Amnesty Magazine


Hog-Tied

Battling it out (again) at Smithfield Foods

The workers are mostly immigrant, often undocumented; the work is dangerous; the employer, the country's largest pork processor, has a record of union-busting and fostering racial division. The stage is set for another organizing drive.

BY KRISTAL BRENT ZOOK

Kristal Brent Zook is the author of Color By Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television. She is an adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia University and a freelance journalist.

Just off rural Highway 53 in White Oak, N.C., sits a modest trailer home with Spanish soap operas playing from a TV on the kitchen counter. Inside, Evelyn Ortiz (not her real name) cooks lunch for her uncle and son in the sweltering southern humidity. Other than a few scattered pieces of furniture, a large cardboard box, and two kittens sprawled out on the floor, the house is empty.

“Pasen,” Ortiz says, politely inviting the two men at her door to sit. José Bustos and Manuel Hernandez, organizers from the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union, are making their daily rounds to talk with workers about conditions at the Tar Heel, N.C. Smithfield Foods plant, the world’s largest hog processing facility. There, Smithfield employees toil to feed 32,000 hogs a day into a death-to-dismemberment-to-packaged pork assembly line. UFCW’s two previous Smithfield union drives have failed; its third effort is now under way.

Ortiz, her family and neighbors are among the increasing number of immigrant Latino workers in North Carolina doing the dirty, dangerous work of meatpacking. The labor demands of the industry are a key factor in the changing ethnic and racial demographics of today’s rural South. In 1990, some 76,000 Latinos lived in North Carolina, for example; a decade later, the number neared 400,000; now it is close to half a million.

At Smithfield’s Tar Heel plant, 85 percent of the 6,000 employees belong to ethnic minorities, according to Smithfield Foods spokesperson Jerry Hostetter; more than half are Latino. “The vast majority may have an issue with immigration,” according to Tom Clarke of the UFCW. Their immigration status, coupled with a lack of English language skills and ignorance of their rights, renders them particularly vulnerable to intimidation and exploitation. They face high injury rates, lack of job security, and manipulation by union-busting employers. To add to the mix, the Smithfield management also has a history of pitting Latinos against their African American coworkers.

Ortiz, a small woman from Chiapas, Mexico, covers the worn couch with a sheet for the visiting UFCW organizers and sets the air conditioner on high. She tells the organizers that she now works in “conversion”—the department where fatty meat is separated from lean pieces and boxed for shipment. The Japanese contracts for these expensive, fat-free pieces are among Smithfield’s most lucrative. Although Ortiz’s assignment still involves long hours of standing and repetitive manual labor, she is better off than when she worked in a 35 degree room with blood slicking the floor and animal parts coming at her at the rate of one every 17 seconds.

Her hours are now shorter, too, at 40 hours a week—not out of choice, but because she grew sick of being exploited. “I used to work 50-hour weeks,” she explains, “but I stopped because my checks were always short and there was nothing I could do about it.” James Blount, a former Smithfield supervisor who said he was fired after an injury, confirmed that company managers routinely set clocks back to cheat workers out of overtime pay. Workers can “clock out whenever,” says Blount, “but they only get paid for what a crew leader writes down.”

W orkers also complain about health benefits. As many as 20 percent of workers spend their first six months at Smithfield as temporary laborers hired by the Labor Ready agency. These workers are paid less than those hired directly by the company and get no benefits. Blount says that workers who do qualify for benefits are discouraged from receiving medical treatment for injuries by a policy that returns unused worker’s compensation funds as year-end bonuses. Those who do claim compensation can find that their papers suddenly attract company scrutiny for immigration irregularities, according to UFCW’s Clarke. And although workers are offered a health care plan, many can’t afford the $17.00 per week fee.

Hostetter disagrees, noting that his company recently built a “state of the art” medical center across the street from the plant where employees and families get free medical care. “We thought it’d be a terrific employee benefit.”

Yet the UFCW charges Smithfield with cutting corners on safety even as the company has reaped an average annual rate of return of 26 percent since 1975. Safety is a key concern in the current union drive. Throughout the meatpacking and poultry industry, low-wage, predominantly Latino immigrant workers suffer some of the highest injury rates in the nation. According to the UFCW, “hundreds of former Smithfield workers are permanently disabled and unable to find employment in eastern North Carolina.”

The state has cited and fined the plant several times for serious worker safety violations since it opened in 1992. Hostetter responds that no violations have occurred in the past four years, and that the company is proud of its safety record.

Smithfield’s record, however, is a matter of contention. In 2002, the Tar Heel plant logged only 425 injuries, a number that Jackie Nowell, director of the UFCW occupational heath and safety office, found suspiciously low. “Why are they reporting half the national average? I’m not going to say they are not reporting injuries, but it begs the question.” Hostetter attributes the low number to “our good safety practices.”

That record is in stark contrast to the general experience for Latino workers in North Carolina. The Charlotte Observer reported that in North Carolina, between 1998 and 1999, nonfatal injuries and illnesses among Latinos resulting in time away from work jumped about 19 percent. In 2000, injuries surged about 24 percent. At the same time, injuries for white, black, and Native American workers fell, while those for Asians rose only slightly.

José Sauceda, a Mexican immigrant, told a panel of U.S. representatives that his supervisors at Smithfield’s Tar Heel plant “were really hard on the workers, especially the immigrants who don’t speak English. My supervisor was making us work faster and faster, get out the product. I was rushing and I reached for a loin and I got my hand caught in the saw.”

Despite worker dissatisfaction over safety, pay, hours, security, and conditions, union organizers Bustos and Hernandez find that many workers are reluctant to openly support the union. After their visit to the Ortiz family, they go back to borrowed offices and hotel rooms to rank potential recruits: “one” for strong supporters and organizers, “two” for those who sign union cards, “three” for doubters, and “four” for hardcore objectors.

Few of the workers fall into category one, and Bustos and Hernandez blame a climate of fear and intimidation, both inside and outside the plant. It dates back, they say, to the earlier union drives, including a 1994 campaign in which the UFCW targeted the company’s smaller plant in Wilson, N.C., and narrowly lost. The union’s next attempt, three years later at the larger Tar Heel plant, was far more bitter and it, too, was ultimately unsuccessful.

During that 1997 campaign, the company moved four trailers onto plant property and pulled workers off the lines to attend meetings in them. Latinos went to one trailer and non-Latinos to others, said senior UFCW representative Randy Tiffey, over lunch at a local steakhouse where even an order of green beans was cooked with meat. “These were basically union busters, who would give their pitch to workers about not signing cards and then report back to the company who was pro-union.”

Smithfield attorney Will Allcott denies charges of union busting. “Smithfield does not invite unions into its plants, but if its employees vote for union representation, Smithfield will work with the union,” he wrote in an email response to questions posed by Amnesty Magazine. Allcott added that Smithfield would also do everything in its power to “educate its employees of the pros and cons of unionization, including the risk of strikes.”

Former supervisor Sherri Buffkin, the highest-ranking ex-employee to speak out against the company, saw the 1997 union drive from the inside and says that the company used illegal union-busting tactics: “We were told to fire anyone who advocated for the union,” she told Amnesty Magazine, repeating charges she made before a 1998 National Labor Relations Board hearing. In the wake of the failed union drive, Buffkin also told the board that after a Smithfield attorney found out that a worker in Buffkin’s section was pro-union, he told her, “Fire the bitch. I’ll beat anything she or they throw at me in court.”

Later, in testimony to the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in June 2002, Buffkin said: “I terminated employees who didn’t deserve to be terminated. I’m here to tell you that Smithfield Foods ordered me to fire employees who supported the union and that the company told me it was either my job or theirs. I’m here because Smithfield Foods asked me to lie on an affidavit [to the NLRB] and made me choose between my job and telling the truth.”

Smithfield fired Buffkin shortly before the NLRB hearing, and the company’s lawyers have consistently denied her charges that the company tried to bust the union. “She told the truth in her affidavits, and she lied on the stand,” Smithfield lawyer William Barrett told The National Law Journal.

The union-busting also took on a racial character, according to Buffkin, who said she was instructed to aggravate tensions between African American and Latino workers by giving Latinos the impression that the union was conspiring to replace them with an all-black workforce.

In a climate of rising unemployment—where Latinos, especially undocumented workers, have little leverage—the rumor carried a fearful resonance. There is always someone else willing to step in and take a job.

“[Smithfield] knew what they were doing,” says Tiffey, the union representative. “Smithfield came to a place with the highest poverty rate and highest unemployment in the state,” he says. “People here think $8 an hour is really making it because now they can get a double-wide [trailer] for $30,000.”

Whether or not Smithfield provoked black-Latino antagonism as Buffkin contends, its anti-union activities clearly overstepped a line. In December 2000, the NLRB ruled that Smithfield committed “egregious and pervasive” violations of workers’ rights during the 1997 election, including conspiring with law enforcement officials to instigate violence during the vote count, intimidating union supporters, and colluding with attorneys and company witnesses who lied under oath.

In addition, the NLRB granted reinstatement and back wages for 11 workers who were illegally fired during union campaigns. It also ordered the company to make several changes during any future campaigns.

Yet those NLRB mandates may never come to pass. First, because the decision is under appeal and will be considered by new NLRB members —Bush appointees. Second, because the First Circuit Court of Appeals, which would hear the case if the NLRB rejects the appeal, has a history of overturning NLRB rulings. And third, because in order for another vote to come to Tar Heel, the union will need signed cards from at least 30 percent of the workforce: a quota that is particularly difficult for the union to reach given the extremely high turnover of workers.

***

Back at the White Oak trailer home the following day, Evelyn Ortiz is cooking as Jorge, her 21-year-old son, returns from his morning commute to Fayetteville, where he is taking an English course at a community college. Jorge has just enough time for a quick lunch before beginning his 3 p.m. shift, during which he will wrench loins off of hanging hogs and sweat as though he were caught in a deluge.

“They say Latinos are all gonna get fired,” he offers. But when that day comes, he adds, “at least with the union, they can help us.”