The Fargo Forum reported on Saturday that American Crystal, union to go back to negotiating table:
Negotiators representing American Crystal Sugar Co. and the company’s approximately 1,300 locked-out union workers have been called back to the negotiating table by the U.S. Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.
Mediated talks between representatives for the nation’s largest sugar beet producer and the union will be held at an undisclosed time and location Oct. 24.
Union representatives said they had planned to contact Jeanne Frank, the federal mediator assigned to the case, this week to request another negotiating session. But according to local union officials, the mediator contacted the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union and the company Monday to schedule another round of negotiations, before the union contacted her.
With the lockout dragging on for more than 75 days, impacting productivity and efficiency at company plants and leaving union workers and their families without paychecks, both sides say they hope for a resolution to a costly labor impasse that has impacted local economies and divided communities and households. . . .
Read the rest at the Forum. The Grand Forks Herald takes a look at Drayton, ND, the smallest town with a ACS refinery in Main Street locked out by lockout:
KodaBank on Main Street has been busy refinancing car loans for locked-out union workers at American Crystal Sugar.
Bank President Pete Anderson anticipates he soon will see customers seeking restructuring of home mortgages, too.
“After 90 days without work, there will be some real hardships,” he said.
That’s especially true for workers at the Drayton and Hillsboro processing plants because North Dakota doesn’t award unemployment benefits as Minnesota does. Drayton likely is the hardest hit community proportionally of the five Red River Valley plant sites because its population of 800 is the smallest, about half of Hillsboro’s.
But the 53-year-old Anderson, raised in Drayton and a starting guard for the high school’s last appearance in the state Class B boys basketball tournament, sees a greater harm than lost wages and lower beet payments to growers.
“I’ve never seen anything here that has impacted relationships more than this has,” he said. “Some of these relationships may never be mended.”. . .
It's not surprising that a community banker might value those relationships. Elsewhere in the Herald, business columnist Ralph Kingsbury observes the consequences of only valuing "comparative advantage" in North Dakota won’t be immune from globalization’s woes:
Globalization. That’s the way they describe it now. When the trend first started, it was called free trade. We were told — and most of us believed — that if only we would let production take place in countries with the greatest “comparative advantage,” we would all be better off. . . .
Globalization has not lived up to its promises. We all know the economies of the world are in precarious shape at best. Read what economists have to say about the problems we face today, and compare their thoughts to those of economists from earlier generations. It’s obvious that today’s economists don’t understand what they have created any better than did the economists at the beginning of the 1900s.
They really don’t seem to understand how to create or sustain demand — and demand is what it’s all about.
It is too early to tell if the anti-Wall Street demonstrations of the past few weeks have depth or staying power. But we can say that the demonstrators are there because of the failures of globalization.
One thing different this time is that many of the people demonstrating are college graduates. Many of them are not getting jobs because they have degrees in areas where the economy finds no value (or at least enough value for the number of graduates).
After all, how many masters of mass communications does an economy need?
How do we as Americans measure success? Certainly many in North Dakota have enjoyed success. But how can we look at the rest of the country and say not only, “We are OK,” but also “We will be all right”?
It's interesting to watch the growing meme that blames college graduate for picking "wrong" degrees for unemployment, rather than holding accountable those who made decisions in the financial sector. It's a blame-the-22-year-olds world. Bluestem suspects this line may become even more popular among our ALEC-fatten politicians than blaming the poor for the follies of the wealthy.
Photo: Locked out workers and vans carrying scabs.
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