Turning point at Smithfield?

IT'S BEEN a long time coming. Some 4,600 workers at Smithfield Foods' pork-processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C., are voting for union recognition with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) on December 10 and 11.

For 16 years, the plant, sometimes called "the world's largest slaughterhouse," has been a battleground, pitting workers' efforts to ensure safety and fairness on the job against a company that has done everything it could to keep workers from unionizing. That includes intimidating and firing union activists, and attempting to divide and conquer the racially and ethnically diverse workforce.

This is the third time the UFCW has tried to unionize at Smithfield. It lost votes in 1994 and 1997 after the company harassed and threatened workers. Smithfield was forced to pay $1.1 million in back pay plus interest to employees who had been fired for union activity, after a federal judge ruled in the union's favor in 2006.

Along the way, Smithfield workers have connected struggle for workers' justice to the struggle against racism.

In October 2006, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided the plant, taking away 50 immigrant workers. In response, some 1,000 workers walked out for two days in a wildcat stay-away. In January 2007, hundreds of workers walked out to protest the company's refusal to make Martin Luther King Day a paid holiday.

In 2006, an energetic campaign, Justice at Smithfield, was launched to target the company's dangerous working conditions as well as its terrible environmental record.

The company filed suit in October 2007, charging the UFCW and its "co-conspirators" with violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which was intended to take up cases of mob extortion. Smithfield claimed that the union's campaign caused a $900 million drop in the value of the company's stock.

On November 27 of this year, company representatives announced Smithfield was dropping the racketeering suit against the UFCW, Jobs with Justice and the Change to Win union federation--and had agreed to a set of rules for the unionization vote this week at the plant. In return, the union halted its public campaign against Smithfield. The Justice@Smithfield Web site was taken down.

According to the agreement, if either the company or union has trouble with the other's literature, they can take it to a monitor who will rule on whether it must be changed. The union also won a regular schedule of access to talk to workers at the plant.

Union representatives couldn't speak with the media until after the election, but labor activists had reason to be positive about the outcome of the vote. "The settlement is more favorable to the union than many 'neutrality' agreements that unions and companies have arrived at," wrote Jane Slaughter in Labor Notes, "where both sides are limited to 'factual' language." Slaughter pointed out:

Under the "factual" criterion, companies have distributed details about the worst union contracts in the country, talked about union officials' salaries, or made statements such as, "If you go on strike, we can permanently replace you."

The UFCW-Smithfield deal, though, uses a different standard: negativity. Both company and union may talk themselves up, but neither may disrespect the other. Smithfield can brag, for example, about its wages and working conditions--and if that impresses any workers in the plant, they can vote accordingly. UFCW can talk about what unions do for workers.

THE AGREEMENT shows the power of the Justice at Smithfield campaign, which exposed the company's obsessive drive for profits at the expenses of workers' safety.

Workers at the plant process some 32,000 hogs a day--in frigid temperatures and at a breakneck pace. Repetitive motion and cutting injuries are so common that the company has its own medical center across the highway from the plant.

"You have extreme colds and extreme heats," former Smithfield worker Keith Ludlum, now a UFCW organizer, explained to Socialist Worker last year. "There are plenty of employees who have gotten frostbite on their feet and hands just from working in the freezer areas for so long."

Labor activists, religious groups and students took up the campaign, helping to organize a boycott of Smithfield products, leafleting grocery stories, demonstrating at Smithfield shareholder meetings, and picketing appearances by celebrity chef and company spokeswoman Paula Deen.

Over the years, the UFCW has kept up a workers' center not far from the plant. It has also made a point to reach out to Latino workers, which used to make up half of Smithfield's workforce, but now--in the wake of the federal crackdown on the undocumented--only constitute a quarter of workers.

Employees are voting at the plant Wednesday and Thursday, with results expected some time Thursday night. A victory for the union at Smithfield will be a significant win for the labor movement, particularly in the unorganized South. North Carolina, which has one of the lowest percentages of unionized workers in the country, is a "right-to-work" state with anti-labor laws that hamper unions.

"The Tar Heel plant is big enough and important enough and close enough to other places that it has the possibility of moving other people," Gene Bruskin, director of the union campaign, told Labor Notes. "The possibilities of organizing packinghouse workers would be transformative to the labor movement, for immigrants, for African American workers, for the South."

The battle at Smithfield also underlines the urgency of passing the proposed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would require companies to recognize unions once a majority of workers sign union cars. With a history of the company pulling out all the stops to defeat the election process, this is something the UFCW had been trying to win at Smithfield for years.

As Ludlum said in February 2007 in testimony before Congress:

A fair vote is difficult if not impossible at the workplace. Workplaces are not neutral and unprejudiced places like the polling sites we go to when we vote in political elections--libraries, schools and community centers. Workplaces are owned by the very companies that are fighting against union representation. The air is thick with the company's discontent. The halls are filled with anti-union rhetoric...

I come from the South, and I know that it sounds good to say that everyone will be able to vote secretly for the union--freely without influence. But big companies like Smithfield turn this whole process upside-down for workers, just like poll taxes and literacy tests turned voting upside down for African Americans at one time. A secret ballot is no longer secret or safe.

There are few better examples of how dangerous and demeaning a working day can be than Smithfield. And as the economic crisis worsens, companies will only argue that they need more from workers, and will offer even less in return. In the coming months and years, workers will need to be organized more than ever.