After a 15-year struggle to fend off unionization of Smithfield's giant Bladen County plant -- the world's largest pork slaughterhouse -- the company is alleging that the union amounts to a criminal organization.

Smithfield is one of a handful of corporations fighting unions with a federal law often used in mob prosecutions. As a result, the suit has taken one of the Southeast's largest union fights into new territory.

The threat of complex and expensive federal lawsuits, which can target not just unions but the community groups that support them, "is certainly going to have a powerful impact on free speech," said Marion Crain, a UNC-Chapel Hill law professor and the director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity.

The suit, filed in Richmond, Va., last month, accuses the United Food and Commercial Workers union of engaging in extortion and asks for about $5 million in damages. It says that union members orchestrated a public smear campaign designed to hurt the Smithfield, Va.-based company's business. Union members offered to stop only if the company agreed to bargain with the union.

The suit uses a federal law known as the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which was designed to target organized crime. In the past few years, companies have used it against unions in rare instances -- but there is still little legal precedent for such a use of the law.

"Our company has been under attack," Joe Luter IV, head of the division that runs the company's slaughterhouses, said Tuesday in a meeting at The News & Observer. "This lawsuit was a last resort, and it's not something that we wanted to do."

Luter said the intent is not to set legal precedent on how unions can operate but to end the union's harassment of Smithfield.

Corporate campaigns

In the past year, the Washington D.C.-based union has waged a national campaign to pressure Smithfield to recognize a union at the Bladen County plant, which employs more than 5,000 people and slaughters about 32,000 hogs a day. Religious and civil rights groups in cities around the country have joined the union in protesting outside stores that sell Smithfield products, threatening boycotts and heckling celebrity chef Paula Deen, who promotes Smithfield products. Protesters crashed the company's shareholder meeting this summer.

In addition, the union has brought more than a dozen complaints of unfair labor practices against the company in the past 18 months, many of which federal regulators have dismissed.

The company has agreed to a union election, which would allow employees to choose whether they want union representation. But the two sides cannot agree on how the election would be conducted, so it has not been scheduled.

A few months ago, Smithfield enlisted G. Robert Blakey, a University of Notre Dame law professor who is a leading expert in the use of organized crime law. He helped the company file the suit two days after Smithfield broke off talks with the union about holding an election.

Blakey said this week that unions nationwide have launched more aggressive campaigns against companies, pressuring their customers and trying to hurt their share prices. He said those tactics are unfair and have forced corporations to look for new weapons.

"Basically what [the unions] have said is, 'Either recognize us or we're going to put you out of business,' " Blakey said. "A company has a right to conduct its business without external pressure."

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