Kentucky Workers at Heaven Hill Bourbon Distillery Still on Strike.

Richard Mellor

From Joe Smedley in Bardstown, Kentucky where workers, members of UFCW  Local 23D are on strike at Heaven Hill Distillery. Heaven Hill is one of the largest producers of bourbon. Kentucky produces 95% of the world's bourbon.

Kentucky has faced a wave of strikes and protests over the past few years. There has been an ongoing campaign in the aftermath of the killing of Breonna Taylor by Louisville police issuing a "no Knock" warrant. There was a months long blocking of railway lines in to a mine by miners who were demanding unpaid wages and an auto parts plant in Louisville was forced to layoff workers as a result of the GM strike in 2019. 

There has been plenty of opportunity for statewide action against the employers, police violence and the right wing state government's attacks on workers the poor and public education but all these struggle are isolated, with no serious efforts to unite them all. The Louisville Labor Federation with 50,000 members has the resources and ability to unite all these working class forces against this offensive of big business, but, as usual, refuses to do so.

As Joe Smedley says in the short video she sent above, the bosses at Heaven Hill have cut the workers' medical coverage pointing out yet again, the insanity of employer based medical care.  This is par for the course and in the strike I was in at my workplace in 1985, the first letter we got was from the boss letting us know our medical coverage would be gone by the end of the month.

I am not so familiar with the details of this strike but if the norm is anything to go by, the UFCW leadership will most likely only be demanding the status quo and fighting a purely defensive battle. No serious effort to unite all this struggles, including the linking of the poor predominantly white Appalachian east with the urban poverty, racism and lack of opportunity in Louisville.  The bosses at Heaven Hill are no exception, they are the rule and it is US capitalism and employers like these that are our first line enemies yet we are supposed to fear the Chinese worker, the Russian worker and so on. In the competition between Russian,  Chinese or any other capitalist state for global dominance in the plunder business, US workers have no allies. Our allies are the workers like ourselves in these countries who are facing the same global capitalist system that we are.

"There's some gray areas in the contract that we don't like," Mike Corbitt, one of the strikers, said. "Basically, it's going to end up making us work seven days a week with no overtime. We just feel like Heaven Hill has always preached to us that we're family-oriented."   More information in this article here. 

We are definitely witnessing an uptick of activity within the ranks of organized labor as we have predicted on this blog. The pandemic and the role workers have played, the sacrifices they have made, has not gone unnoticed and for those on the front line, returning to the status quo is not on the cards. Many new, and younger workers will have a stronger sense of their power and putting this genie back in the bottle will not be easy. There have been contract rejections and strikes at Volvo and in Washington State where carpenters have rejected a deal four times. Nabisco has also been struck throughout the country. This is the future and the trade union hierarchy, the agents of capitalism within organized labor will be facing more opposition ahead.

 This is just a quick update. Thanks to Joe Smedley for heading out to the picket lines and sending us this short clip.