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Now
In March, Smithfield Foods was named--for
the fourth consecutive year--one of "America's Most Admired
Companies" by Fortune magazine. Fortune said
it made its rankings after polling "10,000 executives, directors
and security analysts."
For sure, they didn't ask Smithfield
workers for their opinion.
There's no doubt that Smithfield
knows how to make money. The Tar Heel plant is the largest--and
one of the most profitable--pork slaughterhouses in the world.
Approximately 32,000 hogs a day are slaughtered--one every two
seconds on each eight-hour shift.
In fiscal year 2006, Smithfield's
worldwide operations generated sales of $11.4 billion and net
profits of $172.7 million. Those profits, according to workers,
union activists and human rights organizations, are built on
a continued legacy of brutal conditions--including low wages,
long hours, few benefits, dangerous working conditions, anti-union
harassment and management-fostered racism.
According to the United Food
and Commercial Workers (UFCW), the base wage for workers at the
nonunion Tar Heel plant is just $8.60 an hour for some of the
most dangerous work in the country--and Smithfield has a reported
yearly turnover rate of nearly 100 percent.
Keith Ludlum, who has worked
the livestock line at the Tar Heel plant since July, and also
worked there for seven months in 1994 before being fired for
pro-union activity, described his workday in an interview.
"Those of us in livestock
report to work at a quarter to six and get started running hogs
up into the kill floor of the plant," he said. "Of
course, livestock is extremely messy, and it's made even worse
because they've got drains in the pen area and where the hogs
are stored at, which they refuse to unclog.
"So you get a pool of
hog feces and urine and water building up, and that gets splashed
on you when you're running the hogs up into the plant...There's
constantly people getting hurt there. Every day, there are people
getting hurt all over the plant."
The pace on the kill and cut
floors is incredibly fast. In 1999, during an unfair labor practices
trial, one Tar Heel plant manager testified that from the point
at which a hog is first "stuck," or bled, to the point
that its hair and viscera are completely removed, the fat pulled
from its carcass and the animal flash-frozen is "between
5 and 10 minutes, depending on if [the line] was backed up."
The remaining work of removing the skin and dismembering the
animal into hams, loins, ribs and other cuts takes place in just
five or six minutes more.
As Lance Compa and Jamie Fellner
of Human Rights Watch wrote in an editorial last year, "'Faster,
faster, get that product out the door!' is the industry byword.
The results are cuts, amputations, skin disease, permanent arm
and shoulder damage, and even death from the force of repeated
hard cutting motions. When injured employees seek workers' compensation
claims for their injuries, they are told, 'You got hurt at home,
not on the job.'"
One Smithfield worker described
the brutal pace of work in an interview with Human Rights Watch
in 2003: "The line is so fast that there is no time to sharpen
the knife. The knife gets dull, and you have to cut harder. That's
when it really starts to hurt, and that's when you cut yourself.
"I cut my hand at the
end of my shift, around 10:30 at night...I went to the clinic
the next day at 11 a.m. They gave me stitches and told me to
come back at 2:30, before the start of my shift to check on the
stitches. They told me to go back to work at 3 p.m. I never stopped
working."
According to Keith Ludlum,
when an injury occurs on the livestock line, "[management]
simply tells you to keep running the hogs. They want to keep
their production up. "There are tripping hazards and things
that they could correct. They choose not to, because they'd have
to spend money, and it would also slow down their production."
"The company basically
has an assembly line set up," he says, "and the human
beings are treated like machines. They're sitting there for eight
hours a day, and they don't even have the chance to wipe their
brow, because they're covered in hog feces or blood. They're
drinking from water coolers that other workers have been at who
are covered in hog feces and hog blood. They're hard working
people, and they are being abused and mistreated."
This disregard for workers'
safety has had deadly consequences at Smithfield. In November
2003, 25-year-old Glen Birdsong was killed after being exposed
to fumes from a vat of pig mucosa mixed with sodium bisulfite.
According to "Blood, Sweat
and Fear," a 2005 report from Human Rights Watch detailing
abuses in the packing industry, coworkers of Birdsong reported
that management "didn't tell him about the dangers, and
they didn't give him a safety belt to get pulled out of there
in case he fell in."
Smithfield was cited for safety
violations, but the North Carolina Division of Occupational Safety
and Health fined Smithfield just $4,323 for Birdsong's death--and
later applied a 25 percent "discount" to the fine for
the company's "basic" health and safety program, and
another 10 percent discount for "minimal employer disruption"
of the state's inspection of the site.
* *
*
SMITHFIELD HAS an extensive
anti-union history as well, which has often descended into physical
intimidation.
According to Ludlum, the management's
reaction to a UFCW organizing drive in 1994 "was extremely
violent. It was a stress on the workers. The company would constantly
harass and interrogate workers who were pro-union. Many workers
like myself were fired or forced to quit...Every time workers
have tried to stand up for their rights, they've been beat down,
arrested and their rights are violated."
According to "Blood, Sweat
and Fear," during a 1997 union organizing campaign, management
orchestrated an assault on and the arrest of union supporters,
in which local police beat, maced, handcuffed and arrested supporters
of the organizing campaign.
Smithfield's director of security
at the time, Daniel Priest, also held a position as a local deputy
sheriff--and was later found guilty of violating the "Ku
Klux Klan Act" for spitting at, beating, arresting and using
racial epithets against union supporters.
Moreover, until 2005, Smithfield
was allowed under a special state law to maintain its own private
police force and a special holding cell on site at the Tar Heel
plant. Smithfield officers were allowed to carry company-issued
guns and bullets, as well as concealed weapons.
Workers and union activists
say that the Smithfield company police were there to intimidate
workers who stand up for their rights. In 2003 and 2004, for
example, Smithfield posted armed police in the plant, saying
it had received bomb threats.
"It's all part of the
anti-union campaign to intimidate us and turn the plant into
an armed camp," one worker told Human Rights Watch at the
time. "For those of us from Central America, it is especially
frightening, because where we come from, the police shoot trade
unionists."
* *
*
SMITHFIELD'S TAR Heel plant
runs primarily off the labor of minority workers. More than half
of the workforce is Latino, many of whom are recent immigrants,
and nearly 40 percent is African American.
Smithfield management has a
long history of pitting workers against each other along racial
lines.
New York Times reporter Charlie LeDuff, who went
undercover at the plant in 2000, described the makeup of the
company: "Whites, Blacks, American Indians and Mexicans,
they all have their separate stations. The few whites on the
payroll tend to be mechanics or supervisors. As for the Indians,
a handful are supervisors; others tend to get clean menial jobs
like warehouse work.
"With few exceptions,
that leaves the Blacks and Mexicans with the dirty jobs at the
factory, one of the only places within a 50-mile radius in this
muddy corner of North Carolina where a person might make more
than $8 an hour."
According to "Blood, Sweat
and Fear," during the 1997 union drive, "Anti-union
consultants told Latino workers that the union was dominated
by Black workers, and that the organizing drive was really an
effort by African-Americans--the majority of employees at the
plant [at that time]--to get rid of Latino workers and take all
the jobs for Black people. They told the reverse to Black workers.
Management is still at it--as
its response to the recent wildcat strike shows, according to
Emma Herrera, executive director of the UFCW's Eastern North
Carolina Workers Center in Red Springs.
"What happened two weeks
ago was that it was mostly Latinos who walked out," Herrera
said. "The rumor inside the next day [was that management]
was saying, 'The Blacks are going to do the next strike, because
they want all the Latinos out.' That comes from the company.
They put that out against the workers."
Despite the concessions won
by the wildcat--including a halt to the wholesale firing of workers
with "no-match" discrepancies--Herrera predicts that
the issue could spur future walkouts and organizing in the coming
weeks.
Herrera says she has been receiving
calls from Puerto Rican employees who also received letters from
Smithfield about their immigration status. "But they are
Puerto Ricans--they are American citizens," she said. "My
question is: did the company really check the numbers and the
names? What's going on? Is this racism and discrimination because
they are Latinos?"
"I believe that they want
to punish the workers," Herrera said. "They want to
give them less, and let the company have the first word and the
last word."
Still, said Herrera, the walkout
at Tar Heel is significant because there was support for Latino
workers among other workers at the plant. "I think right
now, the workers are at a point where they're together,"
Herrera said. "They know from now on that they have to do
it together. And they've been doing it, but the company has been
working hard to divide the groups inside.
"Workers before that weren't
sure about the union have learned now that they have to do something
together."
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