WHY THE UNION WON AT SMITHFIELD
By David Bacon
The American Prospect | December 17, 2008 | web only
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=unions_come_to_smithfield
When immigration agents raided Smithfield
Food's huge North Carolina slaughterhouse two
years ago, organizer Eduardo Peña compared the
impact to a "nuclear bomb." The day after,
people were so scared that most of the plant's
5,000 employees didn't show up for work. The
lines where they kill and cut apart 32,000 hogs
every day were motionless.
Yet on December 11, when the votes were
counted in the same packing plant, 2,041 workers
had voted to join the United Food and Commercial
Workers (UFCW) , while just 1,879 had voted
against it. That stunning reversal set off
celebrations in house trailers and ramshackle
homes in Tarheel, Red Springs, Santa Paula, and
all the tiny working class towns spread from
Fayetteville down to the South Carolina border.
Relief and happiness are understandable
in North Carolina, where union membership is the
lowest in the country. But Smithfield workers
were not just celebrating a vote count. They'd
just defeated one of the longest, most bitter
anti-union campaigns in modern U.S. labor
history. Their victory was the product of an
organizing strategy that accomplished what many
have said that U.S. unions can no longer do -
organize huge, privately-owned factories.
In 1994 and 1997, Smithfield workers
voted in two union representation elections, both
lost by the UFCW. In 1997 the head of plant
security, Danny Priest, told local sheriffs he
expected violence on election day. Police in riot
gear then lined the walkway into the
slaughterhouse, and workers had to file past them
to cast their ballots. At the end of the vote
count union activist Ray Shawn was beaten up
inside the plant. Three years later Priest, while
still head of plant security, became an auxiliary
deputy sheriff, and plant security officers were
given the power to arrest and detain people at
work. The company maintained a holding area for
detainees in a trailer on the property, which
workers called the company jail. (Smithfield gave
up its deputized force and detention center in
2005.)
Management used such extensive
intimidation tactics that both elections were
thrown out by the National Labor Relations Board.
In 2006 the NLRB forced Smithfield to rehire
workers fired in 1994 for union activity, and pay
them $1.1 million. That was a victory for the
union, but workers on the line could also easily
see that Smithfield lawyers kept union supporters
out of work for over a decade, in violation of the law.
In 2003 contract workers for QSI, a
company that cleans the machinery at night,
finally challenged that atmosphere of fear.
According to Julio Vargas, a QSI employee, "the
wages were very low and we had no medical
insurance. When people got hurt, after being
taken to the office they made them go back to
work and wear pink helmets [to humiliate them].
We were fed up." Led by Vargas, the cleaning
crew refused to go in to work. The company
negotiated, and workers won concessions. The
following week, however, those identified as
ringleaders, like Vargas, lost their jobs.
Nevertheless, a new group of UFCW
organizers understood the importance of that work
stoppage. "We're not going to give the company
a chance to use union busters anymore," said
Peña. "We're asking workers to take direct action
on the plant floor to improve their own
conditions." So the union set up a workers'
center in nearby Red Springs, holding classes in
English and labor rights. Vargas and other fired
workers went to work for the UFCW, organizing
discontent over high line speed and its human
cost in injuries. Workers began to stop
production lines to get the company to talk with
them about health and safety problems.
In April, 2006, as immigrant protests
spread across the country, 300 Smithfield workers
stayed out of work and marched through the
streets of nearby Wilmington. On May 1 they
paraded again, this time by the thousands.
Those heady days, however, were followed
by a series of immigration enforcement actions
orchestrated between the company and Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. On October
30, 2006, the plant's human resources department
sent letters to hundreds of immigrant workers,
saying the Social Security numbers they'd
provided when they were hired didn't match the
government's database. Managers gave them two
weeks to come up with new ones.
"On November 13 over 30 were escorted out
of the plant," recalled Peña. "Many felt they had
nothing to lose." That Thursday over 300 workers
walked out. They met at a local hotel, came up
with a list of demands, and got church leaders to
intercede with the company. Smithfield agreed to
a 60-day extension, and to rehire those already
terminated. "It's hard to imagine how empowered
people felt," Peña recalled.
The success of the workplace action
impressed African American workers, who at the
time made up about 40 percent of the workforce.
Union supporters collected 4000 signatures asking
the company to give employees the day off on Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr's birthday. A delegation
took the petitions to the human resources office,
but a company vice-president refused to accept
them. When they were denied the holiday, 400
workers didn't come in anyway, and virtually shut
down the plant again.
"Unity between immigrant Latino and
African American workers was essential to
organizing a union," said Gene Bruskin, then the
director of the UFCW's Justice at Smithfield
campaign, and the drive's principal strategist.
In the earlier campaigns, divisions between the
two groups contributed to the union's defeat.
Nine days after the Martin Luther King
day action ICE agents came out to the plant in
their first raid. After they arrested 21 people
for deportation, and questioned hundreds in the
factory lunchroom, fear grew so intense that most
workers didn't show up the following day. A few
months later, a similar raid took place.
"Workers think it's happening because people were
getting organized," said Vargas at the time.
The percentage of immigrants began to
decline as many Latino workers were forced out of
the plant. Eventually, the ratio between Blacks
and Latinos was reversed. The immigrant
workforce shrank to about 40 percent, while the
percentage of African Americans rose to 60
percent. At that point, however, African
American workers became more active in the
unionization campaign. Union workers eventually
collected the signatures of about half the
plant's employees, demanding that the company
agree to recognize the UFCW. At the end of a
noisy march, they presented the petitions at a
company shareholders meeting. Meanwhile, UFCW
organizers began using the violation of workers'
rights to mobilize customer pressure against
Smithfield. Union and community activists
collected thousands of signatures on petitions
asking store chains to find another pork
supplier, and the city of Boston stopped
purchasing Smithfield products.
Inside the plant, militant activity began
to rise again. One key moment came when Juan
Navarro wrote "Union Time" with a felt pen on his
helmet. Supervisors called him in, and took away
his helmet. Navarro worked on the kill floor
where a majority of the workers are Black. When
he went back to the line, the other workers
decided to back him up. "Union Time" appeared on
their helmets too, and eventually spread
throughout the plant, becoming the slogan of the
union campaign. Smithfield was even forced to
apologize to Navarro.
In the back room of the tiny Mexican
market down the road from the plant, the union
committee started meeting before and after work.
Black and Puerto Rican activists would then take
leaflets and union newsletters into the plant and
walk through the halls, into the break rooms,
handing them to their coworkers.
When Martin Luther King's birthday
approached in 2008, the union passed out a
leaflet telling workers to "hold the date." This
time, the company not only gave Tarheel workers
the holiday, but let workers take the day off in
every non-union Smithfield plant. One union
activist observed that the increased activity
among African American workers gave a kind of
cover to the Mexicans, allowing them to regain
some of their former activism without feeling
they had a target painted on their backs. At the
same time, Puerto Rican workers also became more
vocal, giving the union another voice in Spanish
from workers who aren't immigrants at all.
The company responded to rising pressure
both inside and outside the plant by filing a
racketeering suit against the union. It demanded
the same kind of NLRB election it had won in 1994
and 1997, and accused the union of being
anti-democratic when it would not agree to repeat
the bitter experience of the past.
As a trial grew close, the union and the
company agreed to an election procedure that
workers and organizers felt would keep Smithfield
from using the old bare-knuckle tactics. The
union won the right to access to the plant
premises, and organizers were able to walk the
halls themselves, to sit in the lunchrooms and
talk with workers, explaining the potential
benefits of unionization. The company was able
to hold a limited set of "captive audience"
meetings, which workers were required to attend,
where they heard management's anti-union speeches
and watched anti-union videos. But the union
also won the right to limit those speeches,
keeping out threats and overt intimidation.
In the meantime, the lunchrooms became
hubs of union activity, with "Union Time" visible
on helmets, leaflets, and buttons To union
activists, visibility inside the plant meant
that, in the eyes of workers, the union had some
power. Coupled with concessions on things like
the King holiday, and a history of protest over
accidents and line speed, it became clear the
union could actually win changes. At the same
time, workers were the union's visible leaders.
Despite the firings and immigration raids, many
veteran union supporters stayed active in the
campaign. Union organizers spent countless hours
with those leaders, talking about tactics and
helping make decisions about the course of the
campaign.
And when the ballots were counted, the union won.
Efforts by the modern U.S. labor movement
to organize factories the size of the Tarheel
plant have not been very successful for the last
two decades. In fact, private-sector
unionization has fallen below 8 percent of the
workforce. The giant electronics plants of
Silicon Valley have an anti-union strategy so
intimidating that unions haven't even tried to
organize them for years. Japanese car
manufacturers have built assembly plants and
successfully kept workers from organizing, in
spite of efforts by the auto union.
The price for the lack of a successful
strategy to organize those Japanese plants became
clear in December's Congressional debate over the
auto bailout proposal, when Southern Republican
Senators demanded that the United Auto Workers
agree to gut its union contracts to match the
non-union wages and conditions at Nissan, Honda
and BMW. The presence of the non-union plants
now threatens to destroy the union. The same
dilemma exists in industry after industry.
To get out of the box, today's labor
movement pins its hopes on the Employee Free
Choice Act. This proposal would require a
company like Smithfield to negotiate a union
contract if a majority of workers sign union
cards. It would avoid the kind of union election
that took place in 1997, where the idea of voting
freely became a farce in an atmosphere of
violence and terror. EFCA would also put
penalties on employers who fire workers for union
activity. At Smithfield, the company was only
obliged to pay fired workers for their lost
wages, and even then was allowed to deduct any
money they'd earned during the decade their cases
wound through the legal system. EFCA would
substantially restrict the kind of anti-union
campaign Smithfield mounted for 15 years.
But EFCA by itself will not build strong
unions, which workers can use not just to win
elections but to make substantial changes in the
workplace itself. The union at Smithfield wasn't
created on election day by a fairer legal
process. Workers had already organized it in the
battles that preceded the vote. They did much
more than sign union cards, go to a few meetings,
or cast ballots. They had to lose their fear,
show open support for the demands they'd chosen
themselves, and learn to make management listen
to those demands by slowing down lines,
circulating petitions and forming delegations to
demand changes. Those battles hardened the
leaders who survived.
And if African American and Latino
immigrant workers hadn't found a way to work
together, the union drive would have ended with
the immigration raids. Immigration enforcement
was used to attack the union drive, and for
months after the no-match letter and the two
raids, the organizing campaign was effectively
dead. At Smithfield and elsewhere, enforcement
of immigration law itself has become a way to
punish workers when they try to improve
conditions. It was only when the African
American workers who'd fought the first battle
for the King holiday became the core of a new
generation of leaders that the struggle to build
the union could continue. Immigration raids
didn't help Black or other citizen workers - they
increased the fear, reduced the activity,
eliminated leaders, and added months, if not
years, to the time needed to rebuild.
In the end, both African Americans and
immigrant workers found a common interest in
better wages and working conditgions. But they
also had to agree to defend the right of each
worker to her or his job - any unfair firing was
an attack on the union, whether the victim was
Black, Mexican, or Puerto Rican. If the company
and ICE had been successful in convincing half
the plant that the other half really had no right
to work because of their immigration status,
workers would have been unwilling and unable to
defend each other.
The root of the problem lies in employer
sanctions, the provision of Federal law that
prohibits employers from hiring undocumented
workers. The law, in effect makes working a
crime for people without papers, and hands
employers a weapon to fight their own workforce.
When unions decided at the AFL-CIO convention in
1999 to call for repeal of sanctions, they
recognized that changing immigration law was just
as necessary for organizing unions as passing
reforms like EFCA.
Outside the Tarheel plant, the union grew
roots in working-class communities. It organized
a permanent coalition with churches and community
organizations, not just a temporary arrangement
of convenience. It became part of workers'
lives. They met in its office, took English
classes there, and marched in demonstrations for
civil rights. And that coalition was able to
turn the company's anti-labor activity against
it, exposing its record in the place where
Smithfield was most vulnerable - in the eyes of
consumers.
Without pressure from workers and their
communities, Smithfield had no motivation to
reach an agreement on a fair election process.
The election result, therefore, was the product
of a long-term organizing effort and commitment.
Smithfield workers and the UFCW have shown that
with a similar commitment organizing is possible,
no matter how big the plant or anti-union the
employer. But it takes a strategy based on
building a real union in the workplace and
community. And with changes in labor and
immigration law, workers won't have to conduct a
15-year war to do it.
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org
Just out from Beacon Press:
Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates
Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002
See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575
See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the
U.S./Mexico Border (University of California,
2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
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David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
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