Company Profile

Sweet & Sour
Mount Olive staunchly defends its namesake employer
against an attempted boycott by a farm laborer's union

Photo at right: Mt. Olive Pickle Co. President Bill Bryan chats with employee Michele Woods.

By Edward Martin 

The small town of Mount Olive in Wayne County is a place where porch swings still creak on spring evenings and cars thump across railroad tracks that divide main street. It's a town filled with civic-minded people, as was demonstrated when one of its landmarks, Westbrook Park, a fading legacy that dates to the 1920s and one of the town's founding fathers, J.A. Westbrook, needed repairs.

To save the landmark, the Mount Olive Area Chamber of Commerce launched a $100,000 campaign to refurbish it, and the community enlisted not only adults but school children who wielded crayons and young ideas. They helped draw plans for a refurbished park with a playground, gazebo, paths and places to picnic.

If that Mount Olive is a jarring contrast to depictions of oppressed migrant workers dying in the fields of Eastern North Carolina, the contrast is no more jolting than a labor union's choice of its largest employer, Mt. Olive Pickle Co., as the target of a boycott intended to force Tar Heel farmers to support the union of migrant workers.

"There's not a better, more ethical or responsible corporate citizen in Wayne County or North Carolina than Mount Olive Pickle," says George Kornegay, a local hotel owner and president of the Mount Olive Industrial Committee of 100. "The irony is, the people who'd be hurt most by the boycott are ones who work there and would lose their jobs."

That, say community leaders, state officials and others, is only one irony in a struggle that thrusts a nearly postcard town and the company that forms its civic and business backbone into the national spotlight.

Its 500 employees, which swell to 900 during peak cucumber season, earn an average of $10.12 an hour, one of the highest manufacturing wages in Eastern North Carolina. They also enjoy benefits such as profit-sharing and a wellness plan that includes mammograms and other features.

While the boycott raises questions of social justice, company records show 17 percent of Mount Olive's workers are Hispanic and 49 percent black. The company recently added its second English-as-a-second-language class.

"It's a bum rap," adds Joanna Thompson, vice president of the Wayne County Economic Development Commission. "I've been here six years and I've never heard anybody say anything negative about Mount Olive Pickle. They're the epitome of thinking globally and acting locally."

Behind the boycott, organized by the Ohio-based Farm Labor Organization Committee of the AFL-CIO, are more than questions of social justice, however.

Some labor analysts and others say it amounts to economic blackmail, with indications that Mount Olive was chosen not because it mistreated workers but because of its reputation as a progressive employer making an inherently whimsical product -- pickles -- that might be willing to capitulate rather than face bad publicity.

Stakes are high. The company, says William Bryan, president, pumps a $16 million annual payroll into Wayne County, and contributes about $250,000 a year to civic and social causes. When Hurricane Floyd struck, it contributed $60,000 in cash and products to relief efforts, and made $100,000 in interest-free loans to employees to repair homes.

On the corporate side, it markets under its own brand plus making house brands for Harris Teeter and Food Lion, and processes 100 million pounds of cucumbers and peppers annually. Despite the boycott, sales by December were up 14.5 percent from a year earlier.

That sets the stage. "We don't claim to be perfect, but we have earned a good reputation," says Bryan, whose first indication that his company was to be targeted came more than two years ago when, in two meetings, Baldemar Velasquez, president of the union, issued an ultimatum.

"He made two demands," says Bryan. "One was that we increase our cucumber prices by five percent, and the other was that we insure that the union got 2.5 percent of the migrant farm workers' wages as union dues."

Mount Olive Pickle refused. "We believe those decisions are up to the producers and farm workers, not us," says Bryan. Velasquez and his union in March launched the boycott.

On the surface, Mount Olive was an unlikely target. It employs no migrant workers, raises none of its own cucumbers, and buys from union and nonunion farmers alike, not only in North Carolina but also in Ohio, Florida, Texas and other states, and overseas, in Sri Lanka, Greece and India. Less than one percent of migrant farm work in North Carolina is devoted to harvesting cucumbers.

Also, notes state Labor Commissioner Harry Payne Jr., Mount Olive Pickle was "instrumental" in pushing for the state's strict 1989 migrant housing law, credited with improving conditions for laborers.

Beneath the surface, however, Mount Olive Pickle was ideal for the union's action. It was big, well-known, and sells a catchy product. Velasquez concedes Bryan's points, but counters that "conditions are regrettably the same on most farms," adding that Mount Olive should use its size to change them.

That had worked before, when, after a seven-year boycott, Campbell Soup Co. agreed to use only union-picked produce. Two other pickle makers -- Heinz and Vlasic -- followed suit.

But those agreements have had unexpected consequences, too. "One reason the union is trying to expand in North Carolina is because it's difficult now to attract migrant workers to Ohio," says Bryan. FLOC is based in Toledo, and press reports say crops of unionized producers there have rotted on the vine because migrant workers prefer to work in North Carolina, with its longer growing season, more diversified crops -- they provide steadier employment -- and better pay.

FLOC saw its members moving south, but that's not the message it has carried to boycott supporters in cities from Charlotte and Asheville to San Francisco, and on scores of college campuses.

The union has repeatedly linked the death of Raymundo Hernandez, who died in 1995 while working on a Sampson County tobacco farm, to Mount Olive. State Agriculture Commissioner Jim Graham says flatly that there was no connection even remotely to the pickle company.

The boycott has had other unexpected results, too. Using what one union organizer calls coalition building, in which church, environmental and other groups are brought in to keep the union's claims from appearing to be self-serving, some 60 organizations, including the Roman Catholic Diocese of Raleigh, support the boycott.

That, however, has caused splits, including in the N.C. Council of Churches. In an April meeting in Chapel Hill, members spoke openly of using Mount Olive as a "scapegoat," says the Rev. E.T. Malone of Chapel Hill, secretary of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina, who objected.

The Farm Workers Ministry Group of the council supports the boycott, but another minister, the Rev. James McChesney Jr., pastor Emeritus of Goldsboro First Presbyterian Church, is among those who disagree. His suggestion, he says, is for parishioners to "buy and eat more pickles."

The future? Bryan is facing the union head on, taking the company's side to groups such as students at Duke University recently, and a church meeting in St. Louis. "We've always had an open-door policy," he says, although Mount Olive won't surrender.

Instead, it has offered to lead in effect a summit meeting of Tar Heel agribusinesses and producers on migrant labor issues.

He also refuses to accept offers from overseas producers to market finished and bottled pickles that would carry the Mount Olive label, noting that such a step would not only hurt Tar Heel farmers but also would be selling a product produced under unknown conditions, such as child labor.

Meanwhile, the company clearly enjoys support in the town whose name it shares. Patricia O'Donoghue, president of the Mount Olive Area Chamber of Commerce, notes its role in such projects as the revival of Westbrook Park.

"It's close to impossible to think of this community without the pickle company," she says. "This is the most unjust thing I can imagine."

COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL. This article first appeared in the February 2000 issue of North Carolina Magazine.