Blacks and Immigrants Bring in the Union [ anti-union campaign went
down to defeat ]
http://www.truthout.org:80/122108B
When workers at Smithfield Foods' North Carolina packing house voted
in the union on December 11, the longest, most bitter anti-union
campaign in modern labor history went down to defeat. Sixteen years
ago, workers there began organizing with the United Food and
Commercial Workers. In 1994 and 1997, the union was defeated in
elections later thrown out by Federal authorities because the company
created an atmosphere of violence and terror in the plant. In 1997,
one worker was beaten after the vote count. Company guards were given
the ability to arrest workers, who were held in a detention center in
the plant they called the company jail. Many workers were fired for
union activity. And in recent years, immigration raids swept the
plant
in the middle of the union drive, adding to the climate of
intimidation.
It was no surprise then, that the pro-union vote (2,041 to 1,879)
set off celebrations in house trailers and ramshackle homes in Tar
Heel, Red Springs, Santa Paula, and all the tiny working class towns
spread from Fayetteville down to the South Carolina border. Relief
and
happiness are understandable in this state, where union membership is
the lowest in the country. But Smithfield workers were not just
celebrating a vote count. Their victory was the culmination of an
organizing strategy that accomplished what many have said U.S. unions
can no longer do - organize huge, privately-owned factories.
Five thousand people work in the world's largest pork
slaughterhouse, where they kill and cut apart 32,000 hogs every day.
Efforts by the modern U.S. labor movement to organize factories the
size of the Tar Heel plant have not been very successful for the last
two decades. In fact, private-sector unionization has fallen below 8
percent of the workforce. 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,
in spite of efforts by the auto union.
The price for labor's failure to organize Japanese plants became
clear in December's Congressional debate over the auto bailout
proposal. Southern Republican senators demanded that the United Auto
Workers agree to gut its union contracts to match the non-union wages
and conditions at Nissan, Honda and BMW. The presence of the non-
union
plants threatens to destroy the union, and the same dilemma exists in
industry after industry.
Unions pin their 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 at Smithfield in 1997, where
workers voted in an atmosphere of violence and terror. EFCA would
also
put penalties on employers who fire workers for union activity. At
Smithfield, the company rehired in 2006 workers it fired for union
activity in 1994. But it was only obliged to pay the 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. The union at Smithfield wasn't created on election day.
Workers had already organized it in the battles that preceded the
vote. They did much more than sign union cards. They had to lose
their
fear, and show open support for the demands they'd chosen themselves,
like lower line speed to reduce injuries, rehiring workers fired
because of their immigration status, or giving workers a paid holiday
for Dr. King's birthday. Packinghouse laborers then had to learn to
make management listen to those demands by circulating petitions and
forming delegations to demand changes.
The union strategy relied on organizing resistance to
immigration-
related firings, and uniting a diverse workforce of African
Americans,
Puerto Ricans and immigrant Mexicans. In 2007, Immigration and
Customs
Enforcement agents and company managers cooperated in two immigration
raids that produced a climate of terror organizer Eduardo Pena
likened
to "a nuclear bomb." Immigrant workers left the plant in droves. The
Smithfield raids were two of many in recent years, used to punish
workers when they've tried to improve conditions.
The plant's citizen workers felt the effects along with the
immigrants. For months afterwards, the organizing campaign was
effectively dead, with many leaders deported and union activity
halted
by fear. It was only when African American workers who'd fought to
win
the King holiday became the core of a new generation of leaders that
the struggle to build the union could continue.
If Black and Latino immigrant workers hadn't found a way to work
together, the union drive would have ended with the raids. And if the
company and ICE had succeeded in convincing half the plant that the
other half really had no right to work because they lacked legal
immigration status, workers would have been unwilling and unable to
defend each other. In the end, both groups 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, and treat any
unfair firing as an attack on the union, whether the victim was
Black,
Mexican, or Puerto Rican.
The Smithfield firings were made possible by employer sanctions,
the Federal law that prohibits employers from hiring undocumented
workers. The law makes working a crime for people without papers, and
became the pretext for firing immigrant union leaders. That's why the
AFL-CIO voted in 1999 to call for the law's repeal. The Smithfield
raids show that changing immigration law is as necessary for
organizing unions as passing reforms like EFCA.
Outside the Tar Heel plant, the union grew roots in working-class
communities, and became part of workers' lives. They took English
classes in its office and marched in demonstrations for civil rights.
That coalition turned the company's anti-labor actions against it,
exposing its record in the place where Smithfield was most vulnerable
- in the eyes of consumers.
The election result was the product of a long-term organizing
effort and commitment. With a similar commitment, other unions can do
the same, 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. That's what workers did at Smithfield.
And with changes in labor and immigration law, workers won't have
to conduct a 15-year war to accomplish the same goal.
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