Updates: IKEA Workers; Male Circumcision

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MICHELE NORRIS, host: From NPR News, this ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.

ROBERT SIEGEL, host: And I'm Robert Siegel. We have updates now on two stories you've heard recently on this program. Last month, I reported on conditions at an IKEA furniture manufacturing plant in Danville, Virginia, and on one union's three-year struggle to organize there. IKEA came to Danville in 2008, and brought more than 300 new jobs to the old tobacco town not far from the North Carolina border. It also brought worldwide attention to the first IKEA plant on U.S. soil.

DAN WOOD: In the southern Virginia town of Danville, there's been a foreign invasion.

CAT TURNER: Most of the jobs here are in manufacturing.

WOOD: The old tobacco warehouses of Danville are being converted to house 21st century...

TURNER: First, Danville must retrain and reprogram most of its workforce.

WOOD: Now, he works for IKEA.

TURNER: Cat Turner, Al-Jazeera, Danville, Virginia.

WOOD: Greg Wood, BBC News, at Danville in Virginia.

SIEGEL: Well, after the initial euphoria came complaints from workers about dangerous conditions, racial bias and mandatory overtime. Workers told us they felt the company was trying to keep them from organizing, but plant manager Ken Brown denied that.

KEN BROWN: We believe in the right of our employees to choose, or not to choose, to have a union here. No one that I know of, since I started here in 2007, has ever been terminated for their view on a union.

SIEGEL: Well, yesterday, workers there chose overwhelmingly to be represented by the Building and Wood Workers International. Bill Street is a director with that union. He says he was surprised and delighted that 76 percent of Swedwood workers voted to organize.

BILL STREET: There wasn't anybody on staff who projected the margin, and we're usually pretty good at that. We were looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of 57, 58 percent. So the only thing we can surmise from that is the situations that we have been attempting to bring to Swedwood's attention over the past three years have pretty much been validated by three-quarters of the workers inside the operation.

SIEGEL: IKEA issued a statement today reiterating its position from the start, that it fully supports the right of its workers to make this decision. The union's Bill Street says Danville workers celebrated the vote last night, creating what might be a new, but temporary, safety hazard.

STREET: There's quite a few workers in the Swedwood operation this morning with various degrees of hangovers.

SIEGEL: The next step is for the National Labor Relations Board to certify the vote. That is expected within the next 10 days.

NORRIS: Our other update is about a ballot initiative in San Francisco. A California Superior Court judge says voters there will not get to decide whether to make male circumcision illegal in the city. Judge Loretta Giorgi says the controversial measure violates an existing law that makes regulation of medical procedures a function of the state, not of cities. As a result, she has ordered San Francisco's elections director to remove the initiative from the November ballot.

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