The largest pork processing plant in the world is in Tar Heel, North Carolina. It processes 32,000 pigs every day.
For more than a decade, that plant’s workers have endured a repressive anti-union campaign. Smithfield Foods, which owns the Tar Heel plant, has harassed its 5,500 employees, threatened their jobs, and pitted them against each other along racial lines. Smithfield’s private police force—which even employs local sheriffs—has beaten workers advocating for unionization.
Smithfield is the largest hog producer in the world.
Although the National Labor Relations Board has recognized Smithfield’s foul play—comprehensively documented by the likes of establishment human rights groups like Human Rights Watch—it refuses to intervene on behalf of the workers.
Against these odds, Smithfield workers are fighting back. Over the summer months, Smithfield workers and the United Food and Commercial Workers union held protests across the country to build awareness of their struggle. The actions culminated on Aug. 31 with a protest in Richmond, Va., outside Smithfield’s board of directors meeting.
The meat-packing industry
Joe Luter III, the chairman of Smithfield Foods, sits on the executive committee and board of directors of the American Meat Institute. The AMI functions essentially as a union of meat-packing corporations. Its members control 70 percent of the U.S. beef, poultry, pork and veal produced for the national market.
This is big business. According to the USDA, the total value of meat products (meat, poultry and pork) surpassed $5.9 billion in 2005 alone. The struggle for unionization in Tar Heel is being watched closely by the industry as a whole, which has lined up behind Joe Luter.
Although AMI members compete with one another, they know that a breakthrough for the Smithfield workers could create waves for the industry nationwide.
Jobs in the meatpacking industry are the most dangerous in the United States. The corporations’ profits depend on rapidly distributing the largest possible amount of meat products to their buyers.
Constant speed-ups of the production lines have led to serious physical injuries. Many workers have suffered carpel tunnel syndrome due to the constant cutting motions they are forced to repeat all day. Workers mistakenly stab themselves or their co-workers standing close by on the factory lines. These lacerations are the most common injury on what is called “the kill floor.” The UFCW is projecting 800 significant injuries at the Tar Heel plant in 2006 alone.
Despite these risks, meatpackers’ wages are 20 percent lower than the average worker’s wage. To add injustice to injury, in many cases workers who have been hurt on the job have not received workers’ compensation. With no union to fight for them, workers who file complaints or for workers’ compensation are actually at risk of losing their jobs.
 After a serious knee injury at Smithfield, Edward Morrison was denied workers’ compensation and then fired. Photo: David Bacon |
Meat packing jobs formerly paid relatively high wages, around 20 percent higher than most manufacturing jobs. Today, meat processors make $8 to $11 an hour. Since the 1970s, most meat processing plants have been moved to the South and to rural areas in order to exploit the greater poverty and unemployment in the region.
Lance Compa, writing for Human Rights Watch, stated that in the meat and poultry industry, workers “contend with conditions, vulnerabilities and abuses, which violate human rights.”
“Health and safety laws and regulations fail to address critical hazards in the meat and poultry industry,” Compa continues. “Laws and agencies that are supposed to protect workers’ freedom of association are instead manipulated by employers to frustrate worker organizing. Federal laws and policies on immigrant workers are a mass of contradictions and incentives to violate their rights. In sum, the United States is failing to meet its obligations under international human rights standards to protect the human rights of meat and poultry industry workers.”
A century ago, in 1906, Upton Sinclair exposed the horrendous conditions of the meat packing industry in his classic novel “The Jungle.”
The meatpacking industry would like the U.S. people to think that today things are different. In June of this year, the AMI catered a luncheon for journalists to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the publication of “The Jungle.” They hoped, no doubt, to promote a squeaky clean image of their industry.
During the event, the AMI members patted themselves on the back for improving working conditions and creating sanitary work environments. These claims certainly came in attractive packaging, but they failed to mention the high incidence of injury, the denied workers’ compensation and, above all, the industry’s virulent anti-union campaign.
Racism, violence, intimidation among bosses’ tactics
In 1994, two years after the opening at Tar Heel, workers at the plant attempted to organize. Workers sought out the representation of the UFCW. Union organizers and supporters were met with hostility and a coordinated anti-union effort from the Smithfield bosses.
One method the bosses implemented was a racist division of workers. Most jobs are split up by ethnicity at the plant. Typically white workers occupy positions in shipping, receiving, maintenance and supervision. African Americans handled the more arduous labor on the kill floor, and the Latino workers are placed on the cutting lines.
 Julio Vargas was fired after leading a walkout of Smithfield workers in Tar Heel, NC. Photo: David Bacon |
Latino workers make up 60 percent of the total workers, African Americans make up 30 percent, and whites the remaining 10 percent. During the unionizing campaign, managers and supervisors held mandatory closed session meetings informing Latino workers that if the union vote passed, the UFCW would favor Black workers over them, and illegal immigrants would be deported.
Likewise, Black workers were told that Latinos would take their jobs. This is an effective tactic bosses have used throughout the history of the labor movement, to stir up racism and competition among workers who in fact have a common interest to unite.
Smithfield also uses prison labor at the plant. Prison workers are separated from other workers. Plant managers claim that it would be a safety risk to allow union representatives to talk to prison workers.
After these abuses, the vote for the union failed. In 2000, the National Labor Relations Board found Smithfield guilty of tampering and manipulating the outcome of the 1994 unionizing campaign.
In 1997, Smithfield workers tried to unionize again. Again they were confronted with violent opposition. Smithfield forced employees to wear “vote no” buttons, stamped pigs with the words “vote no,” fired pro-union workers and gave favors and preference to workers who pledged to vote against the union.
On the day of the 1997 union certification vote at the plant, the plant’s private police force, joined by local sheriffs, surrounded the plant dressed in riot gear. After the vote, the lights were turned out at the plant.
According to Eric Schlosser, writing in Sept. 11 issue of The Nation, the company police force, “staffed with other deputy sheriffs,” not only beat two union supporters but also “arrested almost a hundred workers, including UFCW supporters.”
A special NLRB ruling in 2004—like the one in 2000—said that Smithfield had broken the law in the 1997 election. Yet, two years after the special ruling, Smithfield still has not been fined or brought up on criminal charges.
The head of the company police force, Danny Priest, was later arrested himself for the unlawful arrests and beatings of UFCW supporters. It is no surprise that Smithfield is holding luncheons to improve their public image. Under international pressure, Smithfield was forced to disband its private thug police force in 2005.
Right-to-work laws
The backdrop to the Smithfield case is the broader attacks on the labor movement. The National Labor Relations Board, which is supposed to protect workers’ interests, has been converted into a tool of the ruling class to break unions. This process did not begin with the Bush administration.
The atrocious violations in Smithfield have been made all the easier by the misnamed “right-to-work” laws, which permit bosses to bypass unions when hiring workers. Under these laws, workers in unionized jobs are not obliged to pay union dues, even though they benefit from the gains made through union struggles and even though the union is legally required to represent all workers at the job, members or not. Many workers, either for shortsighted reasons like avoiding dues or to outright boss pressure, decide to not join the union. In practice, “right-to-work” laws dismember unions, leaving them without significant numbers and unable to marshal enough forces to collectively bargain effectively.
One of the main reasons for the low wages and low numbers of unions in the South is the anti-union climate created by “right-to-work” laws. Currently, 22 states have “right-to-work” laws, including every state in the South. This is one of the main reasons that industries are moving their plants south.
The struggle continues
After two defeats, the Smithfield workers continue to fight. With the assistance of the UFCW, they established the Eastern North Carolina Workers Center. The Workers Center provides information on labor rights and immigration issues, supplies legal help for workers’ compensation cases, offers English classes and organizes community speak outs and demonstrations.
Even without the official backing of a union, the workers carried out a succession of walkouts. The first walkout in 2003 involved the Tar Heel plant’s maintenance crew. Smithfield contracts out its cleaning to QSI, a company which routinely fires workers after the first six months and one-year period of employment, to avoid mandatory raises. Then QSI rehires these same workers at lower wages.
When one QSI supervisor, Antonio Cruz, refused to fire one of these workers, he too was fired. On Nov. 13, 2003, 150 QSI workers walked off the job demanding Cruz’s return and a general pay increase.
The UFCW has helped bring national and international pressure on Smithfield to change its ways, improve wages, protect labor rights and allow the union. Two more high-profile NLRB rulings against Smithfield in 2006 have helped to expose the company’s brutality.
Building unity at the plant by fighting racism and anti-immigrant bashing will be the key components in this struggle to unionize Smithfield. Winning union representation at the Tar Heel plant would be an important victory for workers in the South and across the country.
