SMITHFIELD PACKING, INTIMIDATION, AND THE COMPANY POLICE

Smithfield Packing is the world’s largest producer of pork and its factory in Tar Heel, North Carolina is the world’s largest pork processing plant. The Tar Heel facility, located in one of the most economically depressed regions of North Carolina, employs over 5,000 workers and slaughters more than 34,000 hogs a day, 2000 an hour, 33 a minute in their factory off Highway 87 in Bladen County.

Approximately 55% of the workers at Smithfield are Latino, 30-35% are African American, and the rest of the workers are roughly half White and half Native American. All are hardworking people seeking to bring themselves, and in many cases their families, out of the grinding poverty that pervades the surrounding area. People work at Smithfield because its starting pay rate of just over $8 an hour is slightly higher than the 5 and $6 an hour jobs that are available elsewhere, if any are available at all. Yet, those wages (and many other protections and benefits) are paltry in comparison to those realized by workers doing the same jobs at unionized Smithfield plants elsewhere in the country and throughout the world. In fact, 19 of those factories in the United States employ workers who are members of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) International Union, AFL-CIO.

It’s no surprise that Smithfield workers have been fighting to form a union for more than ten years. It’s also no surprise that the company has fought the effort, but the extreme nature of the response is shocking: threats of retaliation for workers who support the union, harassment and intimidation of union supporters, spying on union activists, threatening cuts in wages and benefits should a union be elected in the plant, and even going to the point of firing union activists for their pro union advocacy, a clear violation of the National Labor Relations Act. Smithfield Packing Co., 344 NLRB __ (2004). Perhaps the most glaring illustration of Smithfield’s labor relations strategy is the presence of their own private police force of just over a dozen armed officers (with co. issued bullets and guns and concealed weapons able to be carried on and off duty) with arrest power and a jail cell at the plant. It is the only such force at a meatpacking plant in the United States.

The advent of this throwback to the era of Pinkerton detectives is an evolution from earlier events. In 1997, the Bladen County Sheriff Department was on site with lights flashing during the union election. The end result was a riot in which union supporters were beaten and the current chief of the company police, Danny Priest, was found guilty of violating the Ku Klux Klan Act for spitting, beating, arresting, and calling union supporters “niggers.” The union also lost the election although the results were later overturned by the National Labor Relations Board. Id.

With the county no longer offering its assistance, Smithfield created the private force to do its dirty work. Since its formation, the Smithfield Company Police have arrested nearly ninety people. In 2003 workers at QSI Inc., a subcontractor that does sanitation in the plant, walked off their jobs in an attempt to improve working conditions. The police assaulted these workers, even falsely arresting one of them. QSI, Inc., NLRB (2005). In 2004, two union supporters were arrested, paraded through the plant in handcuffs, detained for 7 hours (without being allowed to make a phone call, even to make sure that their children were safe), and falsely charged with arson. The charges were later dropped by the Bladen County prosecutor because there was no evidence of any wrongdoing. Most importantly, these acts of intimidation are violating the civil rights of over 5,000 people and effectively denying them the ability to exercise rights guaranteed to them as workers in the United States and the state of North Carolina.

The workers who have been violated are tired of being denied the dignity and respect that they deserve. The UFCW will be launching a campaign to urge Smithfield to disband its police force. Activists from Atlanta to Washington, D.C. will be calling for Justice at Smithfield, but the campaign will launch in Raleigh, NC. Workers from the plant will testify before a distinguished panel of political leaders, ministers, academics, and community activists and demand that Smithfield respect their rights.