Priest carries corn workers' plea to CEO

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 10, 1995 by William Bole

Fr. Martin Mangan didn't like what the multinational corporation Tate & Lyle was doing to workers in his Illinois town. So he bought a share of stock in the British conglomerate and a plane ticket to London. And the Catholic pastor found himself preaching in an international pulpit.

"I said, `Mr. Chairman, I come from a broken city, and you can do something to heal it,'" Mangan recounted in a telephone interview from London, where he had held the microphone for five minutes at Tate & Lyle's annual stockholders' meeting Jan. 26. He then read from a statement signed by 400 U.S. religious leaders, calling for an end to the 17-month lockout of 760 workers at A.E. Staley Mfg. Co., a Tate & Lyle subsidiary in Decatur, Ill.

Mangan, with a single share of stock, was confronting Neil Shaw, chairman and chief executive officer, who reportedly owns several million shares. A Tate & Lyle share goes for 25 British pounds or a little more than $41. Mangan paid for the trip out of his $16,800 annual salary as pastor of St. James Catholic Church in Decatur, 170 miles southwest of Chicago.

Mangan got a hearing at the meeting and headlines in The Guardian newspaper and The Financial Times of London. But he came away from the gathering a bit downhearted.

"I really don't know what I expected," Mangan said when asked about what he thought his action would mean going into the meeting. "I suppose I hoped there would be a more receptive attitude." Shaw said at the meeting that he considered the Staley dispute a local matter" and would not get involved.

At the same time, the parish priest said he was glad to see religious leaders from around the country taking up the cause of the locked-out workers. The 400 signers of the statement read by Mangan included leaders of national Protestant, Catholic and Jewish agencies, as well as many pastors and local leaders.

The statement called on Tate & Lyle to end the lockout as "a gesture of your commitment to the common good of the wider community" in Decatur, which has been torn by labor conflicts. There are 4,000 workers, or 7 percent of the city's work force, either on strike or locked out at three big corporations: Caterpillar Inc., Bridgestone-Firestone Co. and Staley.

The troubles at Staley, which processes corn into sweeteners, began shortly after Tate & Lyle bought the company m 1988. Among other changes instituted by management, the workers started rotating between day and night shifts of 12 hours each. They worked different days from week to week. The company also announced a plan to slash hundreds of jobs.

Inside the plant, the union, Local 837 of the Allied Industrial Workers, began what amounted to a slowdown campaign. Claiming sabotage, the company locked out the workers and brought on replacements. That was June 27, 1993. Union workers are still fighting to regain their jobs.

In pressing on, workers and their allies have mixed union militancy with religious fervor.

Priests, nuns and ministers have been dragged off by police in pro-union demonstrations at the Staley plant, which sprawls over some 450 acres of smokestacks and conveyers. Workers have been arrested for kneeling and praying - and trespassing - on company grounds.

Together with churches, Local 837 has held symbolic fasts in protest of the lockout. The union has also organized "prayer chains" linking hundreds of praying bodies in front of Staley's corporate headquarters, a tower of limestone known as the "castle in the corn fields.'

All this has come to a city that used to be known as a quiet place on the prairie, a place where blue-collar workers were happy and prosperous, and ministers kept to their pulpits.

But the disruptions of a global economy have broken the peace of Decatur. Last June, police in riot gear used pepper spray - which causes burning of the eyes and swelling of mucous membranes - on dozens of protesters who crossed the yellow property line at Staley's gate. More than 3,000 union supporters had turned out for the rally held on the first anniversary of the lockout.

For the most part, Staley management has chosen not to take on the clergy. That is seen as prudent in a city of churches - one for every 560 people in Decatur. But shortly before the Tate & Lyle shareholders' meeting, a Staley official issued an attack on seven religious leaders who had written a letter seeking support for the statement that Mangan later read at the London meeting.

"It is regrettable that you are signatories to a false and misleading letter to religious leaders. We urge you to verify information before creating a public document," Staley Vice President J. Patrick Mohan said in a Jan. 16 letter to the religious leaders, all of whom, except Mangan, live outside Decatur.

The seven included the Rev. Paul H. Sherry, president of the United Church of Christ; Rabbi Allen S. Kaplan, director of the New York Federation of Reform Synagogues; and Msgr. George G. Higgins, a Catholic University of America lecturer known as America's leading labor priest for his nearly 50 years of work in labor-management relations.