. Our first meeting was about a dozen workers meeting at the side of a gas station with an organizer from the Graphic Communications International Union (GCIU). Last month 10 or 12 of us went into Victoria’s Secret in Memphis and handed out fliers to customers, saying, "Victoria’s real secret: Workers face harassment and injury at company that prints the Victoria’s Secret catalog. There’s nothing sexy about getting burned or losing a finger at work." And so on. People were taking them like hotcakes. Quebecor has plants all over the U.S. and in 16 other countries. All seven non-union plants in the U.S. are moving together to unionize, so they can’t move work from a plant that unionizes to one that’s non-union. We have the same issues: lack of health insurance, racism, lack of respect, safety, environment, wanting to have a voice. Our plant is 90% Black. No Blacks are in management. In accounting, purchasing, pre-press and customer service, there are also no Blacks. All of the minorities are in production. This is 2004! The promotion system is by favoritism. This is the first place I’ve worked where there is no on-the-job training. The people who are on production know their jobs, but the managers and supervisors don’t have a clue. Quebecor has their own doctors that they send you to when you get hurt. You lose two or three fingers, you go to their doctor. Whatever they do, for the rest of your life you will no longer have those fingers. When they release you to come back to work, no way is that hand fully healed. One young man called in to his supervisor and tried to get the day off to take his daughter to the hospital. His daughter had lupus. His supervisor told him, if you don’t come in, you will probably be terminated. He needed his insurance from the job to cover his daughter’s medical expenses, so he came in. The machine that he was working on wasn’t even up and running. About 45 minutes later, he got a phone call from his wife telling him their daughter had died. We took it upon ourselves to do something about it. We signed a petition saying we don’t want this to happen to anyone else. Our families come first. We got all the names and went up to the general manager. There were about 10 or 12 of us and we let him know that this march-in for our co-worker was not GCIU-driven. He called us into a conference room. It sounded like he was just patronizing us. We said to the general manager, when we lose loved ones, why don’t we get any type of human touch in the plant, especially from our supervisors? Out there it’s all about what comes out of the press room, what comes out of the bindery, numbers and dollars. We told him they could probably get two or three times more production if they just treated us with more respect, instead of like robots or animals. This was our second march-in. The first one was to let them know we wanted a fair process. That first time, the general manager wouldn’t hear us out. He said he couldn’t receive us in numbers. We said, no. We come in numbers to let you know that we all feel the same way, have the same issues and would like a voice in the workplace. --GCIU member |
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