In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

As the new century dawned, the misery wrought by the meatpacking industry following the IBP revolution and borne disproportionately by immigrants began to catch the public’s eye. This was partly because of the splash created by Eric Schlosser’s bestselling exposé Fast Food Nation (2002) along with his related articles in Mother Jones (2001) and The Nation (2004).1 Commonly seen as a latter -day cousin of Upton Sinclair’s famous muckraking book The Jungle (1926 [1906]), which revealed the agonies of immigrant workers and the dangers to consumers in the meat industry during the Progressive Era, Fast Food Nation riveted the eyes of aghast readers on the ways the beef-processing industry systematically disregarded the health and safety of its employees while showing comparable indifference to contamination problems in its products. A less frequently read but still highly publicized investigation of the meat industry by the international organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) followed close on Schlosser’s heels. Released in early 2005, the HRW report excoriated Tyson and other mega-meat firms for violating international law, U.S. law, and human rights by exposing workers to occupational safety and health hazards as well as by denying workers’ fundamental rights to freedom of association in unions. In addition to these journalists and advocates, however, immigrant workers themselves stepped forward to bring what had been happening inside U.S.-American meatpacking plants out into the open. In 1999, after several years of organizing that began at a low level but gathered intensity and militancy, the largest wildcat (extralegal, nonunion approved) strike by meatpackers in at least the last quartercentury broke out at the IBP plant near Pasco, Washington. Shortly thereafter, immigrant workers at an even bigger Tyson/IBP beefprocessing facility in Amarillo, Texas, as well as another large beef plant owned by Cargill/Excel in Fort Morgan, Colorado, staged briefer 5. ¡Nosotros Somos la Unión! Immigrant Worker Organizing and the Disciplines of the Law 161 but still notable walkouts. The leaders of the movement for rank-and- file union power and industry reform in Pasco were directly involved in these other actions as consultants on tactics for democratizing local unions and changing power relations on the shop floor. This string of actions garnered the attention of the national media, in part through the workers’ efforts to link their experiences of bodily debilitating chain speeds to inhumane slaughter practices but also because these events suggested a growing mobilization of immigrant protest forces. While the Washington Post pursued the former angle in an article on the “brutal harvest” wrought by “modern meat” (Warrick 2001), the New York Times highlighted the latter theme in a story about “The Latest Example of Immigrants Packing the Picket Lines” (Verhovek 1999), both of which featured the workers of Teamsters Local 556. This chapter examines the stories the immigrant workers at Tyson/ IBP told about their ventures into political activism. The brief version of the workers’ mobilization goes as follows. By the mid-1990s, the workers at the plant had fully absorbed the wretched consequences of “the IBP revolution”: plummeting wages, increased speeds of production , harsher supervision, and multiplying health and safety hazards. The company still tolerated the union’s presence, but only because the officers had made it standard practice not to stir up trouble for management by pursuing individual workers’ grievances, much less by organizing the workers to put collective pressure on the firm. Those officers were white non-Hispanics who did not speak Spanish, while the Latino proportion of the unionized labor force had mushroomed to about 85 percent with most being Mexican immigrants who spoke limited or no English. Also, the workers overwhelmingly lived in Pasco, near the plant, in a small urban area where Latinos had become a rising majority of the local population; meanwhile, the principal union officer lived and supervised the union’s office thirty miles away in Walla Walla, where he was well regarded among the town’s (80 percent majority) white community and where none of Local 556’s main industrial employers were located. Realizing that they were on their own if they wanted anything to change at IBP, a small group of immigrant workers began to meet informally in Pasco around 1994 and 1995. They coalesced around two key leaders: Diego Ortega and Maria Martinez. While Ortega himself had emigrated from Mexico (and we heard portions of his story about 162 ¡Nosotros Somos la Unión! [18.118.200.136] Project MUSE...

Share