Smithfield: Why comprehensive immigration reform is necessary for ALL workers

An important analysis of how AfroAmerican/Mexican/Puerto Rican workers forged unity, drawing in churches and community supporters plus mobilizing consumers to beat back a massive anti-union effort by Smithfield aided by ICE.

Unions Come to Smithfield

On Dec. 11, 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.

David Bacon
American Prospect
December 17, 2008 |

When immigration agents raided Smithfield Food's huge North Carolina
slaughterhouse two years ago, union 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. "Workers think
it's happening because people were getting organized," said Vargas at the
time.

Yet on Dec. 11, 2008, 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, St. Pauls, 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 and rejected the UFCW both times. 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. The union set up a workers' center in nearby Red
Springs, holding classes on 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 Oct. 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. The
following Thursday, more than 300 workers walked out in protest. 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 rehire the terminated
workers for 60 days. "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 work force. Union supporters
collected 4,000 signatures asking the company to give employees the day off
on the 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 more 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.

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 work force 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.
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 and into the break rooms, handing out the
information to their co-workers.

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 also let workers take the day off
in every nonunion 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 the plant
premises, and organizers were able to walk the halls themselves and 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 work
force. 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, despite 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 nonunion wages and
conditions at Nissan, Honda, and BMW. The presence of the nonunion 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,
and 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 conditions. 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 work force. 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.

***************

David Bacon is a writer and photographer, and associate editor for New
America Media. He is the author of "Illegal People" and "The Children of NAFTA" and sits on the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Committee of the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition.

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=unions_come_to_smithfield