Press report below
Following is an excerpt from a letter from Joe Crimi, one of the main people involved in the Domino Sugar strike in New York City, and the chief representative in negotiations for the strikers, received February 28, 2001:
You must have heard by now the strike has ended, not at all the way it should have. The members are extremely pissed off to say the least at the Local Leadership and most of all at the entire Labor Movement from Sweeney on down mostly Sweeney. This does not mean the people who did support them, they are speaking about the Leaders who should have. The people who went into hiding since the strike began. Two years and nothing from the AFL-CIO in the way of support, No Nationwide strike Fund to help these strikers and their families, No National Boycott of Domino Sugar or any other support.
300 union members took on the largest Sugar and Sweetener Multinational corporation in the world, with a track record and history of union-busting not only in America but around the world. Every member thought no one would ever allow it to happen in the Largest union town in America, like it happened in Decatur to the Staley workers.
And then we have the strike last year at the Domino Sugar refinery in New Orleans in this fight with Tate & Lyle they were getting almost the same shit that is on our table and Local 1101 UFCW had to give up in two weeks because the UFCW International refused to sanction the strike, they would not allow them to send pickets to the sister UFCW Domino plant in Baltimore, this was unbelievable specially since we were out on strike as well, Domino would have had no sugar in the market.
So the Labor Movement continues to allow this union-busting company to plunder, pillage and rape contracts, people and their families across America without any kind of all out fight one subsidiary after another.
This company is now punishing these courageous Die hard strikers here in NY who held out to the end. They will not go back into the plant by seniority, the members who resigned from the union turned SCAB and crossed the picket line will keep the jobs that they are in, this means junior employees will have jobs and the union people who are senior to them will not, and some will be forced to take the jobs that are left in the plant about 60 jobs others will take a buyout and others may end up with nothing after 21 months on strike.135 members stood the test of time.
We put in a complaint charge in the NLRB on the seniority and if it lost, so may be the strike tool as we all know it. If junior workers can take jobs in this manner “who” will ever want to strike. We will have people crossing picket lines all over the place.
God Bless our Labor Leaders who must have thought this strike was a waste of time. AS you might be able to tell I am a little bitter as well as my members, the reasons could be for all the things above, but what really gets me mad is I stopped these members from putting up the RAT against Sweeney.
Two year Strike, one death, totally destroyed membership, a contract book that took more then 60 years to accomplish slashed to shit, God knows the money they lost, families disrupted. And I stopped them. Why, Because I didn’t want to hurt the Labor Movement. They ended this by a Mail ballot Vote. These poor bastards don’t even know what they voted on they don’t have a memorandum of agreement yet. The Vote was 56 to 48 and 2 void others would not vote at all. Now to get back into the plant, take a buyout or retain a job will be the real challenge.
Steven Greenhouse
THE NEW YORK TIMES, Tuesday, February 27, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/27/nyregion/27DOMI.html
Strikers at the mammoth Domino Sugar refinery in Brooklyn agreed yesterday to return to work, ending the city’s longest labor battle in what even union leaders acknowledged was a stinging loss.
The 20-month strike had become a major test for the local labor movement, with 284 workers holding out on the picket line for nine months at one of Brooklyn’s few remaining large manufacturing operations. But the strikers gradually started crossing the picket line, feeling abandoned by their parent union and the labor movement at large.
“It’s a complete loss,” acknowledged Joe Crimi, the chief negotiator for the strikers, who work at the 143-year-old refinery, a symbol of New York’s onetime manufacturing might.
Under the new contract, approved on Friday in a ratification vote by members of Local 1814 of the International Longshoremen’s Association, Domino will be allowed to cut 110 jobs at the refinery. The threeyear contract, union officials said, also provides for a one-time 5 percent raise on top of the workers’ average weekly base pay of about $600.
For the first nine months of the strike, the 284 unionized workers showed extraordinary solidarity, without anyone crossing the picket line. But then they cracked, with workers crossing the picket line in fives and tens because their unemployment insurance had expired and because, they said, they were convinced that the walkout was making little headway.
By last weekend,104 former strikers had crossed the picket line, and the company insisted that production had long been back to normal. The workers who remained on strike felt so little hope that they voted 56 to 48 to approve the contract, which was little different from a management proposal that they unanimously rejected four months ago.
The strikers blamed their parent union for doing little for them it did not even provide strike benefits. They blamed the labor movement for turning its back on them by not rallying to their cause. They blamed their co-workers for crossing the picket line. And they accused the president of their union local of selling them out to put this embarrassing fight behind them.
“We got shafted,” said Charles Milan, who has worked for 37 years in the refinery’s packaging department. “We got stabbed in the back.”
Domino Sugar, a division of Tate & Lyle, a British company that is one of the world’s largest sweetener producers, praised the workers’ decision to approve the contract.
In a news release, the company said the new agreement “provides substantial improvement in wages and benefits for union employees, and it also contains the operating flexibility which the company sought to improve competitiveness in the volatile U. S. cane sugar market.”
The company repeatedly told the workers that it needed to reduce its work force because profits were down and because the company was starting to ship semiprocessed sugar to the Brooklyn refinery, rather than the traditional unrefined sugar.
“The resulting loss of some Brooklyn processing jobs has been eased by a generous enhanced severance package,” the company said.
Jim McNamara, a spokesman for the International Longshoremen’s Association, defended the role of the parent union, saying it gave the strikers generous support and even paid for union officials to travel to England to protest at a Tate & Lyle board meeting.
While company officials said it was time for union and management to work together, some workers acknowledged there would inevitably be tensions between those who crossed the picket line and those who remained on strike to the end.
Charles Sekera, a machine operator, said he crossed the picket line last April, after being on strike for 10 months, because the strike was costing him a lot of money and because he was getting little information from his union.
“The union lost big-time,” he said. “The union was out for more than a year and a half for nothing.”
Denis Hughes, president of the New York State A. F. L. -C. I. O. , said the strike seemed doomed from the start.
“It bothered me from the beginning that the union wasn’t strong enough to put this together,” he said. “It shows that even in the best of situations management has an enormous amount of power. One of the things we have to do better in the trade union movement is to develop strategies at the beginning of a dispute, instead of midway through.”
Yesterday afternoon, the trailer that served as the center of the strike activities looked as if a hurricane had hit it. Empty Coke cans were everywhere, and the workers were tearing from the walls solidarity statements from other unions.
Hernando Gallego, a sugar boiler, conceded that he voted to approve management’s proposal, saying,“I don’t like the contract at all, but there’s nothing to hold out for anymore.”
