Historic union vote comes this week

RALEIGH -- A noisy and often caustic 16-year effort to unionize the world's largest hog slaughterhouse is quietly headed toward an end.

About 4,600 workers at Smithfield Foods' slaughterhouse in the tiny town of Tar Heel, in one of the state's poorest regions, will vote this week on whether to join the United Food and Commercial Workers. Per the order of a federal judge, both the company and the union are staying silent until the ballots are cast and counted.

"It appears to me that the two sides have tried to find a process that would allow them to settle this dispute," said Richard Hurd, a Cornell professor of industrial and labor relations who has followed the dispute. "That does not mean that it will work."

That another vote -- the third since the plant about 80 miles south of Raleigh opened in 1992 -- is taking place at all should be considered progress.

Smithfield's workers in Tar Heel, who are increasingly Hispanic immigrants, turn up to 32,000 hogs a day into pork loins and hams. Some complain the unrelenting pace leads to repetitive-motion and cutting injuries.

"They really don't care nothing about the employees out there. The only thing they care about is getting the hogs out the doors," said Dominique Childs, who worked at the plant for about six years until 2004. "They need a union in there."

Smithfield acknowledges that the jobs are tough, but denies it runs an unsafe workplace and notes it works with unions at eight of its 13 U.S. pork processing plants and distribution centers.

Nearly 24,000 of Smithfield's 35,300 pork employees were covered by a collective bargaining agreement as of April, according to the company's annual report. Many work for subsidiaries other than Smithfield Packing, which runs the Tar Heel plant.

The average hourly wage for U.S. slaughtering and processing workers was $10.80 in 2007, the most recent figures available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In North Carolina, where four Smithfield processing plans are non-union and a distribution center is unionized, the mean wage was $9.76 an hour. In Virginia, where Smithfield runs three unionized processing plants, the wage was $11.02.

During the running battle over the plant, Smithfield liked to point out that employees twice voted against joining the union elections. The union was quick to counter that a federal appeals court threw out the results after finding Smithfield's misdeeds -- including threatening to freeze wages, fire workers and close the plant if the union was approved -- unfairly skewed the results.

The UFCW has long maintained an office near the plant and tried to build trust among workers.

Two years ago, the union quickly backed about 1,000 workers when they walked off the job to protest the firings of about 50 workers in a federal crackdown on illegal immigrants. The walkout ended two days later when the company agreed to rehire the workers and give them 60 days to prove they were eligible to work in the United States.

The union also organized marches and prayer meetings. It urged a boycott of Smithfield's products, targeting both stores and celebrity chef and company spokeswoman Paula Deen.

Last year, the Smithfield, Va., company fired back with a federal lawsuit -- under a racketeering law designed to fight organized crime -- to argue that the union's tactics amount to extortion. It estimated the cost of the negative publicity at $900 million.

Union officials have said the cost of organizing the Tar Heel plant far exceeds the dues it would collect from workers. But the effort is now a model for organizing other meat-packing plants. It's also given the union a platform to promote "card-check," in which a union collects signed cards from a majority of workers instead of winning a secret-ballot election.

The settlement approved by U.S. District Judge Robert E. Payne in October calls for a vote.

If the union wins, it will be certified to act as the workers' bargaining agent. If negotiations fail to produce a contract within a year, workers have the option to scrap the union. If the union loses, it must wait a year before starting a new organizing campaign. Or either side could find fault in the process and fight on in court. Hurd doesn't think that would happen.

"I would suspect whatever happens, they would try to move on into a productive relationship," he said.