Union targets Smithfield with D.C. ad campaign

WASHINGTON -- With bright lights warming his head, four television producers offering direction and a union spokeswoman pelting him with questions, former hog herder Roscoe Bell leaned on a cane in a Washington row house and talked about his pain.

Bell remembered the hogs trampling him a year ago at a Smithfield Packing plant in North Carolina. He described hooves on his chest and his body's constant ache. The camera rolled, and he repeated again how he can no longer play basketball, pull on his shoes or make love to his wife.

"They cherish the hogs, but they don't cherish the humans," he said.

It was a starring role and yet just a bit part in a larger campaign by the United Commercial Food Workers union's efforts to train a spotlight on the Smithfield Packing slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, N.C., the world's largest meat-processing plant.

This week, the union's Smithfield Justice Campaign will launch a $200,000 advertising blitz two states away from the plant, with television commercials and banner ads in the Washington subway and on city buses, hoping to win the sympathies of pork buyers in the Washington area.

Smithfield officials, who have accused the union of intimidating workers, call the ad campaign "desperate."

Union organizers have rallied for years against what they call untenable working conditions at the Tar Heel plant, in Bladen County. But this campaign has a twist. It focuses on the bonds that send many black people in the Washington region back to North Carolina for family reunions, hoping to convince communities up here that their brethren down South need help.

In the past century, many blacks from farms and rural regions of the Carolinas settled in Washington.

"I think Washington, D.C., was built from North Carolina," said the Rev. Jarvis Johnson, co-pastor of New Prospect Family Praise and Worship Center in Washington, who counts 50 or 60 cousins who moved up from the state.

"When you move from the South to the North, always the thought was that you do better," he said. "If this is still true, it's time for the North to reach back and say, let us help you out of the mud."

Now, the union and other workers' rights activists hope the region's ties to North Carolina will persuade consumers to think about what brands of pork they buy in local groceries.

"Washington, D.C., is a major market for Smithfield products, and we want to demonstrate to the company that people are extremely concerned," said the Rev. Graylan Hagler, national president of Ministers for Racial, Social and Economic Justice and a pastor in Washington who has met with workers in North Carolina.

Activists are garnering attention.

In Maryland's Prince George's County, a largely black suburb of Washington, leaders passed a resolution last fall affirming the county's support for workers in Tar Heel. Smithfield has a plant in Prince George's County that is unionized. Pastors say they're hoping to persuade the D.C. council to pass a resolution, too. And a local congressional candidate, Democrat Donna Edwards, whose family hails from Yanceyville, mentions the Tar Heel workers on her campaign Web site.

Smithfield speaks

Smithfield Packing spokesman Dennis Pittman said the campaign is another example of the union trying to pressure the plant to allow union representation without a secret ballot vote.

"That plant has been as safe or safer than any of the union plants. We're very proud of it," he said.

Pittman warned that if the ad campaign is too successful, the union could hurt the people it purports to help.

"It's going to cost jobs," he said.

Bell, 54, traveled to Washington last week. There, the Smithfield Justice Campaign borrowed a row house from union employee Eric Wingerter.

"They're Southern-ing it up," Wingerter joked as a set designer hung a biblical quote on the wall, arranged fake floral curtains and draped a blanket over a couch.

Prompted by union spokeswoman Leila McDowell, Bell described his experience with the hogs.

"They tromped me," he said in his quiet, rural North Carolina accent. "I fell backwards."

Over and over, Bell told his story for a television commercial.

"I'd rather be in the grave than bear this pain," he told McDowell.

Say that part again, she asked, this time into the camera.

"I'd rather be dead than to bear this pain day after day," he said.

Once more, the producer asked. Bell clutched his cane.

"I'd rather be dead than to bear this pain day after day."