The Latino workers, who comprise two-thirds of the plant’s labor force, traced their disgruntlement to the beginning of the month. That’s when Smithfield began mailing out scores of “no-match letters,” indicating discrepancies between the names and Social Security numbers workers furnished to the company and records on file with the Social Security Administration. Those laborers who were unable to rectify the problem were dismissed. According to Smithfield, it was all done to comply with an employer program run by the Department of Homeland Security. But the workers claim that they’re being unfairly targeted. And they argue that the firings are just one of a litany of misdeeds by the company, including fostering a hostile and unsafe work environment. “People are tired of being mistreated and discriminated against,” said Rodríguez. “Only this way can we stop the injustice.”
Discontent is nothing new at the Smithfield slaughterhouse. The upheaval this week caps a long history of vehement clashes between labor and management. Since the 1990s, some workers have fought arduously to unionize Tar Heel, the largest pork-processing plant in the world, where 5,500 workers slaughter 32,000 hogs per day. But the laborers say that the company has repeatedly undermined their efforts with underhanded tactics (charges the company denies). Through a decade of litigation that finally concluded this year, courts as high as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit have found that the company violated a variety of labor laws.
Now, the cause of the Tar Heel workers is garnering more attention, as the United Food and Commercial Workers union redoubles its efforts to organize the plant and enlists some high-profile backers. Among them: Eric Schlosser, whose best-selling book “Fast Food Nation,” was turned into a movie that was released on Friday. Schlosser has been citing the unionization effort regularly on the film’s promotional tour. He even invited a half-dozen Smithfield workers to a screening in Washington and, during a question-and-answer session afterward, recounted their story to the audience. Noting the hundredth anniversary of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”–a withering portrait of the meatpacking industry–he has said that conditions at Smithfield “sound like they’re out of 1906.” Schlosser has also joined a nascent committee, along with leaders like Jesse Jackson, designed to serve as a Tar Heel watchdog.
The acrimonious relationship between the laborers and Smithfield traces its origins to two elections held in the mid-1990s aimed at deciding whether workers wanted to unionize. The UFCW lost both times. But in the course the campaigns, union forces hurled an array of accusations at Smithfield: that the company harassed and fired union supporters, that it threatened to shut down operations if workers chose to join the UFCW and that it deployed armed security officers who arrested and beat some union sympathizers. “It was real ugly,” says Ronnie Ann Simmons, who was there at the time and still works at the slaughterhouse. “Anybody [the company] knew had voted for the union, they got rid of.” (Smithfield denies this.) Keith Ludlum claims he was one such worker. Within weeks of joining the unionization effort in 1994, he was fired, ostensibly for attendance problems. But as part of the same litigation that concluded this year, courts sided with Ludlum and ordered Smithfield to reinstate him. Twelve years later, he has returned to the plant.
These days, injuries top the list of complaints among workers. A Human Rights Watch report released in 2004 documented a host of workplace hazards and managerial negligence at the Tar Heel plant. Along with other abattoirs, the study concluded, Smithfield was guilty of “systematic human-rights violations.” One worker who would agree is Carnell York. While cutting meat on the assembly line in 2004, he slipped and accidentally plunged a six-inch blade deep into his leg. But rather than send him to the hospital, he says, the nurse’s station in the factory simply bandaged him up and sent him home. That mishandling, he alleges, caused the wound to develop a raging infection that ended up requiring a dozen surgeries.
While Smithfield declines to comment on specific cases, it vigorously defends itself against allegations of worker mistreatment. The company responds swiftly and seriously to injuries, says Dennis Pittman, director of corporate communications, and has even built a family clinic for its workforce across the street from the slaughterhouse. “We want to be sure that our employees are comfortable working here,” he says. “We can’t afford to have increased turnover.” As Pittman sees it, the unionization drive is a desperate attempt by the UFCW to score a victory at a time when the labor movement is more anemic than ever. “This has nothing to do with health and safety,” he says. “It has nothing to do with workers’ rights. It has everything to do with money, power and politics.”
Smithfield says it would welcome another election to allow workers to decide, once and for all, whether they want a union. It would also agree to pay half the cost of an outside monitoring group. But the union has refused that offer. The company has “shown repeatedly over the last decade total disrespect for the National Labor Relations Act,” says Gene Bruskin, head of the Smithfield campaign for the UFCW. “They have so poisoned the well that the possibility of real free choice under their authority … is impossible.” Rather than an election, the UFCW is advocating a different decision-making method, one in which workers can choose a union by having a majority sign union cards. The company rejects that method. But some Tar Heel workers are going ahead anyway, collecting signatures from colleagues during shift change on Friday afternoons.
Though UFCW officials insist they had nothing to do with the walkout this week, company officials suspect otherwise. Whatever the case, the union clearly sought to capitalize on the upheaval. It protested the firings and connected the workers with lawyers. In the end, the local Roman Catholic diocese stepped in to mediate the dispute. After hours of negotiation, the company and the workers struck an agreement on Friday night. Among the provisions: that all dismissals would be re-examined, that those workers with Social Security discrepancies would get more time to resolve them and that mailings of “no-match” letters would be temporarily suspended. Both sides declared themselves pleased. But it’s a pretty safe bet that the truce won’t last for long.
