The Militant (logo)  
   Vol. 67/No. 22           June 30, 2003  
 
 
UFCW seeks support for
union drive at Carolina plant
(front page)
 
BY BILL ARTH  
ATLANTA—An overflow crowd of more than 250 union members and civil rights supporters packed the auditorium at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site June 12 for the premier showing of a documentary video on the decade-long effort by workers to organize a union at the Smithfield Foods hog-processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. The video is part of a campaign by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) to pressure Smithfield to end its fight to keep the union out. A UFCW press release explains, “As a key Smithfield market area, Atlanta is the kickoff point for a new campaign: Witness: Justice@Smithfield—that will bring religious, civil rights, community and worker activists to food stores alerting both the retail operators and customers about the human rights abuses at Smithfield’s plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. Retail food operators and consumers will be asked to send a message to Smithfield.”

The Tar Heel plant, the largest hog processing plant in the world, has nearly 6,000 workers, and slaughters 32,000 hogs per day over two shifts. By the company’s own estimates, the union press release states, the plant has an annual turnover rate of 6,000 workers, or 100 percent. About 60 percent of the workforce is Latino. The majority of other workers are Black.

Union elections were held in 1994 and 1997, with the union losing both times. After the 1997 elections, supporters of the union won damages of $755,000 in a civil lawsuit filed under the Ku Klux Klan Act. Union election monitors were badly beaten by company thugs after the election results were announced. A National Labor Relations Board judge also overturned the results from the 1997 union election at Smithfield and ordered the company to provide the UFCW with free access to the workers in the plant. Smithfield has tied up both decisions with legal appeals.

The union’s video presentation includes interviews with Smithfield workers and former bosses on the gangster tactics used by Smithfield to defeat union organizing efforts. A favorite management technique was to foster divisions along racial lines. Black workers were threatened with replacement by Latino workers, and Latino workers were threatened with INS action and told that Black workers were attempting to eliminate them from the plant.

Speakers at the premiere included Doug Dority, UFCW international president; Joseph Lowery, Georgia Coalition for People’s Agenda; Linda Chavez-Thompson, AFL-CIO executive vice president; William Lucy, Coalition of Black Trade Unionists; and other Georgia union officials, civil rights figures, and politicians. A showing of the video is planned for Raleigh, North Carolina, June 18.

The union has targeted Saturday, June 28, as a day for supporters of the Smithfield workers to visit local Atlanta stores to get out information on the union organizing campaign. They will meet at the Atlanta Central Labor Council, 501 Pulliam St. SW, from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m., to be dispatched to selected stores. More information on this fight is available online at www.smithfieldjustice.com.

Bill Arth is a meat packer and member of UFCW Local 1996.  
 
 
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