HOOPESTON, Ill. — “We stuck together and stood strong and now we’re more united than we were before,” Beatrice Marmolejo told the Militant. She’s a forklift driver at Teasdale Latin Foods here, where 65 members of Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Local 1 struck the company for three months. They won a new union contract Aug. 29.
Workers at the Hoopeston plant can, pack, and distribute a variety of beans that are sold under the Teasdale brand, as well as under store brands at Walmart, Giant, Aldi, Jewel and other chains.
The union won an immediate 5% wage increase and a 17% overall increase over the four-year contract. They also won 40 additional hours of paid time off a year. “We also stopped the company from using ‘management rights’ to hire nonunion contractors in the plant,” Marmolejo said.
The bosses hoped to demoralize the strikers by using scabs to keep production going, but the union kept the picket lines up around the clock seven days a week. “At one point the wind even blew away our tent,” she said, “but that didn’t stop us.”
Solidarity came in from all across the country, Donna Strawser, a worker with nine years in the plant, said. “We had people from the BCTGM in Kentucky, Iowa, California, Michigan, Ohio and more come to back us up.”
Juan “Chico” Lugo, a picket captain with 26 years in the plant, said, “Whenever we started to feel a bit down, another local would show up and give us a pep talk. That really helped.”
“The Teamsters were awesome in supporting us,” said Strawser. The Teamsters organize the company’s distribution workers, who work in a building next to the cannery. “As long as we had our pickets at the warehouse they would sign in with their union rep and refuse to cross the line, and they got strike benefits from their union.”
The Teamsters union also covered the cost of BCTGM strikers’ health insurance. “We couldn’t have won a contract without their solidarity,” Strawser said.
In the last few weeks, the union launched a campaign called “Who’s Cooking the Beans?” leafleting at Walmart and other stores to let workers and customers know about the strike and the company’s use of scabs.
The union also succeeded in beating back the company’s demand to institute a two-tier wage scale, Lugo said. “But the new contract does change the work schedules from four 10- to 12-hour days to five eight-hour days with three shifts, something the union opposed,” he said. Workers are concerned the company will find ways to use the new schedule to impose forced overtime.
“We got most of what we wanted, not everything,” Strawser said. “But we’re going back stronger and united.”
“These hard-working members put it all on the line in their fight for a fair contract,” BCTGM International President Anthony Shelton said in the BCTGM blog post issued on Labor Day. “This settlement is the result of their dedication and the solidarity of the labor movement and the community.”