Camilla Poultry Workers Negotiate New Union Agreement
The facility in Camilla is owned by Tyson Foods Inc. and produces chicken nuggets for McDonald’s.
Danny Johnston / Associated Press
Workers at a poultry plant in south Georgia just negotiated a new union agreement with higher pay and better benefits. But the union believes the agreement won’t just help that plant.
The facility in Camilla is owned by Tyson Foods Inc. and produces chicken nuggets for McDonald’s. There are three other non-union plants nearby, and Edgar Fields, president of the Southeast Council of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, said this new agreement will have an effect on those plants too.
“A lot of what poultry pays is based on union facilities,” he said. “What companies do is look at, ‘I’ve got to compete with the union wages to keep the employees satisfied so they won’t want a union.’”
He called the agreement, which was ratified by 97 percent of the workers, “historic,” while the plant has been unionized for some time. It was recently purchased by Tyson. The annual wage increase over the agreement time span comes to $1.50, plus $0.20 cents per hour based on seniority.
The new deal also features better healthcare benefits, putting those of workers on par with those of management, stronger recognition of seniority in terms of pay and consideration for promotions and a new freedom to take personal days any day of the week. Another outcome they won, Fields said, “that had been fought for ages,” was to have personal days count as time worked.
Fields said the workers on the ground negotiated the deal. “I attribute everything we got to the fact that the members stood strong and supported the activity,” he said. “The ones that fight the fight are the ones that are actually in the facility, that have come together to stand strong for eight months.”
The agreement covers 1,800 workers.
Georgia is the nation’s number one poultry producing state.
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