Taking on Tyson Foods
On any drive east from Madison, it does not take long to recognize the sentiments of the citizenry. Along every road, signs declare: "Support Tyson Workers." Farmers and townsfolk from here to Jefferson recognize that the struggle of 470 members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union to get a decent contract with the Arkansas-based food processing giant is about more than wages and benefits at one company.
Tyson is responsible for the dispute at the company's Jefferson plant, which the Arkansas company recently purchased. The Jefferson plant is well run and profitable, and the wage and benefits requests of the workers are modest. But Tyson has refused to treat the workers with even the bare minimum of respect that a Wisconsin- based employer would be expected to show.
What is the real motivation behind Tyson's actions? It's simple, really. Like another Arkansas-based company - Wal-Mart - Tyson is trying to make Wisconsin a little more like the South, where the rights of workers always take a back seat to the whims of their corporate masters. If every region in the United States were to follow the Southern model, corporations like Tyson would be able to operate with impunity - and earn excessive profits at the expense of the livelihoods, the health and the safety of its workers.
Wisconsin is a more prosperous and functional state than Arkansas because working people here expect - and historically have received - better pay and better conditions than workers in the South. But if Tyson beats back the reasonable requests of the UFCW members at the Jefferson plant, the circumstance of working people across Wisconsin will be more vulnerable.
So the Tyson strike is a big deal. And it is not difficult to figure out which side Wisconsinites should be on. Already, the Dane and Jefferson county boards have banned purchases by those local government units of Tyson products. The Madison Metropolitan School District has made the same choice. And now, UW-Madison officials have banned the purchase of Tyson products for food service at the campus' student unions, residential halls and UW-Extension.
Casey Nagy, executive assistant to UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley, says the university is not taking a side in the 6-month-old labor dispute. Rather, argues Nagy, "We got a sense that there was campus support for the idea that to reach a resolution to this dispute, people would be comfortable with not serving Tyson products on campus."
That's a round-about way of saying students demanded that Tyson products be dumped. Associated Students of Madison lobbied the administration to drop the Tyson products. Campus officials say UW- Madison purchases roughly $50,000 a year in Tyson products; some students say the figure is substantially higher. But the bottom line is this: UW-Madison students and administrators have recognized that the struggle of the Tyson workers is about securing a stable future for all Wisconsinites. And, we might add, it is about making sure that Wisconsin does not go the way of Arkansas.
(The editorial above is from The Capital Times & Wisconsin State Journal, published on August 28, 2003.)
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