Sacramento Backs Blue Diamond Workers

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/04/10/sacramento-backs-blue-diamond-workers/

Marcy Rein, a communications specialist in the ILWU Organizing Department, describes how the city of Sacramento put its weight behind the efforts of workers who for years have been seeking to form a union at Blue Diamond Growers in the face of massive company intimidation.

The Sacramento City Council in California on April 1 threw its support in a big way behind workers at Blue Diamond Growers struggling for the freedom to organize and join the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). The Council voted 7–1 to create an ad hoc committee that would talk with the company, the workers and the union to try to work out a fair election process agreeable to all.



This marks the second time the Council had taken action for the Blue Diamond workers. At a packed and dramatic meeting Dec. 5, 2006, the Council passed a resolution urging the company to sign a neutrality agreement with the ILWU. Company management has not responded to that or any other input from the community it has called home for nearly 100 years—the community that gave it some $21 million in public aid in 1995 to keep it from leaving town. Blue Diamond Organizing Committee member Carlos Saraiva said the workers “are very happy with the Council’s decision.”

I hope now Blue Diamond will show some respect for the community leaders and the elected council members and receive them. I don’t ask them to agree at first, but at least they need to talk.

The vote also reflected the support Saraiva and his co-workers at the Blue Diamond processing plant have been building since they began organizing three and a half years ago.

Last year, during the debate over the Employee Free Choice Act, two members of Congress cited the experience of Ivo Camilo, a Blue Diamond worker who was fired after 35 years for seeking a better life by trying to form a union (see video). Camilo and his co-workers are falling farther and farther behind the cost of living because of sagging wages and rising health care costs. Yet they have no job security, as they watch the company give more and more of their jobs to temps. Many of the workers say they go to work every day hurting from carpal tunnel and other injuries.

FULL story at link.