Labor boycotts Iowa Beef

Iowa Beef Products, the largest beef slaughtering and processing company in the U.S., currently faces an AFL-CIO "consumers boycott" protesting the firm's labor policies.

The AFL-CIO's Executive Council in mid-August endorsed the boycott of Iowa Beef, claiming that "Iowa Beef Products had failed to bargain in good faith with the union's local."

Purchased by Armand Hammer's Occidental Petroleum last year, Iowa Beef has been attempting to wrangle wage and benefit concessions from its workers.

At the company's massive Dakota City, Nebraska plant, 2400 workers have been on strike for over three months. Their contract expired June 7, and Iowa Beef has issued demands for severe cuts in any new contract.

"The company's proposals are ridiculous," says Bill Schmitz, business agent for the local union of the United Food and Commercial Workers, representing the Iowa Beef strikers.

Iowa Beef has demanded that workers at its Dakota City plant - the company's largest in the country - take a four year wage and cost of living freeze, and a $2.00 slash in the base wage. Iowa Beef also seeks a clause which would allow the company automatically to decrease wages if a competitor obtained a lower wage contract.

The union countered with an offer of a two-year wage and cost of living freeze, which Iowa Beef rejected.

"This company does not need concessions from its employees," says union man Schmitz. "Its profitable. . . After all, it's part of Occidental Petroleum," the nation's 12th largest oil company.

"We're not claiming poverty," Iowa Beef's Charles Harness says, but "we feel that in order to remain competitive, we need this freeze."

Iowa Beef reopened the Dakota City plant on July 20, hiring 1400 non-union workers to run the operations. This action sparked violence on the picket lines. It was "a full-scale riot," says Harness; "several hundred union people" were "throwing rocks" at the nonunion workers. Union business agent Schmitz claims there were "only a couple of incidents." In any event, Nebraska's governor called in the state police and the National Guard to stand guard over the plant for two weeks.

The AFL-CIO Executive Committee charged that "the company has attempted to break the strike by recruiting scab workers from a wide territory and paying them substandard wages."

The AFL-CIO won a preliminary round in the dispute when the U.S. National Labor Relations Board issued an unfair labor practice complaint against Iowa Beef for refusing to bargain with the union in good faith. A hearing on the charges is set for October 13.

Meanwhile, "the boycott is being supported very well," says Schmitz. "In the Midwest, it's a big success." Iowa Beef spokesperson Harness disagrees: "It hasn't affected us at all."