Immigration issues real in Delta `Struggle to hold on to what
we have'
In Mississippi catfish-processing plants, the nation's poorest
citizens and its newest arrivals are competing for low-skilled
work
By Dawn Turner Trice
INDIANOLA, Miss. -- In 1983, when Sarah Claree White joined the
kill line at the DeltaPride Catfish processing plant, the workers'
lives were so dominated by stopwatches that even their restroom
visits were timed.
White male supervisors often followed the workers--nearly all of
them African-American women--into the bathrooms with timers to
make sure they didn't stay too long.
White was one of the catfish workers who began the fight for
change in the fledgling industry, demanding medical benefits, job
security and a work environment free of sexual harassment. The
workers accomplished what few believed was possible for poor
African-American women in the Deep South. Twenty years ago this
fall, they formed a union.
Though the gains from organizing have been modest, White, now a
union representative, says they have eroded in recent years as
undocumented Hispanics entered Mississippi's catfish industry
willing to work for lower wages and fewer benefits.
Far from the Delta, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Washington, the
debate about immigration reform often centers on people coming to
this country to do work most Americans don't want to do.
That may not be the case in the Delta, where in some counties 40
percent of black residents live below the poverty line and the
jobs left for low-skilled workers often are in food-processing
plants, particularly those in the $275 million-a-year catfish
industry.
Few places outside this region, which produced more than half of
the nation's farm-raised catfish in 2005, better illustrate the
competition between the nation's poorest citizens and its newest
immigrants for low-skilled work.
"We struggle to hold on to what we have," says White,
47, who left the plant floor in 1996 to become a union
representative for United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1529.
"We try to tell the Hispanic workers about the unions. But
mostly they're afraid and desperate and will do whatever to keep
food on their table. Just like us."
Having lived in the Delta all of her life, White sees the stamp
the fast-growing immigrant population is making on a landscape
still colored by a legacy of black-white segregation. Some catfish
plant owners have created mini-communities for their new workers
that include on-site housing and churches. Local businesses have
begun stocking their shelves with Hispanic merchandise.
White spends much of her time in several catfish plants,
addressing the grievances of union members and trying to persuade
others, particularly Hispanic workers, to join the union. But her
greatest struggle to date is divining a way for black and Hispanic
workers to find common ground.
"I guess all of us are tired of just getting by," White
says. "They used to say the richest thing about the Delta is
the soil. Now we got to live on this land together and try, as
best we can, to wring a livable wage from it."
- - -
In the Delta, it used to be that cotton alone was king. Now cotton
has ceded a good portion of the land to catfish.
Along U.S. Highway 82, on the way to White's union office in
downtown Indianola, that transformation is apparent. Where rows of
cotton once stretched out for acres, now catfish ponds, man-made
and almost perfect squares, have been carved out of the clay
soil.
Indianola, a town of about 11,500 residents, hails itself as the
birthplace of blues musician B.B. King. Downtown, on one side of
the railroad tracks, whites own many of the stately homes,
boutiques and restaurants. On the other side of the tracks, blacks
occupy the new government-subsidized homes and the old shotgun
shacks.
In her office, White juggles telephone calls from shop stewards
and union members, but also from residents seeking work at the
catfish plants.
"Times can get pretty rough down here," she says.
"Ain't so uncommon to see somebody sneaking down to a catfish
pond and holding a slice of Wonder bread over the water. If the
fish are snapping pretty good, you can catch you some
dinner."
White, a grandmother, is a heavyset woman with a big voice that
can convey calm or command attention with equal effectiveness. She
grew up poor in neighboring Inverness, about 6 miles from her
office. Of her 10 siblings, she was one of only two to complete
college.
Though she studied to be a teacher, she failed part of the
licensing exam. In 1983 she took a job at Indianola's Delta Pride
plant. Like many women there, she was a young single parent trying
desperately to support her family.
"When I worked on the line, the women would call me
sanctified because I was so shy," she says. "I wore
these long dresses that draped down to my ankles. I wasn't no
sanctified. I was quiet because my dresses was hand-me-downs. My
weight always made me ashamed."
With the opening of the catfish plants in the early 1980s, the
workers believed their lives and their lot would change. Many had
picked cotton or worked as domestics. Some were on welfare.
"We learned fast that they'd took us out of the cotton fields
and put us in a field with a tin roof," White says.
"They knew they could pay us slave wages and put us in slave
conditions and they did."
Because doors had been removed from the bathroom stalls, women had
to provide privacy for one another. On the plant floor, the
workers often stood for 12 to 13 hours a day in ankle-deep water.
They sterilized their aprons with water so hot it often scalded
them.
The women--timed by their bosses--skinned 25 to 28 catfish per
minute. "Workers got carpal tunnel so bad, and all the
company nurse could tell us was chew on a couple of aspirin and
then get back to work," says White.
The federal government eventually fined Delta Pride $32,800 for
violation of safety laws and ordered reforms. The company appealed
but later complied.
Such conditions weren't limited to Delta Pride, which was one of
several catfish-processing plants in the Delta owned by white
farmers.
In 1985, White and another catfish worker named Mary Young decided
to organize the workers. They knew that talk of a union could get
them fired.
"We feared for our livelihood, but also for our lives,"
White says. "But what does a job mean when you can get fired
for wanting to take your baby to the doctor or refusing to let the
supervisor run his hands up your thigh?"
Despite opposition from plant owners, workers voted in 1986 to
bring in a union. But White says conditions hardly improved.
In contract negotiations four years later, management offered a
6. 5-cent-an-hour raise over each of three years. But the greater
indignity was a proposal to restrict the workers' bathroom breaks
to their lunch hour.
About 1,200 workers walked off the job. The strike and a national
boycott, led in part by Chicago's Operation PUSH, brought Delta
Pride back to the bargaining table, ending the walkout after three
months. The workers won a pay increase of $1.50 per hour, pushing
the average hourly wage to about $5.50, as well as full bathroom
privileges and a contract clause prohibiting sexual harassment.
As the years passed, White says it became more difficult to
persuade new workers to join the union. Because Mississippi is an
"open shop" state, workers do not have to be union
members to reap the benefits.
"People just forgot about what we went through," White
says. "They kind of took it for granted, thought the jobs
would be there forever."
Those sentiments changed in the mid-1990s when catfish plant
owners found an even cheaper labor pool: Hispanic immigrants.
Owners with fewer Hispanic workers started asking for union
givebacks to stay competitive.
Hugh Warren, executive vice president of the trade group Catfish
Farmers of America, says his industry has turned many Delta
communities around, and plant owners have a stake in treating all
employees fairly.
"The industry has always gone through a cyclical period of
high and low prices," he says. "And that has affected
wages."
But White says the pressure for givebacks is frustrating because
catfish work has never had the pull to lift people out of
poverty.
"You always had one foot in and one foot out," she says.
"Now with the Hispanic workers, it's getting harder and
harder as far as concessions go. What more can you pinch off, when
you don't have but a pinch in the first place?"
- - -
Along U.S. 82, White drives past Supermercado El Mexicano, a
grocery and restaurant that opened a year and a half ago. Some
nights the green metal building transforms into the area's only
Hispanic juke joint.
A few miles down the road is Indianola's lone Wal-Mart. In January
it began to stock items for menudo, a Mexican stew. Before that,
customers had to drive 170 miles to Memphis to buy the
ingredients.
"You got social services agencies, schools, grocery stores
and hospitals posting signs in English and in Spanish," White
says.
The Hispanic population is growing faster in the South than in any
other part of the country, according to the Washington, D.C.-based
Pew Hispanic Center.
U. S. census data show that from 1990 to 2000, Mississippi's
Hispanic population grew nearly 150 percent to about 39,000
residents. In a report in February, the state auditor said
Mississippi's undocumented population could be as high as
100,000.
For years workers have come primarily from southern Mexico but
also from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia and
Argentina.
"We would see the [migrant farmworkers] traveling through
Mississippi on their way to and from Florida and the
Carolinas," White says. "They stopped in the Delta for
years to pick cotton right alongside us. They'd pick sweet
potatoes or corn before moving on."
But in the mid-1990s, more employers in the growing hospitality,
poultry, forestry, construction and catfish industries were taking
advantage of the U.S. Labor Department's program that allows them
to hire foreign workers to fill jobs if they can show Americans
aren't clamoring for the work. Foreign workers are supposed to
stay for a set time, often five to six months, and then return
home. But many have been staying on.
Dickie Stevens, part owner of ConFish Inc., was one of the few
Delta-area catfish plant owners willing to talk to the Tribune
about hiring Hispanic workers.
He said that years ago his plant hired documented immigrants
because many local workers were employed in other industries. But
as work for low-skilled laborers left the region, Stevens says
ConFish has been hiring more local workers.
White says ConFish may be the exception among the Delta's major
catfish-processing plants. She estimates that about 30 percent of
the 5,000 catfish plant workforce is Hispanic, yet only one
Hispanic catfish worker belongs to Local
1529. That's why White spends much of her day trying to recruit.
Many Hispanics are reluctant to join because of their illegal
status.
In addition to her union work, White is board president of the
Mississippi Workers' Center for Human Rights, which fights for
workers' rights around the state and teams with other groups
fighting immigration legislation viewed as punitive.
White pulls off the main road and into a parking lot. About 25
row-house apartments and a small church that's been converted from
a trailer are clustered in a field. A sign reads "Iglesia
Nueva Vida Y Esperanza, Bienvenidos," or "New Life and
Hope Church, Welcome."
A catfish company maintains the apartment complex for its
immigrant workers.
Once a month, members of a predominantly white Baptist church
drive out to provide medicine, clothing and other necessities.
At the apartment complex, a Hispanic woman stands in a doorway.
Feral dogs roam the parking lot, and the afternoon sun glints off
the windshields of a couple of aging pickups.
In Spanish, the woman says her name is Catalina Aguilar. She says
she was fired from the catfish plant for talking too much and not
filleting fast enough. She now stays home and cares for her
toddler.
Aguilar, 25, came to Mississippi from Mexico four years ago,
joining her husband, a catfish pond worker, who has been in this
country for nine years. Both are undocumented.
The two had been saving money to send for their 8-year-old son.
But recent rumors of an illegal immigrant roundup have unnerved
residents and put their plans on hold.
"We don't know what to do," says Aguilar. "People
think we take, take, take. But we give too. We give back in taxes
and in sweat."
White says that when Hispanics started coming into the plants,
some union members would call immigration officials to report
them.
"We were jealous," she says. "We thought they was
being treated like gold. Even though that wasn't so, nobody wants
to hear talk about [the two groups] banding together if the baby
needs diapers or you can't afford the rent."
- - -
At noon at the Delta Pride plant, workers converge on the
cafeteria.
White stands before a long table assembling stacks of grievance
forms, applications (in English and Spanish), the union contract,
company policies.
A group of older African-American women joins her at the table and
begins dining on hot dogs, hamburgers and leftovers.
"You won't see much catfish here," says Charlene Wade, a
shop steward. "Maybe on the weekends, but not now."
At another table, a couple of Hispanic workers have their lunch
near a bank of lockers.
During a cafeteria appearance at any plant, White has to straddle
two worlds. In a few minutes, she'll approach the Hispanic
workers. But she admits that these days her union pitch feels a
bit perfunctory.
As in other industries, the Hispanic catfish workers face great
uncertainty.
With attention trained on immigration reform legislation and
tightening the borders, undocumented workers are more vulnerable
than ever, she says.
On May 12, the owner of one processing plant sent letters to some
of his immigrant workers, advising them that they have 30 days to
prove they're documented or they will lose their jobs.
White says African-American and Hispanic workers believe it may
only be a matter of time before other plants follow suit. There
are no signs now of a Hispanic exodus. But White says black union
workers--facing contract negotiations next year --can't help but
wonder whether pay and pensions would improve if large numbers of
undocumented workers do pull out.
"It's like there's a rumbling and a quake is coming,"
says White. "One group got their ear to the ground, waiting
to see how it all shakes out. The other group is waiting to be
shaken, and we don't know where they're going to wind up. But that
ain't just in the Delta. Right now that's everywhere."
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