Workers vote for union at Smithfield

TAR HEEL -- The United Food and Commercial Workers Union has won its fight to organize at the world’s largest pork slaughterhouse.

Employees at Smithfield Foods’ Bladen County plant voted 2,041 to 1,879 to be represented by a union. The vote was counted tonight by federal officials.

The Washington-based union has been trying to get a foothold at the plant, about 80 miles south of Raleigh, since it opened in 1992. Its nearly 5,000 workers slaughter and butcher as many as 32,000 hogs a day.

A union victory is considered a coup in North Carolina, which has the lowest rate of unionization in the nation. It is part of a larger struggle to organize meat-packing plants that have moved to the Southeast in the past few decades hoping to escape the reach of unions.

“It would be an important symbolic win,” labor expert Marion Crain said before the votes were totalled. A law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Crain added that the victory was “not just for the union, but for the workers, to see that an employer who was steadfastly committed to resisting unionization eventually yielded.”

This week’s election was the culmination of 16 years of bitter rivalry between Smithfield, the nation’s leading pork company, and the union.

The results of two previous elections at the plant in the 1990s were thrown out after federal officials declared that the company had harassed and fired union supporters, even forcing an employee to stamp the words “Vote No” on dead hogs.

In 2006, the union began an intense public campaign that included a national boycott and frequent protests outside grocery stores and at company shareholder meetings. Union supporters heckled celebrity chef Paula Deen, who promotes Smithfield products, at public appearances across the country. The union also brought more than a dozen charges of unfair labor practices against the company.

The union says it is fighting to protect Smithfield workers from dangerous and demoralizing working conditions. Union representatives say they want better health care and compensation for those injured on the job.

Union membership also gives workers a voice in setting hours and determining workloads and a procedure to appeal their bosses’ decisions. Smithfield managers say that they have strict safety procedures and that workers are paid well and treated fairly.

Workers at the remote, rural plant, which opened in 1992, do repetitive and often grueling jobs. Some pull pigs off trucks and usher them to a gas chamber. Others work in a cavernous room where freshly killed hogs are wrestled onto hooks, decapitated and sliced in half.

Some spend all day pulling out internal organs or yanking out sheets of fat. Many wield knives, and slice and debone pork as it moves along conveyor belts. Some stand for hours placing stickers on wrapped pieces of pork.

Those who choose to join will have union dues deducted from their checks. But under North Carolina’s right to work laws, no worker is forced to pay union dues, even though all will be represented by the union.

Stan Greer, a spokesman for the National Right to Work Committee in Springfield, Va., which lobbies against compulsory unionization, said a victory at Smithfield will not give unions a foothold in North Carolina. He said unions discourage economic growth and sometimes bully employees into bad contracts.

“There are all kinds of reasons why employees might not see a union in their best interest,” Greer said. “Even if these employees do, that doesn’t change the fact that many don’t.”