Women Workers Connect Internationally, Organizing for Their Rights

Marie Thompson (left) and Maria Cazorla represent MPOWER, an organization primarily of poultry processing workers, at a learning exchange with members of STITCH, a network of women workers.

On a sweltering July afternoon, Carmen Molina, a banana worker from Izabal, Guatemala, shared her story with a group of women members of MPOWER (Mississippi Poultry Workers for Equality and Respect), a workers' center in rural Mississippi.

Molina had traveled over 1,000 miles from Guatemala to Mississippi as a representative of STITCH, a network that connects women workers in Central America and the United States, to share strategies for achieving better wages and working conditions.

Her story is one of struggle, awareness, growing confidence, and collective action through workers' unions. "As women, we believe that unions should not only defend the labor rights of workers, but they should also fight to eliminate violence against women," Molina told the group.

Listening thoughtfully was Maria Cazorla, who worked at a poultry-processing plant in Morton, Miss., for 11 years. Although her shifts often lasted up to 10 hours, she struggled to make ends meet, earning minimum wage. She experienced sexual harassment and discrimination on the job.

Cazorla shared her coworkers' feelings of powerlessness as they faced mounting abuse from their supervisor. "It made me feel powerless," she explained, "that people couldn't express themselves freely when they felt that something was unfair. We weren't being treated as human beings."

When Cazorla quit her job, she joined the staff of MPOWER as office manager. She quickly grew into the role of community organizer, responding to the urgent need to educate and mobilize an increasingly diverse workforce in Mississippi's growing poultry industry.

In Scott County, where much of Mississippi's poultry industry is based, the Latino community grew by over 1,000 percent between 1990 and 2000. Roughly 60 percent of poultry-processing workers are immigrants from Latin American countries. The remaining 40 percent are U.S.-born African Americans from rural areas. Many of the workers are women, often young, single mothers.

Cultivating alliances

Carmen Molina, a banana worker from Guatemala and a representative of STITCH, shares her personal story of struggle, awareness, confidence, and action during a learning exchange with women members of MPOWER, a workers' center in Mississippi.

Through its Economic Justice Program, UUSC supports STITCH and MPOWER to connect workers across divides of race, ethnicity, nationality, and gender.

UUSC cultivates alliances and learning exchanges so that workers' rights groups around the globe can develop and share innovative tools and strategies.

Explained Johanna Chao Kreilick, UUSC's Economic Justice Program manager, "In a global economy where markets and supply chains are highly linked and networked, we have to promote connections among workers' rights partners to help them share their innovative work - connecting what otherwise might have been isolated efforts into a broader social movement."

Advancing workers' right to organize

Uniting workers to confront violations of their rights - such as discrimination, wage theft, and poor health and safety conditions - is especially important in Mississippi's poultry processing industries, one of the most dangerous in the country. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, one in seven poultry workers is injured on the job.
In part, these labor violations are due to the absence of effective unions in Mississippi, a state that has historically been unreceptive to organized labor.

While freedom of association and the right to form a union are protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and numerous International Labor Organization conventions, these rights are severely restricted, not only in Mississippi and in Guatemala, but all over the world.

To address this issue, UUSC began working with STITCH over three years ago to develop a Women, Labor, and Leadership curriculum to build skills and strategies for women workers to organize collectively against violations of their rights.

Molina, as a member of STITCH'S Labor Advisory Group, helped to develop the curriculum. She is now teaming up with fellow members of her union to teach the curriculum's modules on Gender, Globalization, Women's Leadership, and New Directions in Unionism.

With UUSC's technical support, STITCH is also launching a new phase of the project - using the curriculum to train women workers in the United States.

It was under this initiative that Molina traveled to Mississippi to hold a learning exchange between STITCH and MPOWER.

The exchange created an important space for women workers to talk about how gender discrimination, racism, and economic globalization affect them in their workplaces and communities.

For Cazorla, the exchange inspired her to envision new possibilities for women workers in Mississippi.

"We could work toward a dream of unifying all poultry plants under one strong contract with provisions for women," she said. "We just have to cultivate alliances that will one day bear fruit, and in a few years there will be better working conditions."