Union wins a 16-year fight to organize hog plant

Tar Heel packer employs 5,000

TAR HEEL -- Workers at the world's largest pork slaughterhouse have voted for a union, ending a bitter fight and scoring a huge victory for organized labor in the South.

It was a narrow victory among the more than 4,500 employees at Smithfield Foods' Bladen County plant, who voted Wednesday and Thursday. The vote tally, released late Thursday, was 2,041 to 1,879.

"Today, justice has truly been served," said Mattie Fulcher, a nine-year employee of the plant. Fulcher, a union supporter who observed the count, said the union would protect her from a company where "the pigs mean more to them than I do."

The Washington, D.C.-based United Food and Commercial Workers Union has been trying to unionize the plant, about 80 miles south of Raleigh, since it opened in 1992. The plant's workers slaughter and butcher as many as 32,000 hogs a day.

Company officials, after years of fighting unionization, said Friday night that the election was fair. Eight of the company's 13 plants in other parts of the country are already unionized.

"We respect the employees' decision and look forward to working together," company spokesman Dennis Pittman said at a news conference.

The victory is a coup in a state with the lowest rate of unionization in the nation. It is part of a larger struggle to organize meatpacking plants that have moved to the Southeast in the past few decades, hoping to escape the reach of unions.

Labor expert Marion Crain, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., called the victory in Tar Heel "an important symbolic win, not just for the union, but for the workers, to see that an employer who was steadfastly committed to resisting unionization eventually yielded."

Workers who supported the union said Friday that they hoped for many changes in the plant, including higher pay, more breaks, better work schedules and more respect from supervisors.

"You can't go to the bathroom when you want. When you're sick, they expect you to still come to work," said Charles McEachim of Fayetteville, who was leaving the plant after his shift Thursday. "We need a union."

Power in a union

Membership gives workers a voice in setting hours and determining their workloads, and gives them a procedure to appeal decisions by their bosses. The union has promised to put an end to working conditions that it says are dangerous and demoralizing.

"When workers have a fair [election] process, they choose a voice on the job," Pat O'Neill, the union's organizing director, said in a statement. "This is a great victory for the Tar Heel workers."

Smithfield managers say they have strict safety procedures and that workers are treated fairly and paid well, with wages that start at $10 an hour.

Workers at the remote, rural plant, which opened in 1992, do repetitive and often physically grueling jobs.

Some pull pigs from trucks and usher them into 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, slicing and deboning pork as it moves along conveyor belts. Some stand for hours placing stickers on wrapped pieces of pork.

A long, bitter rivalry

This week's election, conducted by the National Labor Relations Board, was the culmination of 16 years of bitter rivalry between Smithfield, the nation's leading pork company, and the union.

The national board threw out the results of two previous elections, saying the company had harassed and fired union supporters, forcing one employee to stamp the words "Vote No" onto dead hogs.