Blue Diamond Workers Roll Organizing Drive from Seoul to Modesto to Tokyo

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2006/09/14/blue-diamond-workers-roll-organizing-drive-from-seoul-to-modesto-to-tokyo/

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Blue Diamond Workers Roll Organizing Drive from Seoul to Modesto to Tokyo

Marcy Rein, International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) communications specialist, adapted the following for AFL-CIO Now from the September 2006 ILWU newspaper, The Dispatcher.

Early on, the organizing committee members at Blue Diamond Growers (BDG) learned they would have to think outside the gates of their Sacramento almond-processing plant to win their drive to join ILWU warehouse Local 17. This summer, their campaign has taken them to places they never thought they’d see, like Seoul and Tokyo—and to small towns all over north-central California, like Modesto and Atwater, Chico and Colusa.



Organizing committee member Mike Olivera said Blue Diamond

…tries to paint the campaign into a little square around 18th and C streets. I tell people it’s on a world scale. Wherever Blue Diamond is, we will be there as well.

BDG has a global reach, shipping 70 percent of its almonds overseas. Japan ranks third among BDG’s top 10 customers. South Korea ranks sixth.

Blue Diamond also has deep roots in California. It runs as a cooperative and its almond-farmer members and decision-makers live and work in towns scattered around Highway 99, from Bakersfield in the south to Chico in the north.

And BDG is anti-union. It met the workers’ drive with a nasty union-busting campaign. An administrative law judge of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) found the company guilty of numerous labor law violations including firing two union supporters, threatening to close the plant, threatening that workers will lose wages, pensions and benefits if they are unionized, coercively interrogating workers about their union activities, unlawfully disciplining workers in retaliation for their union support and soliciting workers grievances and promising to make changes.

The committee members have pushed back. Last year, they had dozens of meetings with unions and community groups and public officials around Sacramento, seeking to build backing for their right to organize. Now they are reaching deeper into Blue Diamond’s networks of customers, distributors, shippers and decision-makers and pressing for a formal neutrality agreement between the company and the union.

FULL story at link above.

[LynneSin]

1. Ironically I'm eating a Blue Diamond Smokehouse Almond as I read this

Not kidding

[Parche]

2. blue diamond

I guess you cant say they have 'balls' anymore, you must say they have 'nuts'