50 Years Ago: Tribe finalizes plant agreement giving workers $1.25 an hour

The first major economic initiative developed during the Raymond Nakai administration has been finalized.

Tribal officials have spent the past 18 months negotiating an agreement with the B.V.D. Corporation, which wants to build an apparel manufacturing plant somewhere on the Navajo reservation.

The company wants the tribe to spend $1.6 million to build the plant and purchase the equipment. In exchange, the company will repay the debt over a 25-year period at an interest rate of 4.25 percent.

The proposal has a lot of support, particularly from Nakai, who says that the tribe has a lot of workers with backgrounds in sewing and weaving who would be a good source of prospective employee for the company.

The company is looking at hiring in the beginning about 200 employees, most of whom would be paid the federal minimum wage of $1.25 an hour. While that may seem low today, that equals a wage of $8.92 an hour in today’s pay scale.

Nakai feels that once the plant opens, the company will be deluged with applications from Navajo men and women who have been desperately seeking a job for years.

No site for the plant has been selected, but the company said it is looking at two possible sites in Arizona. Company officials said if this works out, they would be willing to build a second plant on the reservation.

The matter is expected to come before members of the Navajo Tribal Council later this month and is expected to be approved, especially since a pilot project started by the company last year in Winslow is being called a “major success.”

When the matter finally came up for a vote, the big question was not whether the deal would be approved but where the plant would be located.

Every member of the council – and it was every single member – pushed to have the plant built in their district and the council members spent two entire days discussing the merits of building the plant within their districts.

With all 74 members of the council saying it should be in their area, the Navajo Times questioned whether it would be possible for the council to get 38 members to agree on any one location.

With all of this controversy over location, there were some tribal officials who wondered if tribal politics would result in the whole proposal going under.

The BIA formally dedicated a new $4.7 million boarding school in Shonto this week. The school has been opened since last October but a decision was made to hold the dedication in the following spring when weather was better.

Abraham Tucker, an education specialist for the tribe during the 1960s and 70s, said because of the joint efforts of the tribe and the BIA during the past 10 years, 39 BIA schools have been built or expanded.

“Our schools are of the finest, our teachers and other personnel are of the best and our food program can’t be beat,” he said.

Even then, however, the boarding school system on the reservation was coming under ire from activist on the reservation who questioned whether the schools were doing their best to encourage Navajo students to be the nation’s future leaders.

But Tucker passed off this criticism as being politically motivated, pointed to the fact that many of the tribe’s top leaders, including Nakai and Sam Billison, who was running against Nakai for chairman in the upcoming tribal election, were products of the BIA boarding system.

Another matter expected to come before members of the council later this month is the proposal to revamp the tribal elections.

This was one of the campaign promises of Nakai, who wants the tribal government to get rid of the tribal system currently being used where each of the five districts chooses a candidate for tribal chairman and the top two then compete in the general election.

Each chapter gets one vote but Nakai has been working since the first day he got into office to do away with this system because it means that only those who go to chapter meetings would have a say on who makes it past the primary.

What Nakai wants is to have each tribal member have a vote in the primary as they do in the general election.

While this makes a lot of sense today, there were still a lot of tribal members who liked the system being used because it gave more authority to the chapter officials who could, if they so desired, influence who got the vote of the chapter.

Nakai had prepared a 98-page resolution that spelled out in great detail how the new system would work.

The big problem with this is that under the rules, the entire resolution would have to be read into the record at the council meeting both in English and Navajo.

This means that the council delegates would spend he entire day at their desks listening to the resolution being read into the record.

The good news was that the item was No. 10 on the agenda, which meant it would have a good chance of coming up on Thursday which would give council members an entire day to read that issue of the Navajo Times.

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