After rejecting a recent proposal, striking Tyson Foods workers are poised to vote on the latest offer from their employer this Thursday.
If the workers, members of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 538, choose not to accept the contract, their jobs will be in jeopardy. If the strike continues for more than a year, the replacement workers hired by Tyson could vote to decertify the union, according to Gregg Peters, chief steward for the Jefferson plant.
\Basically, the strike would be over. The company would have no legal obligation to bargain with the union,"" he said.
Union President Mike Rice recently recommended the workers to accept Tyson's latest contract.
""Nobody really thinks it's a good contract ... all we asked was that people think of the consequences of not accepting it,"" Peters said.
The workers, who have been striking since Feb. 28, 2003, walked out over several discrepancies between themselves and the management, including a possible elimination of workers' pensions, the cost of insurance and wage freezes, Peters said.
Ed Nicholson, director of media relations at Tyson Foods, Inc., said Tyson was trying to make the jobs stay in Jefferson and make the plant competitive.
Nicholson said the union members and Tyson were in talks from May 2002 until the strike.
""We resumed negotiations on December 18 and had another session on January 9, after which a revised contract was taken back to the rank and file, and they had a vote on it, and they turned it down,"" he said.
Samantha Ashley, a UW-Madison senior and a member of the Student Labor Action Coalition, said the workers would not automatically get their jobs back under the current contract.
""They could potentially not hire anyone back if they didn't want to,"" she said.
Even with the union leaders' reluctant endorsement of the offer, Peters said strikers are split 50-50 on the subject and the vote could be extraordinarily close. However, Nicholson said he wanted to see an end to the strike, and remained optimistic the offer would succeed.
