I wrote yesterday about the “pink slime” panic and the tension between fashionable disdain for industrial food production and fashionable demands that we revive domestic American manufacturing. To further push the point, I was interested to learn today that the pink slime facility in Waterloo, Iowa, used to employ 350 members of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union and is now down to zero. The Dakota Dunes plant was also a UFCW facility, formerly with 500 jobs, now down to 350.
At any rate, I doubt that fact alone will sway anyone’s views on anything, but I do notice that time and again the writers I follow who like to talk about labor unions in the abstract seem to have relatively little interest in concrete issues like this.
