They vot­ed, 108 – 79, in an elec­tion held by the Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Board on August 26.  More than 200 work­ers at the plant, which makes near­ly all of the Lip­ton Tea sold in North Amer­i­ca, will now be rep­re­sent­ed by Unit­ed Food and Com­mer­cial Work­ers Local 400. 

“I was cry­ing like I had won the lot­tery,” Hart told In These Times.  I was so glad and I was so hap­py because I’ve been told for all this time, all these years, that it would nev­er hap­pen.  And when it hap­pened, I had so much joy that all I could do (was) cry.” 

Juani­ta Hart has worked as an oper­a­tor at the Lip­ton Tea man­u­fac­tur­ing plant in Suf­folk, Vir­ginia, for 25 years.  She’s seen a lot of change in that time, but noth­ing like what hap­pened last month. 

The orga­niz­ing dri­ve came after years of declin­ing ben­e­fits — loss of sick pay, sup­ple­men­tal time off and a down­grade in insur­ance cov­er­age con­sid­ered too expen­sive for what it offered. 

“We’re hop­ing that maybe we can get some of this back,” says Robert Davis, anoth­er 25-year vet­er­an at the Lip­ton plant.  ​“I don’t know if we will or not.  We would like to try.” 

Anoth­er impor­tant issue that affect­ed most work­ers was what is alleged to be forced over­time work, also known as ​“draft­ing.”  Work­ers at the Suf­folk site have been known to work a rou­tine of 12-hour shifts for 13 days before get­ting a day off. 

In These Times reached out to com­pa­ny rep­re­sen­ta­tives for com­ment on the cam­paign and the issues behind it.  They did not imme­di­ate­ly respond. 

“They tried to, attempt­ed to talk to them and they just turned a deaf ear toward us.  And it’s just like we were robots and what they said went.  It was not going to change and we had to do it or we could leave,” says Davis.  ​“The employ­ees just — they became so dis­gust­ed with what was going on and every­one just got tired of it.” 

Work­ers at the plant approached UFCW Local 400 in June. 

“The work­ers were the ones who took own­er­ship of it from the very begin­ning,” says Kay­la Mock, an orga­niz­er with Local 400.  ​“They very clear­ly under­stood that their union was some­thing that they need­ed to build, almost like a tan­gi­ble thing, and they built it from the ground up — they just owned it.” 

Anoth­er impor­tant fac­tor in the cam­paign was the fact that Lipton’s par­ent com­pa­ny, the inter­na­tion­al behe­moth Unilever, was seen as treat­ing its union­ized work­ers far bet­ter in oth­er loca­tions.  At a Hellmann’s plant in Chica­go that is orga­nized with the UFCW, for exam­ple (the Hellmann’s mayo brand is anoth­er Unilever prop­er­ty), over­time pay is much more imme­di­ate and a health care plan sim­i­lar to the one offered to the Suf­folk work­ers is half as expen­sive.  A con­fer­ence call between the work­ers at the Hellmann’s plant and those at the Lip­ton one helped spread the word of the ben­e­fits of union representation. 

The cam­paign wasn’t the first time that orga­niz­ing was attempt­ed at the plant in Suf­folk.  In recent years, Hart says, work­ers’ efforts were met with resis­tance by those in charge. 

“Every time it would be — some­one said the word ​‘orga­niz­ing’ or ​‘union,’ any of those kinds of words were used, the next thing you know we were called into a meet­ing and we were shown a film about how dis­rup­tive it would be to have a union,” she says. 

But now, after years of decreased ben­e­fits and a near-$100 mil­lion upgrade of the Lip­ton facil­i­ty, pro-union work­ers have final­ly car­ried the day. 

“Top rea­son to me why peo­ple aren’t afraid any­more (is) because they’re fed up,” says Hart.  ​“When you strip the per­son of their dig­ni­ty, and you have no respect for the per­son, and you’ve tak­en away what they feel, their self-worth … that’s when you stop being afraid.”