Tar Heel, N.C., is home to the biggest pork processing plant in the world. At the plant, 5,500 workers process 32,000 pigs a day under extremely hazardous and oppressive conditions.
Smithfield, one of the wealthiest meat producers in the world, owns the plant. The history of the non-union plant has
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Smithfield’s crimes have been catalogued by the National Labor Relations Board: threatening retaliation against employees who speak up for their rights on the job; harassing and intimidating employees; physically assaulting and falsely arresting employees with its company-run police force; pitting African American and Latino workers against each other; and threatening cuts in wages and benefits.
Despite issuing numerous rulings against Smithfield, the NLRB has yet to give Smithfield workers the justice they deserve. This is not surprising, considering the increasingly overt way in which the Bush administration and the NLRB are carrying out ruling class demands to lower wages, erode workers rights, and smash unions.
Against the odds, Smithfield workers are fighting back. Over the summer months, Smithfield workers and the United Food and Commercial Workers union have held rallies all over the country to hold Smithfield accountable. The protests culminated in an action in Richmond, Va., on Aug. 30 during Smithfield’s board of directors meeting.
A climate of intimidation
Union drives at the plant have been met with severe repression, including beatings by the plant’s private police. Pro-union workers have been targeted for firing, harassment, deportation and arrest.
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. A group of workers was beaten and arrested by private police and sheriffs.
Workers, many of them immigrants, have been subject to constant threats of arrest and deportation by managers and the company’s hired thugs.
The United Food and Commercial Workers union has been working to organize the plant since 1992 when it was built. Union elections were held in 1994 and 1997. Met with company intimidation campaigns, the union lost both times. In the run-up to the elections, Smithfield forced employees to wear “vote no” buttons, stamped pigs with “vote no,” fired pro-union workers, and gave favors and preference to workers who pledged to vote against the union.
A special NLRB ruling in 2004 said that Smithfield had broken the law during the 1997 election. This was seven years after the fact, and Smithfield had not yet been punished. Two years after the special ruling, Smithfield still has not been fined or brought up on criminal charges.
Under international pressure, Smithfield was forced to disband its private thug police force in 2005.
Workers suffer daily injuries
Major injuries are very common at Smithfield’s Tar Heel plant. Each pig weighs between 200 to 400 pounds. On the assembly line, workers stand shoulder to shoulder, processing the pigs into different cuts of meat and parts. Pigs travel down the processing line at a rate of one every 3.5 seconds. That’s 1,000 pigs an hour and 8,000 a day, per line. Serious shoulder and wrist injuries are rampant in the meat processing industry.
The large butcher knives used by workers are another common source of injury. Workers often stab themselves and
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Workers blame the hectic pace of the assembly line and dull knives for the injuries. Workers at the Tar Heel plant had to wage a struggle against the bosses at the plant to be provided with two knives for each eight hour shift.
The UFCW is projecting 800 significant injuries at the Tar Heel plant in 2006 alone. This is up from 300 in 2003. According to the union, the brutal nature of work at the plant leads to an astronomical turnover rate of over 50 percent every year.
Racism used to lower wages, defeat union
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.
The bosses have also sought to use racism in order to drive down wages at packing plants. Sixty percent of workers at Smithfield are Latino. Many are undocumented immigrants. Corporate bosses have actively recruited immigrant labor, especially in the meat industry because they can threaten undocumented workers with deportation and drive down all workers’ wages.
Processing lines at Smithfield are segregated by race. Thirty percent of workers at Smithfield are African American. Managers continually insinuate to Latino workers that if they are outperformed, or if they stand up for their rights, their jobs will be taken by African Americans. They tell African American workers the same thing about Latino workers.
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.
The UFCW has helped bring national and international pressure on Smithfield to change its ways. This year, two more high-profile rulings against Smithfield by the NLRB and a federal appeals court have helped to expose the company’s brutality.
The union plans to organize the Tar Heel plant to help strengthen the position of workers in the South and all across the country against the current assault against workers’ wages and rights. Building unity at the plant by fighting racism and anti-immigrant bashing will be the key components in this struggle.
The capitalist owners of Smithfield are criminals who squeeze enormous profits from the hard labor of immigrants, African Americans and other workers at the Tar Heel plant. They are part of a long list of corporate criminals in the United States, whose wealth is soaked in the sweat and blood of the working class.
Winning union representation at the Tar Heel plant would be a big step forward for workers in the South and across the country.
