The company employs nearly 6,000 workers. Two previous attempts by the UFCW to organize the plant in the 1990s failed. The union is now in the middle of its third organizing campaign.

“The NLRB complaint, issued July 30, 2004, charges Smithfield Packing and a number of employees by name with: illegally assaulting employees; threatening workers with arrest by federal immigration authorities; causing workers to be falsely arrested; and threatening workers with bodily harm,” said an August 4 press release by the UFCW.

Smithfield’s in-house cleaning contractor, QSI, based in Lumberton, North Carolina, has also been charged with “failing to pay workers their wages and vacation time; and threatening workers for supporting the union,” the press release said.

According to the Bladen Journal, a local paper, the NLRB has scheduled a September 20 hearing on the charges filed by the union.

Last November, a group of maintenance workers walked off the job to protest harassment of union supporters by the bosses. Some workers, employed by QSI, “felt that management was harassing them with unwarranted write-ups and withholding promised raises,” the UFCW press announcement said. “A sympathetic supervisor was fired for supporting workers’ complaints.” In response, 250 workers walked off the job.

Following the walkout, QSI managers decided to bring everyone back, including the fired supervisor, and signed an agreement promising wage increases and an end to the abusive write-up system.

“The successful collective action within the maintenance department appears to have inspired a crack down by management,” the UFCW statement said. A few days later, “more workers were terminated, which inspired a second walkout.”

This time, according to the union, Smithfield company police, along with deputies of the Bladen County Sheriff’s Department, blocked the doors, assaulted workers, arrested employees on trumped up charges, and threatened them with physical violence as they attempted to walk off the job. According to union officials, 21 workers and some supervisors were fired after this incident.

“Smithfield is the only packing plant in the country to employ a full company police force with armed officers, an in-plant holding cell, and the right under state law to make arrests and charge people with infractions,” the UFCW press release said. “Company police officers have the right to carry concealed weapons.”

“Smithfield resorts to a police presence to create a Gestapo-like atmosphere in an attempt to suppress workers from speaking out,” said Bill McDonough, UFCW executive vice president and director of organizing. “We demand that the company police force be immediately disbanded.”

These assaults have come down as workers at Smithfield are making their third attempt to win union representation by the UFCW. In two previous organizing drives, the company used many means of intimidation and prevented workers from voting in the union. During the first organizing campaign in 1994, the union filed numerous charges against Smithfield for illegal surveillance, threats, coercion, and harassment of union backers.

After the second campaign in 1997, union supporters won damages of $755,000 in a civil lawsuit against the food giant, after union election monitors were badly beaten by company thugs. An NLRB administrative law judge issued a ruling stating that Smithfield had worked with the cops to instigate violence during the vote count and that company managers collaborated with the local sheriff’s department to intimidate and physically assault union supporters.

In testimony to the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in June 2002, Sherri Buffkin, a former Smithfield supervisor at the Tar Heel plant, said, “I terminated employees who didn’t deserve to be terminated. I’m here to tell you that Smithfield Foods ordered me to fire employees who supported the union and that the company told me it was either my job or theirs. I’m here because Smithfield Foods asked me to lie on an affidavit [to the NLRB] and made me choose between my job and telling the truth.” The company fired Buffkin shortly before a 1998 NLRB hearing.

James Blount, another former supervisor who was fired for similar reasons, told the Charlotte Observer that the company has routinely cheated workers out of overtime pay. Regardless of when workers clock out, he said, “they only get paid for what a crew leader writes down.”

The Smithfield plant in Tar Heel is the largest hog processing plant in the world, with nearly 6,000 workers and a very high turnover rate. Workers at the plant slaughter about 32,000 hogs per day over two shifts. According to company figures, 85 percent of the workforce comes from oppressed nationalities. About 60 percent of the workers are Latino, and most of the rest are Black.

As many as 20 percent of Smithfield workers at Tar Heel spend their first six months as temporary employees hired by the Labor Ready agency. These workers are paid lower wages and have no health or other benefits.
 
Unsafe working conditions
North Carolina state authorities have cited and fined the plant several times since it opened in 1992 for serious work safety violations. According to the UFCW, “hundreds of former Smithfield workers are permanently disabled and unable to find employment in eastern North Carolina.”

“My supervisor was making us work faster and faster, get out the product,” José Sauceda, a Mexican-born worker there, told a congressional panel. “I was rushing and I reached for a loin and I got my hand caught in the saw.”

Other companies have also opened plants in the state, operating under similar conditions. They employ tens of thousands of workers, many of them Latino. It is estimated that nearly half a million Latinos now live in North Carolina, up from 76,000 in 1990. According to the Charlotte Observer, on-the-job injuries and illnesses resulting in time off work among Latinos jumped 19 percent in 1998 and another 24 percent two years later.

A year ago, the UFCW launched a video on the decade-long struggle by Smithfield workers to organize a union at the Tar Heel plant. Among other facts, the documentary provides evidence that the bosses foster divisions along race lines as part of their antilabor campaign aimed at keeping the union out. Managers threaten workers who are Black with replacement by Latinos, while they try to scare Latino workers with deportation and tell them that African-Americans are trying to get them out of the plant.

“They say Latinos are all going to get fired,” Jorge, the 21-year-old son of Tar Heel worker Evelyn Ortíz, who is a union supporter, told the Observer. “At least with the union, they can help us.”

Janice Lynn is a member of UFCW Local 27 at Smithfield Packing in Landover, Maryland.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home