LATIN LESSONS.

• Author: Maley, Frank
• Position: Statistical Data Included

Hispanic workers are teaching unions and management that labor relations is no longer a black-and-white issue.

Joseph Lee Price Jr.'s long walk home starts between two chain-link fences topped with barbed wire. A siren wails and a yellow light flashes -- someone passing through a nearby gate between Rand Street and a loading dock. It's 6:30 p.m. The sun has deserted Morganton, and a cold mist has turned into a light shower. A barnyard stench of feathers, flesh and feces hangs in the air, but not as heavily as earlier in the day. Maybe it's something you get used to, or maybe it's the rain flushing the smell out of the sky.

Price, tall and solidly built, moves gracefully through the dark drizzle, despite a pair of gray rubber boots on his feet. A hair net peeks from beneath a blue stocking cap on his head. Case Farms Inc. pays him $7.05 an hour to cut the feet off chickens and pack them off to Australia. He turns right on Rand and walks toward, and eventually past, the front door of Case Farms.

Ten years he's been making this walk. He's 35 now and claims that he hasn't had a raise in three years, gets only two weeks of paid vacation, the company won't recognize job-related injuries and fires workers who miss days, even with letters from their doctors. It's been this way since he started working here, he says. He's thought about walking away and never coming back. He's even talked about it with his buddies. But as one says, it's guys like him and Price who have to stay and help the old-timers. "He says, 'Some of them is really too scared to stand up for their rights. We got to stand up for them,'" Price says. "He said, 'Some day, we can look back on this and be proud that we did it."'

By "it," Price means forcing Case Farms to negotiate a contract with Laborers International Union. Case Farms workers have been fighting for a contract since they walked off the job for several days in 1995. At first, the dispute was over bathroom breaks. Three workers were arrested for trespassing because they had protested the lack of bathroom breaks, wouldn't go back to work and wouldn't leave the premises. That problem was settled, but other unmet demands -- a $2-an-hour pay raise, a slower production schedule, better health care and more company help in paying for on-the-job injuries -- pushed workers into the arms of the union.

The dispute dragged into the courts. In March 1998, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Case Farms' appeal of a lower court order to negotiate. Despite that, the company halted negotiations in June, claiming the union no longer represents the workers because of a petition signed by the majority. The union claims workers were duped into signing the petition. "The company wants us to give up, but we ain't gonna give up," Price says.

A protracted labor dispute was virtually unthinkable at Case Farms 10 years ago.

When Price started, his co-workers were either black, like him, or white. Sometime in the early '90s -- Price isn't sure exactly when -- the company started recruiting Guatemalans, many driven from their country by war between the military-dominated Guatemalan government and leftist rebels. By 1994, Price estimates, more than half of his co-workers were Hispanic. It was tough...