June 1 - Standing Up by Sitting Down

On this day in labor history, the year was 2000.

That was the day meatpackers at Dakota Premium Foods in St. Paul, Minnesota staged a seven-hour sit-down strike for health and safety.

They protested assembly line speed-up, being forced to work while injured and the dreaded “gang-time,” supervisors used to avoid paying overtime.

Remarkably, the organizing drive came after the workers took action on their own behalf.

The United Food and Commercial Workers had organized the plant briefly in the early 1990s.

They quickly lost ground when the company pressed a successful decertification campaign after refusing a first contract.

This time, workers found that as the assembly line pace increased, so did the rate of injuries.

Workers came into the plant that morning, resolved to make a stand.

Management bullied them for hours throughout the day to give up.

Finally they were forced to concede to many of the workers concerns, including observation of line speed changes and uniform hours of work.

Workers eagerly signed UFCW cards, while the company unleashed its propaganda campaign to scare workers away from the union.  

Management claimed workers would have to pay outrageous sums in union dues, that they’d lose their medical benefits and that their names would be turned over to the federal government.

The undocumented among the workers, some of whom were the best union fighters in the plant, were unshaken by these threats.

Then the company began targeting the strike leaders with firings and endless job transfers.

Workers stood intransigent and the UFCW overwhelmingly won the NLRB election a month later.

The union successfully weathered years of continued harassment, threats and decertification campaigns, but could not survive the closing of the plant in 2014.