http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/_i_Staley_i_Captures_Corporate_War_on_Unions_6814.htmlby Randy Shaw‚ Apr. 16‚ 2009
After President Reagan broke the air traffic controllers union in 1981, corporate America got a White House Seal of Approval for union busting, shifting manufacturing jobs overseas, and reducing wages and benefits at home. The nation’s heartland became the epicenter of the corporate war on blue-collar unionized workers. In the early1990’s, Decatur, Illinois alone saw three unions battling employers seeking to destroy longstanding worker gains. The most combative of these struggles was at the A.E. Staley corn processing plant. The Staley fight became a gripping story of worker resistance to the takeover of their longtime family-owned company by a foreign owner committed to breaking the union at all costs. The Staley campaign shows how United States labor laws reward vicious, anti-union employers, and how worker solidarity alone is not enough to prevail. Although the Staley campaign includes vital lessons for labor activists, it took Steven Ashby and C.J. Hawking’s powerful new book, Staley: The Fight for a New American Labor Movement, to revive, and fully bring to life, this historic campaign.
While many attribute declining unionized manufacturing jobs in the United States to shifting work overseas, another major factor was the corporate war against organized labor that hit full steam in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Workers at the Staley plant in Decatur, Illinois were at the epicenter of these attacks. The London-based Tate & Lyle Corporation acquired Staley in 1988, and almost immediately sought to eliminate all of the gains that the unionized workforce had achieved over the past four decades. A company vice-president even told the union in 1992, “We are going to hit you hard all at once, rather than have people pissed off for several contracts and years.”
This book is about worker resistance to these attacks. Although the Staley workers had not previously viewed themselves as activists, and their union, the Allied Industrial Workers Local 837, was not part of a powerful international, the company’s aggressive tactics forced the workers to create a national grassroots resistance campaign that engaged millions of supporters across the nation.
The Staley workers faced a fundamental problem: what are workers options after their employer has locked them out for refusing to agree to a terrible contract? United States labor law does not require employers to agree to a fair deal, and they can bargain forever so long as they don’t blatantly act in “bad faith.”
Cesar Chavez and the UFW responded to such employer-worker imbalance by launching an international grape boycott to force growers to sign contracts. The union used vegetable boycotts for a similar end, and combined this with building a grassroots political force that resulted in California’s 1975 enactment of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act. In a later successful campaign against J.P. Stevens, textile workers combined a national product boycott with a “corporate campaign” targeting corporations and banks with financial relationships to the anti-union textile giant.
FULL story at link.