DATE LINES
SLAUGHTER, JANE & E, Bruce & Johansen & Isenhart, Charles & METZ, HOLLY
DATE LINES SAC Sergeant Says No to Spy Flights OMAHA, NEBRASKA Daniel Cobos admits to being a little anxious now and then. He's been having some problems with his superiors at work. It isn't...
...I can look in the mirror again...
...July 1 was the day that workers were supposed to get a government-ordered wage increase of 23 per cent, a quarterly mandate designed to keep up with Mexico's galloping inflation...
...Union workers knew their strike was getting to be a long one by Mexican standards, and strike benefits were small if not nonexistent...
...Just twenty minutes away from Nutley, another grassroots-art battle is raging...
...The company's aggressive posture toward its employees fit in with the Mexican government's plan for "industrial reconversion" of the ecoomy...
...Many others here say the company's name stands for "Iowa's Biggest Polluter...
...I felt like a mercenary," says the thirty-year-old sergeant...
...The company pleaded poverty to justify its position, but a study by the University of Puebla found the claim was unfounded...
...I tried to ignore the reality of my job," Cobos continues, "but after a while I couldn't live with myself any longer...
...But they held out—for themselves and for the other industrial workers who would have been next...
...His attorney, Louis Font, plans to argue that the espionage flights violate international law, and that they may have violated U.S...
...Civic leaders reacted with glee last November to this unexpected announcement by the nation's biggest meatpacker, formerly known as Iowa Beef Processors...
...Four weeks into the strike, Volkswagen amended its wage offer to a 5 per cent increase...
...As long as he wears the uniform, he has to worry about sanctions...
...This summer, IBP was slapped with the largest fine in the history of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration...
...Those workers in Storm Lake "must be working a lot of [overtime] hours," counters Mel Maas, president of the UFCW local in Dubuque...
...But many communities, Nut-ley included, are divided over the merits of the unconventional public creations...
...For the first time since I had been in the military, I had taken control of my own life...
...Grass-roots Art Seeks a Haven NUTLEY and NEWARK, NEW JERSEY For twenty years, Angelo Nar-done has been building "ruins" around a former coffee shop in Nutley...
...It was bad enough when Volkswagen paid its workers here an average of $7.03 a day for a nine hours of work...
...Is he entitled to First Amendment protection?' He certainly indicates that he's an artist...
...It would bring 1,200 jobs to this town of 4,900, inject an annual payroll of as much as $20 million into the slack agricultural economy, and give local farmers a market for four million hogs a year...
...I gave the security clearance back to them," he says...
...Two weeks later, when they marched on the state's administrative offices and threatened a takeover, anti-riot police armed with tear gas and rifles took their turn at blocking roads...
...Jane Slaughter (Jane Slaughter is a staff writer for Labor Notes...
...Some important facts have been lost in all the rhetoric," says Gary Mickelson, a company spokesman...
...The Boland Amendment forbade military aid to the contras...
...Despite media attention that brings architects and artists to the nearly desolate Central Ward to marvel at her three-story wooden frame, local developers and city officials have mounted a campaign to destroy the ark...
...In 1986, Occidental's agribusiness operations earned $58.8 million on revenues of $6.8 billion...
...There's no place safe on land," she says, referring to numerous moves she has made from ravaged communities in Harlem, Brooklyn, and Newark...
...Given Mexican inflation, the union says, this was a joke— and an insult...
...Cobos gives a different account...
...In his brief for a permanent injunction, attorney Fred Zemel asserts that the ark is "a sculpture of monumental proportions" which is "an artistic, sculptural manifestation" of Tawana's self-expression, protected by the First Amendment...
...The United Food and Commercial Workers Union has encountered difficulties in organizing and operating at other IBP plants...
...The seed was planted there...
...The union at Volkswagen, however—the Sindicato Inde-pendiente de Trabajadores de la Industria Automotriz—is independent, and proud of it...
...In April, a superior-court judge granted Tawana a temporary restraining order barring the city from destroying the eighty-ton structure, but its permanence is not assured...
...The administration of President Miguel de la Madrid proposes to further the country's half-finished industrialization process by making it more attractive to foreign investors...
...Flying out of SAC headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base a dozen miles south of here, Cobos was one of a group of Spanish-speaking specialists the Air Force uses to eavesdrop on radio communications inside Nicaragua, providing the raw material of war intelligence...
...It was a great feeling...
...Soon, I was having nightmares...
...Seeking relief from the town's complaints, Nardone contacted Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (VLA), a New York-based nonprofit organization that assists lower-income artists and arts organizations with their problems...
...Iowa has already helped IBP to the tune of $ 11 million for three other plants, despite doubts that the company, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, needs any help...
...It isn't every day that an Air Force sergeant talks back to the Strategic Air Command, the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency...
...An association representing 680 lakeside families unanimously opposes the plant...
...When asked about state aid for IBP, Mickelson says, "Incentives are a competitive fact of life in economic development...
...Intelligence gathered on the missions was fed to the CIA, NSA, and sometimes the contras...
...Kea Tawana is an active member of the church on whose parking lot the ark stands, but she says her inspiration was personal, not biblical...
...The average worker in Delaware County [where Manchester is located] now makes only $14,000...
...Most doubt that it is...
...In the beginning, he says, "I allowed myself to be intimidated...
...But Cobos did when he refused to fly espionage missions over Nicaragua's borders...
...The Air Force will neither confirm nor deny Cobos's allegations about the flights, and Cobos avoids going deeply into the details because the Air Force is investigating him...
...Each group in the coalition has its own grievance: ¶ Tax activists question the propriety of public subsidies for IBP's plans to compete with established meatpackers...
...And they claim waste discharge will pollute the Maquoketa River, which empties into nearby Lake Delhi...
...at the right time, they open up...
...11 Farmers are less upset, but some experts are telling them that they, too, will be hurt, especially if other packing plants are forced to shut down, thus reducing competition and depressing the prices paid for hogs...
...Thousands of people, however, have signed petitions asking to keep the ark in Newark, and Tawana has proposed that the city join her in the creation of Ark Park by turning two nearby vacant lots into public tree-lined playgrounds...
...Mickelson claims the company has "a strong commitment to maintaining a safe and clean environment at all of our plants...
...She uses them to build an ark which, when completed, will reflect the city's history of opulence, destruction, and renewal...
...To me, it's my roots...
...The company wants the local airport upgraded to accommodate its corporate jets (cost: $1.8 million) and better highway and rail access ($800,000), as well as state job-training funds and a five-year property-tax abatement...
...We all carry seeds...
...Hog Heaven or Hell MANCHESTER, IOWA Hogs by the million are raised in eastern Iowa, and IBP, Inc., wants to turn them into bacon and pork chops by building, just south of here, the largest-volume, most technologically advanced pork plant in the world...
...Then, eight weeks after the walkout, Volkswagen chose to settle, agreeing to a 78 per cent wage increase and payment of half the wages workers lost while out...
...We were walking past Mill Road," she says, "and he said, 'Do you want to see something amazing?' " —Holly Metz (Holly Metz is a free-lance writer in Hoboken, New Jersey...
...law while the Boland Amendment was in effect...
...Concrete gods dance and suffer on the roof...
...So, on August 5, workers blocked the four-lane highway connecting Puebla and the capital, calling in vain for state officials to meet with them...
...To do so, Mexican industry's historically low productivity must be raised, largely by lowering labor costs...
...The radar picked up telephone calls—Spanish voices from a nation besieged by war, voices much like those he heard as a child growing up in San Antonio or those of Central American refugees Cobos helped during his off-duty hours in Omaha...
...I went to Italy, I went to Rome," says Nardone...
...Despite the controversy, IBP defends its proposed plant...
...Finally, I'm at peace with myself," Cobos says...
...Is this man an artist...
...At least, that is the Air Force's version...
...Army tour...
...But on July 1 the company demanded a 15 per cent wage cut, to be followed by a year-long wage freeze...
...When the Air Force got wind of Cobos's decision, the sergeant was grounded and stripped of his security clearance...
...Grass-roots art in New Jersey has had the state's blessings in at least one instance-that of George Daynor's Depression Palace in Vine-land, constructed of clay and automobile parts during the 1930s...
...What Nardone has created is called grass-roots art: "work that falls outside the mainstreams of fine art or folk art," in the definition of organizations that support such efforts...
...As his case wends its way through the military bureaucracy, Cobos drives to SAC headquarters every working day...
...Apparently not...
...Charles Isenhart (Charles Isenhart is a Du-buque-based free-lance writer who has covered agricultural and economic issues in Iowa and Illinois for several years...
...When it fell into disrepair after Daynor's death in 1964, it was condemned and bulldozed...
...But now he uses his military bearing to withstand the psychological attacks at Offutt...
...Opposition is widespread, and local people know that the residents of Stanwood, two counties away, prevailed against IBP in a similar battle in 1981...
...The community is trying to get him on a zoning ordinance," explains Tim Jensen, VLA's director of legal services...
...Nardone complains of years of harassment by local lawyers and politicians...
...For fifteen years, Kea Tawana, a Japanese-born woman has been salvaging materials from demolished Newark buildings—enormous timbers, metal vents, a pipe organ...
...But industry observers wonder whether the demand for pork products is high enough to sustain three plants in eastern Iowa...
...I saw myself standing beside a river of blood, with a bucket, pouring more blood into it...
...To me, it's a piece of art...
...IBP has been cited for violating environmental safety limits for sewage discharge at other Iowa plants...
...Someone had hired me to work against my people...
...The official auto union at the other plants ignored the Volkswagen strike, but the strikers carried on without them—with the support of other unions in this city two hours southeast of Mexico City...
...Tawana, forty-seven, whose formal education ended with the sixth grade, has framed the ark herself, using Nineteenth Century ship-building techniques she learned from books...
...A number of legislators complain that state economic-development money is supposed to be used as venture capital for new business startups, not for expansion of existing industries...
...Bruce E. Johansen (Bruce E. Johansen is an associate professor of communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha...
...To them, it's a junkyard," says Nardone...
...They don't want me to keep the stuff there," the artist says, and adds that building and fire inspectors visit repeatedly and cite different code violations each time...
...At the Mexican plants represented by the official auto-workers' union, which include those of Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler, the union will be expected to help enforce the discipline and speed-ups needed to accomplish that...
...If it isn't, any company that gets public assistance may have the edge it needs to outlast the competition...
...Volkswagen also proposed to eliminate 723 of the 10,500 jobs and halve the vacation and Christmas bonuses...
...He feels that it's art...
...Second, although it's not known yet what the starting wage would be, production workers at our most mature plant in Storm Lake have an annual compensation package of $20,000...
...The New Jersey State Council promoted it with postcards picturing the castle with eighteen spires and car fenders for archways, and the long-haired, bearded Daynor, complete with walking stick...
...Some residents see the constructions as private visions run amok, offensive to public sensibilities...
...In the front yard, saints lift their arms-minus their hands, which languish in cardboard boxes at their feet—and endure what Nardone calls "the aging process," exposure to rain and wind...
...With that, he became the first person to disclose the existence of such flights to the civilian public...
...Cobos's background is strongly military: His father is a twenty-eight-year veteran of the Air Force, and two of his brothers enlisted before he did in 1983...
...I'm just a person whose conscience finally told him, 'Enough is enough.' " Cobos sought legal aid from Citizen Soldier, a New York-based Gl-rights organization, to obtain a discharge from the Air Force as a conscientious objector...
...The Air Force could accuse Cobos of leaking classified information, which, as he notes, is just about anything the service says it is...
...Some enlisted personnel secretly congratulate him, while officers sometimes subject him to withering monologues...
...Its Cedar Rapids local has been especially vocal in opposing the Manchester plant, regaling townfolks with horror stories about poverty-level wages, the high turnover of transient labor, and IBP plant-safety practices—this last a recent subject of Congressional investigation...
...The workers struck...
...He is bitter about his energy-draining battles with the town, which he believes are primarily about aesthetics...
...An inspection by the city's engineering department found the construction "unsafe," and Newark's assistant corporation counsel Audrey Davidson argues that the central issue is the city's ability to "demolish unsafe properties...
...One is that IBP is willing to risk $40 million of its own capital...
...The Iowa Department of Natural Resources has yet to hold hearings on water and air permits or comment on the plant's possible environmental impact...
...Mexican Auto Workers Resist Cuts PUEBLA, MEXICO Is there a wage low enough to satisfy a multinational corporation...
...But he decided he could no longer follow orders to eavesdrop on Nicaragua...
...People have said I'm a hero to them," Cobos says, "and that what I did took a lot of courage...
...Susan D'Ottavio, a local librarian, remembers her grandfather taking her to see the Depression Palace when she was a child...
...When it got into my dreams, I knew I had to do something about it...
...Close to a year after IBP's decision, not a spade of dirt has been turned to build the $40 million facility, thanks to an informal coalition that wants Manchester to nix the plans...
...Here, across the street from the town's Sunoco station, stands one man's interpretation of the excavated ruins of ancient Rome, which he saw once, more than thirty years ago, on a U.S...
...But now they are enveloped in a brouhaha involving farmers, homeowners, state legislators, environmentalists, taxpayers, economic-development specialists, and union meatpack-ers...
...But no provisions were made to preserve the palace...
...The trouble is that the wording of the zoning ordinance overlaps, and I guess it comes down to: 'What is art, and how can one define it...
...Environmentalists and homeowners wonder where the plant will get the two million gallons of water it will need every day without sapping existing wells...
...I saw the Colosseum when I was on leave three or four days...
...The fifty-four-year-old, Italian-born man has cast thousands of replicas of classical statues in plaster and concrete, then piled them into walls snaking around the single-story structure where he lives and works...
...But IBP's future in Manchester is questionable...
Vol. 51 • October 1987 • No. 10
