Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [27]
With the exception of the time she is allowed to be off the line, Durst spends her entire day standing and grabbing catfish—twelve to twenty-five a minute. “You have a group leader working with you,” she explains matter-of-factly. “You have to obey her, everything she tell you. You ask her when you need to go to the bathroom.”
That March 13, the Department of Labor’s Judge Vittone adjourned the hearing at 6:30 P.M. Assuming the cut-and-gut line at Freshwater’s Belzoni plant ran ten hours that day, and factoring in the two breaks and lunch, Sherry Durst skinned between 8,100 and 10,800 catfish. If she went to the bathroom once, the count dropped by 120.
Going to the bathroom is a problem. While a worker is in the rest room, the line continues to move, fish pile up, supervisors get angry. In 1990 rest-room breaks were the central issue in the strike at the neighboring Delta Pride catfish factory. Sarah White was a worker at the plant in Belzoni, where she is now the United Food and Commercial Workers Union’s local rep. She recalled the strike’s hidden issue: “It came down to rest-room breaks,” she said in her small office across the street from the county courthouse. “We got another five or six cents an hour, but the strike centered on bathroom rights.”
The company opened with an offer of six bathroom visits a week (have you ever taken a road trip with a pregnant woman?). When the union rejected the fixed number, the company’s position hardened. “They told us they gave us six breaks, but since we said no, we were going to have to go once a day—at lunchtime,” said White. “They added five minutes to our lunch break and said we would have to go then. We couldn’t abide it. We tired of it. The workers couldn’t abide it anymore.”
The Mississippi Delta is full of stories about women who decide they can’t abide it anymore. The late Fannie Lou Hamer said, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” The civil rights leader was from Ruleville, sixty miles north of Belzoni. The workers at the catfish plants know just how she felt. In addition to the fixed number of bathroom breaks, there were other forms of degradation. Male supervisors would walk into the women’s rest rooms and tell women to get up off the toilet and go to work. “I’ve had a supervisor walk into the rest room and tell me, ‘Get up, Sarah. You’ve been sitting there too long.’ That don’t happen no more. The civil rights movement changed a lot of things.” (Those of you who think the civil rights movement ended in the 1960s haven’t been to Belzoni lately.)
Jazz artist Cassandra Wilson, another daughter of the Delta, said Mississippi women “will be as nice as possible until you cross the line.” In 1990 Delta Pride crossed the line. “They told us go on, go on out on strike,” said White. When the workers struck, the company brought in replacements and stopped negotiating with the union. “The company brought in scabs from Greenville and Cleveland, but they were too slow,” White said. Production slowed to a crawl. Black activist-comedian Dick Gregory joined the strikers for a day. The congressional Black Caucus supported them. Jesse Jackson came to help. Workers survived on sixty dollars a week in strike pay and a fifty-pound weekly ration package of rice, beans, and peas provided by the union. Supporters across the country prepared to travel to Indianola for a “civil rights/workers’ rights” march from downtown to Delta Pride’s Indianola plant.
The company blinked first. The three-year-old local, made up of mostly African-American women, won concessions from a catfish co-op made up of the most powerful white men in the region. They won the right to privacy in the rest room, a reasonable lunch-break policy, an hourly wage increase, and overtime pay that kicked in at the end of each eight-hour day, rather than at the end of a forty-hour