After five years of pickets and protests that entangled Duke in many ways, the boycott of the North Carolina-based Mt. Olive Pickle Company will officially end today.
After five years of pickets and protests that entangled Duke in many ways, the boycott of the North Carolina-based Mt. Olive Pickle Company will officially end today.
Officials from the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, a union-instigating and farmworker rights group, reached a settlement with Mt. Olive earlier this month about farmworker conditions and cucumber pricing that enabled FLOC to end its call for a boycott. The North Carolina Growers Association, which includes most farmers in the state, agreed to a separate contract with FLOC that ensures union recognition and includes several steps FLOC said will improve worker conditions.
More details about both agreements will be released at a 10 a.m. press conference today in Raleigh, but officials from both Mt. Olive and FLOC are declaring victory.
“It’s just been a matter of time,” said Brendan Greene, boycott organizer for FLOC. “We were always really confident that we were going to win the struggle.”
FLOC called the boycott in 1999 as part of its efforts to help unionize and improve conditions for migrant farm workers, who pick many of the cucumbers that become Mt. Olive pickles. Mt. Olive and FLOC have struggled over the issues and conditions of the boycott since the beginning.
Mt. Olive ought to use its position as the dominant purchaser of North Carolina cucumbers to regulate worker conditions on farms, FLOC organizers said. They added that better working conditions could arise from a three-way contract among Mt. Olive, growers and FLOC, as the representative of the workers.
Such an agreement would be against Mt. Olive policy, said Lynn Williams, community relations director for the company. Like Duke, Mt. Olive has always taken the position that it is inappropriate for an institution to force the workers of its subcontracted vendors, in this case the growers, to unionize.
Williams said Wednesday that Mt. Olive still held “exactly the position we’ve always had.” The agreement with FLOC was possible because NCGA worked independently with FLOC to meet the demands that the union organizers set.
“The NCGA saw value in negotiating with FLOC, and they began to negotiate in earnest,” Williams said. “As they were doing that, we were able to negotiate an end to the boycott with FLOC.”
In order to end the boycott, Mt. Olive agreed to raise the price it pays for farm products by 2.25 percent, Williams said. The pickle-production company will also offer a price supplement of 3 percent to any farm that offers workers’ compensation to its laborers.
Greene said Mt. Olive would offer a 10 percent raise in the price it pays for cucumbers over the next three years. As part of FLOC’s agreement with NCGA, the growers consented not to discriminate against unionized workers and to raise worker salaries by 10 percent over the next three years, he added.
Representatives from NCGA did not return phone calls from The Chronicle Wednesday.
Many of the farmworkers are “guest workers” from Mexico with no permanent legal status in the United States. When they officially become part of the union later this week, they will be required to pay 2.5 percent of their income in FLOC dues. North Carolina, however, is a right-to-work state so union membership will be optional.
Greene said this is the first time in the United States that guest workers have been allowed to unionize. About 3,000 of the 8,000 guest workers affiliated with NCGA have signed union cards, he added.
Duke’s branch of the national activist group Students Against Sweatshops took the Mt. Olive boycott as one of its causes as soon as the protests began, and in October 2001 it encouraged the University to support the ban on Mt. Olive products.
Former President Nan Keohane and Jim Wilkerson, director of Duke Stores, took an active role in examining the conditions for workers on farms. While the University investigated the situation, it pulled Mt. Olive products from the shelves of Duke’s stores.
Students from SAS balked when the University decided in the summer of 2002 that Mt. Olive had sufficiently improved its oversight of conditions on its growers’ farms and Keohane rescinded the boycott.
“We said all along that we did not differ in the ultimate goals we had in terms of improving the quality of life of farmworkers, but we saw other ways in which an institution like Duke could make a difference,” said John Burness, senior vice president for public affairs and government relations.
FLOC and Mt. Olive officials declined to comment on whether Duke’s role in the boycott had any influence in the agreement.
SAS, however, noted that Duke’s role in the boycott was short-lived. “Former President Keohane made a lot of really innovative moves. She invested a lot into researching it,” said senior Chris Paul, a student organizer in SAS. “What’s fair to say is that Duke didn’t play any role at all in the final resolution of the boycott.”
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