Richmond Times Dispatch (Virginia), June 19, 2006, Monday

Copyright 2006 Richmond Newspapers, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Richmond Times Dispatch (Virginia)

June 19, 2006 Monday
Final Edition

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A-9

HEADLINE: Smithfield Employees Deserve Better Treatment...

BYLINE: Lance Compa

DATELINE: ITHACA, NEW YORK

BODY:
Richmond will be the launching site of a campaign unique in the largely anti-union South. Led by Richmond churches and civil rights activists, the effort aims to right a so-far unequal struggle of African-American workers and immigrant workers against the mammoth Virginia-based company Smithfield Foods.
The company has been found guilty of threats, violence, and other abuses against its workers. But so far, despite the workers winning in the courts, the legal system has failed to remedy these violations of their rights. That's what prompts the new campaign - and it is a story that has widespread implications.
One hundred years ago, the landmark book The Jungle by Upton Sinclair raised the nation's alarm over brutal, sweatshop conditions in the meatpacking industry. The outrage inspired national regulation of the industry. Yet today, in a massive meatpacking factory thousands of workers labor long hours for low pay in crowded, fast-paced, dangerous conditions.
"If we complain about injuries, they'll find a way to get rid of us," workers tell independent researchers in interviews away from the plant. "So we work with the pain."
MANY WORKERS report that employees who get serious injuries are fired; unable to find additional work because the injuries are so severe. Some have lost their homes and livelihood as a result. Workers' compensation and adequate health benefits, they say, are often denied.
Quizzed about this scenario, most scholars of international labor rights would say it likely happened in an authoritarian dictatorship. But these events took place right here in the United States, at the Smithfield Packing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. There, more than 5,000 workers kill and cut up some 30,000 pigs each day in the world's biggest hog-slaughtering facility.
It has become the quintessential modern-day symbol of The Jungle.
In a May ruling, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia cited Smithfield Packing for assaulting, threatening with deportation, intimidating, and illegally arresting its workers who have sought help from a trade union.
The court upheld several lower court decisions ordering the company to immediately cease and desist.
This is one of the few companies that had its own private police force that was found to have illegally arrested, threatened, and assaulted workers. Smithfield disbanded its police force last year following public pressure.
IN WHAT could prove to be a seminal choice, Smithfield workers decided not to wait for the courts. They have called on civil rights, religious, environmental, immigrant rights, and labor groups to help. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) is also investing its resources in supporting a national campaign starting in Richmond and in other cities where Smithfield has large retail sales. Its goal is to educate consumers about the working conditions behind their Smithfield breakfast bacon and Easter holiday ham.
Smithfield workers want the company to prosper in the marketplace. But they are asking the company to abide by the court decision, to find its moral compass, and allow the workers their voice.
THE TAR HEEL abuses are putting Smithfield's name and face on public concern about conditions in the meatpacking industry. The effort has important ramifications for organized labor in the South.
As the percentage of union-represented workers in the nation as a whole has fallen, trade unions find high barriers to Southern organizing efforts. "Right to work" laws and low union membership make the South often hostile territory to organizing. Nationally, the labor movement's impact on politics and legislation has faltered. Other industrialized countries with stronger labor movements have better working conditions for all employees, including greater safety standards, comprehensive health insurance, secure pensions, and other important benefits that U.S. employers are increasingly taking away from American workers. Securing health benefits and pensions would be a welcome outcome to the emergence of stronger unions here.
The UFCW is one of the country's largest unions. By leading a campaign for justice for thousands of Smithfield's employees, the union can be a trendsetter for the labor movement. By responding positively and respecting workers' freedom of association, Smithfield can show new leadership in the business sector. Together, they can make the meatpacking industry a place where workers earn good wages and benefits with decent working conditions - rather than becoming a symbol of workers' rights violations.
And it could augur a more aggressive - and much needed - stance in the labor movement that could benefit all workers.

Lance Compa teaches labor law and international labor rights at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations in Ithaca, New York. He is the author of the 2005 Human Rights Watch report "Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers' Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants."

GRAPHIC: PHOTO