Union, Smithfield OK vote

'Dramatic change' may come to N.C

Workers at the world's largest hog slaughterhouse in Bladen County will get another chance to vote for a union.

Pork giant Smithfield Foods and the union that wants to organize its nearly 5,000 North Carolina workers agreed Monday to hold an election, after years of public sniping that culminated in a federal lawsuit. The election is part of a deal that ended Smithfield's racketeering lawsuit against the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.

A successful election would be a major victory in a state that is generally hostile to unions, and it could lead to a push to unionize other slaughterhouses.

"It would be a huge number of people unionized at one time and a very dramatic change in North Carolina," said Catherine Fisk, a labor law expert at the University of California at Irvine.

In 2007, North Carolina had the lowest rate of unionization in the nation, with only about 147,000 people, or 3.9 percent of workers, represented by unions, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Union representation in the state's large meatpacking industry is virtually nil.

The UFCW, as the Washington, D.C.-based union is commonly known, has been trying to unionize the plant in Tar Heel, about 80 miles south of Raleigh, since it opened in 1992. Union officials have said the plant is an important target in an effort to unionize slaughterhouses across the nation.

This election will be the third held at the plant, where workers slaughter and process more than 30,000 hogs a day.

Federal regulators threw out the results of the first two elections, in 1994 and 1997, saying the company harassed and fired union supporters. The company eventually agreed to pay more than $1 million to employees it fired during those elections.

Representatives of Smithfield and the UFCW declined to comment Monday on when the new election would be held or what parameters would ensure its fairness.

The two sides "have agreed on what both parties believe to be a fair election process," they said in a joint statement. They said the terms of their settlement prevented them from commenting further.

Also as part of the settlement, the union agreed to end its two-year campaign against the company. Since June 2006, the union has organized a national boycott of Smithfield products and brought more than a dozen complaints of unfair labor practices against the company. It recruited religious and civil rights groups nationwide to protest outside stores that sell Smithfield products, to crash shareholder meetings and to heckle celebrity chef Paula Deen, who promotes Smithfield products.

The union's tactics prompted the Smithfield, Va.-based company to file suit in Richmond, Va., a year ago, under a federal law designed to go after organized crime. Smithfield executives said the union's campaign interfered with their business and cost the company about $900 million. They said demands that they negotiate with a union amounted to extortion and asked for about $5 million in damages.

The lawsuit was an aggressive step that placed Smithfield in a small group of corporations that have gone after unions with the complex federal law.

The union fought back, saying the suit was an attack on free speech and the rights of individuals to question corporations. But the potentially costly suit put the UFCW at a disadvantage.

"It forced the union to make hard choices about the risks of possibly losing in front of a jury and having to pay huge damages," Fisk said.

She said that is probably the reason the union agreed to another election after two failed ones.

Until now, the union has refused to hold a new election in the plant, even though the company has called for one. Union representatives said a fair election could not be held there, and they wanted the company to instead recognize a union once a majority of workers signed membership cards.

They still face a tough fight to win this election in a place where company officials have for years been openly hostile to unionization. In recent years, plant managers have shown anti-union videos to employees and posted signs comparing union members to cockroaches.

The two sides said Monday that they would make no further statements until the election has been held.