Rural Community Workers Alliance

Background

Rural Community Workers Alliance was founded in 2014 in Missouri. The group conducts left-of-center labor advocacy and organizing for minority workers in rural Missouri. The group primarily organizes largely Hispanic employees of meatpacking plants and other industrial food industry workers in the state. The organization has mostly centered its efforts on facilities in Milan, Missouri and on organizing “low-wage immigrant and refugee” employees. ⁶

Activities

Rural Community Workers Alliance lobbies for left-of-center labor policies as well as working to improve federal labor standards at meat and poultry processing plants. The organization is mostly focused in Missouri at a few specific large processing facilities, and pressures federal investigators to more frequently inspect and cite such facilities. The group has advocated that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) conduct inspections of the Milan, Missouri processing plant on several occasions, which resulted in two separate inspections and “also advocated for workers facing poor work conditions including sexual harassment, verbal abuse from supervisors, and retaliatory firings for speaking up.” ⁶

The group also conducts voting assistance and education to rural processing plant employees. It partners with a variety of left-of-center organizations and community groups, including the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. ⁷

In April 2020, the group sued the Smithfield Foods pork plant in Milan, Missouri for alleged lack of protections for workers against COVID-19. The group also joined a nationwide coalition of left-of-center organizations to file a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture alleging that “two major meat processing corporations have engaged in racial discrimination through their workplace policies during the COVID-19 pandemic.” ⁸

Educational efforts of the group have included “environmental consciousness, racial solidarity, civic education, and English as a second language.” ⁹

Affiliations

Rural Community Workers Alliance is closely affiliated with the Food Chain Workers Alliance, a left-of-center food-industry labor coalition affiliated with socialist organizations and causes. One of FWCA’s primary goals is to decrease private ownership in the food industry while supporting “alternatives to capitalism.” FWCA calls for the introduction of socialist and other left-of-center equity principles into America’s food-production system. Instead of private ownership, FWCA desires the food industry to be “democratically controlled by the communities it impacts and driven by the workers that create the food.” ^{4 5}