When a company locks out skilled employees and replaces its entire workforce with inexperienced new hires, here’s what happens: productivity plunges and profits tank.

Losing money is not a wise corporate strategy. Yet, unless American Crystal Sugar Co. agrees to return to contract negotiations with the 1,300 workers the company locked out a year ago, the company is on course to repeat its sorry fiscal 2012 performance. After the company replaced all its seasoned employees, production costs increased by 23 percent and payments to its shareholders lagged behind the rest of the industry, which saw their shareholder payments increase. That followed a year in which Crystal Sugar was hugely profitable, with $1.5 billion in net earnings.

(Sign a petition calling on American Crystal Sugar CEO Dave Berg to treat workers fairly and return to the bargaining table.)

Today, workers locked out of Crystal Sugar’s plants in North Dakota, Iowa and Minneapolis “stand ready to step in and recoup the investment Crystal Sugar’s shareholders and growers have made in this bumper crop,” says Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM) Local 167G (representing union members in North Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin) President John Riskey. 

That’s why we’re drafting a Ready to Work Plan to salvage this crop and return Crystal Sugar’s facilities to productivity. But we know it isn’t going to be easy.

Riskey and Minnesota State Building and Construction Trades Council President Harry Melander spoke today at a media event in Fargo, N.D., where Riskey announced the Ready to Work Plan. Riskey and the other workers, all BCTGM members, also recognize that unless veteran employees are in the processing plants this fall, Crystal Sugar’s profits could plunge even further. Farmers are currently harvesting a bumper crop of sugar beets that will stress production and require a highly skilled workforce to efficiently produce it.

Because Crystal Sugar is run as a cooperative, the 3,000 stockholders who stand to lose are the farmers themselves, meaning that unless the company begins talking with the locked-out workers real soon, they could get short-changed on all the work they collectively undertake in harvesting 500,000 acres of sugar beets.

The company locked out the workers Aug. 1, 2011, during bargaining talks over a successor contract between Crystal Sugar and five local BCTGM unions. Union leaders say that although Crystal Sugar promotes itself as a “family kind of business,” the company’s decision to cut off hundreds of families from their incomes and health care benefits has had a devastating impact on Red River Valley communities.

Yet Berg, who took in nearly $2.5 million in total compensation, told shareholders in a November 2011 meeting that union workers and their contract are like a “cancerous tumor” on the company.

The 1,300 union workers locked out by Crystal Sugar have more than 15,000 cumulative years of sugar-making experience—and are ready to work to make the company profitable again.

Sign a petition calling on American Crystal Sugar CEO Dave Berg to treat workers fairly and return to the bargaining table.

Contribute to the strike relief fund and get the latest updates on the Crystal Sugar lockout.