The Struggle at Smithfield and Beyond- An Essay on today's Labor Movement

In 1906, U.S. author Uptown Sinclair exposed to the world the horrors immigrant workers faced in the meatpacking plants of Chicago’s Union Stock Yards. The public outcry following Sinclair’s expose led to inspection of the industry and the creation of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which was meant to protect the integrity of U.S. meatpacking in the eyes of millions. However, it was the 1930’s surge of industrial unionism and the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the sharp class battles during that period that meatpacking workers actually experienced a significant rise in living standards and the right to join or form a union.

Today’s labor movement is a different story. The U.S. labor movement has been in a full-scale retreat since the late 1970’s. Union membership is at an all time low: just 12.5 percent of public wage and salary workers belong to one (Smith x). This has to do with several factors, the growing bureaucratization of U.S. unions, the unwillingness of labor leaders to adapt to the structural changes in the world economy, and the union leaders overall strategy of business partnership.

To argue what it will take to rebuild the labor movement in this country is a task well beyond the scope of this essay. However, by focusing on a struggle-taking place at the largest pork processing plant in the world, Smithfield Foods Tar Heel plant, I want to show what is at stake and what are the challenges facing the entire U.S. labor movement. The struggle for unionization and workers’ solidarity at the Tar Heel plant has been occurring for over a decade. It is important to understand what is taking place here because it highlights several important factors that the labor movement can learn from. First, Smithfield’s Tar Heel plant is located in the south (North Carolina) where historically, the labor movement has failed to organize workers. Secondly, the racial composition of workers at the Tar Heel plant are white, Black and Latinos. This has historically made it harder for workers to organize since employers have used racism as a key way to pit workers against each other. Thirdly, many of the Latino workers are also undocumented, which makes the issue of immigration and immigrant’s rights key to this struggle. Lastly, the meatpacking industry has never been more central to the U.S. economy, they are “responding to the demands of the fast food and supermarket chains” all across the United States (Schlosser 149). The battle that is occurring in Smithfield, i.e. the struggle of white, Black and immigrant workers to form a union and, resist “no match” immigration firings will be crucial to rebuilding a strong labor movement.

Since the 1960’s the meatpacking industry has experienced a massive expansion and growth, while simultaneously there has been a decline of unions and workers wages, this is no coincidence. (Horowitz 245). Traditionally, being a meatpacker was considered a well paying blue-collar job, which provided a stable income and a union. In fact, meatpackers after World War II exceeded the national average for workers in manufacturing (Schlosser 153). However, the meatpacking industry was about to experience a massive structural adjustment starting from the shop floor. In 1961, Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) opened up its first slaughterhouse in Denison, Iowa, in what was to be known as the “IBP revolution.” This is important for several key reasons. First, the plant was situated in a location outside the traditional union bastions, like New York, Chicago or Minnesota. The bosses understood that in order to compete with other industry giants, their plant needed to remain union free. Secondly, IBP eliminated the need for “skilled” workers in the process of meat production. This is how Eric Schlosser, in his muckraking work Fast Food Nation, describes the plant:
The new IBP plant was a one-story structure with a disassembly line. Each worker stood in one spot along the line, performing the same simple task over and over again…The gains that meatpacking workers had made since the days of The Jungle stood in the way of IBP’s new system, whose success depended upon access to a cheap and powerless workforce. (156)

Using cheap labor on an assembly line to turn sides of beef into ready-to-sell cuts, the company simultaneously de-skilled meatpacking, ran the unions out, and made skilled union butchers who worked in grocery stores obsolete. The “IBP revolution” was going to have a huge impact to the rest of the industry. In fact, it set the standards for the next decades. An example of the impact of the “IBP revolution” was the labor struggles in 1979 between Monfort executives and Greeley workers. Monfort wanted to follow the path of IBP by slashing wages and applying tougher policy on labor unions. Greeley workers who were represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) understood what was underway, and decided to strike. Monfort began to hire scabs and hire thugs to beat up and intimidate striking workers, while president Ken Monfort decide to purchase a new slaughterhouse in Nebraska, from Swift & Company (Schlosser 157). The outcome of this struggle was disastrous for workers. After Greeley workers decided to work without a contract, Monfort closed the plant and fired all workers and in his new plant began to hire undocumented workers. This move allowed him to pay low wages, have access to large numbers of workers, and to prevent unions from organizing the workers. Today the basic pay is $9.25 an hour, if this adjusted by inflation, today’s wages is more than a third lower than when the plant opened forty years ago (Schlosser 160).

These attacks on unions however, did not go down without a fight. The Hormel meatpackers’ strike, which lasted for fourteen months, fought against bosses attempt to slash wages and to create the now fashionable two-tier wage system that offers new hires much lower wages than current workers. When the 1,500 members of Local P-9 of the UFCW voted to strike, the national union was not happy about it. In fact, the national leaders did all they could do to undermine the strike and workers’ solidarity by calling the P-9 strikes a “plague” and arguing that Local P-9 “sought a better deal for Austin alone” (Smith 250). So much for an injury to one being an injury to all. The conflict at Hormel revealed the rank-and-file anger among packinghouse workers at the assault on their living standards. It also revealed the catastrophic role that the national leadership of UFCW played. This was also true for the whole labor movement in the 1980’s and onward. Instead of union leaders representing the mass anger that existed below, they discouraged working class militancy and workers’ solidarity across industry lines. The question that was at stake then and desperately more so today, is how do we combat the employers’ offensive and the overall shift of power from labor to capital. In the end, the national union took over Local P-9 and negotiated a new contract with the scabs that stole the jobs of the strikers, ending the strike in a blistering defeat.

The decline of unions and assault on workers allowed for the meatpacking industry to expand in huge proportions. Therefore, it was by 1983, the number of workers under master agreements in the industry had fallen to thirty-thousand, effectively leaving each slaughterhouse to fight for themselves (Horowitz 275). The effects of the decline in unionism in meatpacking were the increase in the pace of work and consequently a higher rate of injury. This is how Roger Horowitz in his excellent work “Negro and White, Unite and Fight” details the decline of industrial unionism in meatpacking:
Towns that lured packinghouses in hope of prosperity have found that the low wage levels have failed to provide a spur to the local economy; instead the poorly paid workers bring crime and increased demands on local services…The decline of industrial unionism reflected incessant pressure by capital for lower labor costs and more control over the work process. Companies that emerged victorious from the competitive scramble were those that most successfully increased the rate of exploitation of today’s makers of meat (279).

The increase of the rate of exploitation, the creation of “middle America” ghettos, the decline of job safety, the increasing number of debt in working class families, and decline of wages: all form part of the employer’s offensive and shift of class forces in the U.S. The quarter-century old retreat has left a trail of declining living and working standards for union and non-union workers alike. Unions as institutions, with some exceptions, have failed their members and proved unable to recruit new ones in sufficient numbers to slow down a deteriorating balance of class forces in American society that has created a capitalist class of super rich individuals whose wealth has never been greater in history (Moody 2). The result is a generation of workers that only know defeats. However, the systematic attack on workers living standards provides the recipe for acts of rebellions and resistance, which the labor movement sorely needs to organize.

The struggle at Smithfield is part of the acts of rebellion from below that will be crucial to increasing the confidence of other meatpacking workers and rebuilding the labor movement through clashes with bosses. The United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) has been trying to unionize Smithfield workers since 1994. The battle has featured two attempts, in 1994 and 1997, for workers to vote for whether or not they want to be represented by a union. However, workers have often testified that the company continually harasses and interrogates workers who show signs of being pro-union (Colson 8). In the 1997 campaign, management beat up, maced, handcuffed and arrested union activist and supporters in an effort to send a message to all of Smithfield workers. (Human Rights Watch 85). Smithfield executives fear the organization of their workers into a union, after all Smithfield generated over $172 million in profits in 2006 alone (Colson 8). These profits are coming straight from the backs of workers, who work for low wages in horrible conditions, brutal long hours, few benefits, and face anti-union harassment. The Tar Heel plant primarily runs off the labor of immigrant workers and African Americans, and small number of whites. New York Times Reporter Charlie LeDuff writes in his article: “At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die; Who Kills, Who Cuts, Who Bosses Can Depend on Race” how bosses use racism as a way to divide workers:

Whites, Black, American Indians and Mexicans they all have their separate stations…the few whites on the pay role tend to be mechanics or supervisors. As for the Indians, a handful are supervisors, others tend to get clean menial jobs like warehouse work. With few exceptions, it leaves the Blacks and Mexicans with the dirty jobs in the factory.

This is one of the challenges workers face—how to build a multi-racial struggle that’s build on a class basis. In order to win in Smithfield, workers will need to organize across racial barriers and understand that what they all have in common are the horrible working conditions that benefit the bosses.

Another challenge facing Tar Heel workers has been the assault on undocumented workers. In November 2006, 1,000 workers walked out of the Tar Heel plant in a wildcat strike to protest the firing of 75 workers whose social security number did not match the federal government’s data. The strike settlement was able to rehire the 75 workers and secure no penalties for striking. A 2003 study by the Center for Economic Development explains the role that these “no-match” letters have been having, “many workers identified in the letters have quit their jobs out of concern the immigration authorities might raid their workplace…evidence indicates that many employers have used the letters to undermine workers’ right to organize” (Harkin 10). The Smithfield wildcat strike is a model for how workers can respond to “no-match” letters. The aim of the ruling class in this country is to create a guest-worker program that will create a two-tier system of workers in this country that directly undermines worker’s solidarity. As a result, it will be easier to squeeze workers wages and it would effectively prevent immigrant workers from seeking roots into this country. This is why it is important for the labor movement and union leaders to fight against politicians so-called “comprehensive immigration reform.” Historically, workers of different races or nationalities have advanced together, or they have sunk together. That is why all workers and their unions should not only welcome immigrants into the labor movement, but they should support a real reform that legalizes millions of undocumented workers, without forcing them to accept the second-class category of “guest worker.”

The battle at the Tar Heel plant will prove to be challenging for workers. However, its success depends on the ability of the UFCW and Smithfield workers to take up the issues that are at the heart of this struggle, i.e. racism on the shop floor, immigrant’s rights and the ruthlessness of the meatpacking industries drive for profit. All of these issues need to be confronted on an industrial wide basis, workers at Tyson, which is the world’s largest meat producer, should know what their brothers and sisters are facing in North Carolina. The 1,100 workers at the six Swift and Co. meatpacking plants that were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last year should not be left to fight their struggles alone. Workers’ solidarity across the meatpacking industry will be key to fighting their greedy bosses and Smithfield is just one piece of that struggle.







Works Cited
Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers' Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants. Human Rights Watch. New York City: Human Rights Report, 2005.

Colson, Nicole. "Smithfield Food's Rotten Record." Socialist Worker 16 Dec. 2006, 613 ed.: 8-9.

Harkin, Shaun, and Nicole Colson. "Walkout At Tar Heel." International Socialist Review 1 (January-February 2007): 9-11.

Horowitz, Roger. "Negro and Whote, Unite and Fight!" a Social Histroy of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-1990. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois P, 1997.

Leduff, Charlie. "At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die; Who Kills, Who Cuts, Who Bosses Can Depend on Race." New York Times 16 June 2000. < res="9E07E7DF1E3EF935A25755C0A9669C8B63" res="9E07E7DF1E3EF935A25755C0A9669C8B63">.

Moody, Kim. U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition: the Failure of Reform From Below and the Promise of Revival From Below. New York City: Verso, 2007.

HYPERLINK "http://www.easybib.com/products/mbp_parens.php"
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: the Dark side of the All-American Meal. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001.

Smith, Sharon. Subterranean Fire: History of Working Class Radicalism in the U.S. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006.
HYPERLINK "http://www.easybib.com/products/mbp_parens.php"

On the Picket Line: Fresh Direct

The online grocery store Fresh Direct has joined countless other companies using the racist backlash against immigrants to thwart attempts of workers to organize.


Fresh Direct, a company that made $240 million in profits in 2006, has been battling both the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and the Teamsters Local 805 since 2006.


With a scheduled union ratification vote December 22-23, Fresh Direct told workers at their plant in Long Island City, Queens, that federal officials planned to check their immigration status and demanded that workers bring their documentation to work.


This led to undocumented workers walking off the job out of fear of being reported to immigration authorities. More than 250 workers didn't show up to work the next day, creating a state of fear and panic in a plant of 900 workers.
Javier Guzman, a former worker in the plant, who is now an organizer for UFCW Local 348-S, told me that “workers inside the plant are scared; management has told workers that it is the union's fault that the firings occurred.”
Some plant workers have drawn the conclusion that the union is to blame. This was evident during a community rally on December 20 in front of the plant. Dozens of workers watched the rally wearing “Vote No” pins, and jeered at the mention of the union.


Conditions inside the plant are staggeringly bad. Warehouse employees at the company often work 13-hour shifts in 30-degree temperatures for $7.50-9.75 per hour, while most unionized warehouse workers in New York City earn $10-20 an hour. Guzman also reported how management has been able to pit workers against each other by their race--putting Black supervisors to look after a section of the plant with Latino workers, while white supervisors oversee a section of the plant with Black workers.


In the end, with 500 plant workers participating in the election, 426 voted against unionization, with 73 in favor. The pro-union votes were split between Teamsters Local 805 and UFCW Local 348-S.


The UFCW has been trying to organize the plant since November 2006. José Merced, Local 348-S organizer, said that the struggle at Fresh Direct has just begun. “There can only be fair elections once Fresh Direct stops its anti-immigrant tactic of dividing workers and intimidating pro-union workers” he said.

Showing day laborers have the power to fight

An organizer on workers taking a stand for their rights
CARLOS CANALES is the day labor organizer of the Workplace Project in Hempstead, N.Y., on Long Island. Carlos fled El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s and became a well-known organizer in New York. He talked to ALVARO LOPEZ about the conditions that immigrant day laborers face and how they have organized.
CAN YOU talk about what conditions were like for day laborers before there was a workers’ center?
IT HASN’T changed too much. We can say that for day laborers who are on the official side, there are some differences. The most important difference is that contractors tend to respect day laborers more when they’re in a workplace center we’ve organized than when they pick them up on the street.
The majority of the nonpayment of workers that we see here every week--I’d say 99 percent of it--is workers who are on the streets. They’re not coming from our workers’ centers.
That would be the most concrete difference. But there are other differences. For instance, workers in the workers’ center are more organized. They participate in the process of improving their condition or quality of life.
There’s only one rule that you hear me repeat over and over again every day when I go visiting: “You do not have to obey rules that are coming from outside the trailer. You have to disobey any rules that are imposed on you.”
You have to create your own rules--you have to create your own government here. Whatever’s happening at this trailer, you have to know what’s going on. If you don’t want to participate, that’s okay, but you have to ask whoever the coordinator or organizer is. Nothing that’s happening can be secret. It must be open.
HOW DO you organize workers’ centers?
MOST OF the time, workers call the workers’ center. We usually go to visit the place and we start a long process, visiting every day to establish relationships with the majority of people, because it may have been two or three who called on behalf of the others.
They’ll have a big meeting, and we’ll elect a board of workers. They are five or six workers, representing the rest. So after that, we train the new ones about what to say to the press, what not to say to the press, how we are going to face the issues, what the issues are.
Once they’re trained, in many cases, they realize they don’t have the power by themselves to change what they want to change. Politicians know that they don’t vote. So how will the gringo listen to us?
Sometimes they say that we’re immigrants, and they won’t pay attention to us. Then we go look for support before we go to negotiations with local authorities. We visit churches, identify people who’ll be in support of the workers, and then we organize a group of supporters to support the day laborers and a workers’ center.
The day laborers begin a steady process of negotiations, asking local authorities to assign an official place where they can stand and wait for contractors. So that the media and the authorities know that they have a place to stay, and the police from now on won’t come to bother them.
Also in the workers’ center, there are other complementary benefits, like English as a Second Language, computers to use, workshops on basic labor rights, heath information about things like TB, immigration courses, and any other workshop that people want.
Every Friday, we have general assemblies with workers, because the maximum authority is with the workers. They have to do the deciding in an open meeting. So they can debate and everybody can give opinions and vote.
HOW DID the contractors respond? Have you had run-ins with the Minutemen?
IT DEPENDS. Here in Long Island, in Nassau County, the most difficult place that we’ve found to organize labor is Farmingdale. In Suffolk County, it’s Farmingville. In Farmingville, it has been impossible to organize a working center because there are a lot of people who are anti-immigrant.
In Farmingville, you have Sachem Quality of Life, a group of local residents who are organizing, and their only purpose is to target day laborers. They were protesting at a 7-11 to stop contractors from picking up day laborers. They told the contractors to go to the Department of Labor.
They’ve done a lot of other things, like passing legislation that will prohibit contractors from picking up day laborers on the street. The last thing they did was lobby Steve Levy, the executive of Suffolk County, and made him order the police to arrest any day laborers standing at that 7-11 for more than 30 minutes.
IS SACHEM Quality of Life part of the Minutemen?
THEY ARE the Minutemen.
THERE HAVE been some counter-protests against the Minutement, right?
THERE WAS a counter-protest against Sachem last December, when they came to Massapequa.
Last year, the Minutemen targeted the border with Mexico. Then, by December, they changed their target and said the new target would be day labor. So they came to New York State.
By last summer, they came to Massapequa to recruit people, supposedly to patrol the border with Canada. But then in December, they came to protest day labor sites. They were just 6 or 7, and we got about 50 or 60 local residents.
WHAT ROLE would you like to see day laborers play in the immigrant rights movement?
A LOT of day laborers in the future will make a transition to more permanent jobs. So after some five or 10 years, they stop being day laborers.
They participate in the immigrant rights movements--in the rallies. If a good law is passed, which is improbable, maybe they will be assimilated into the community, build families and stay here. A lot of them want to stay here and live here.

ICE is “trying to scare the community"

June 8, 2007
THIRTEEN GUATEMALAN immigrants are the victims this time in yet another Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid in New York City.
On May 20, about a dozen ICE agents rushed into a Brooklyn apartment, allegedly looking for an “Oscar.” Nobody with that name was found, but agents demanded that everyone in the apartment present valid identification. Of the 15 people in the apartment, all but Obispo Lopez and his 16-year-old son Nehemias were detained.
As Lopez told the El Diario newspaper, “They asked us for our papers, and I showed them my identification from the Guatemalan consulate, and the others did as well, but they took them anyway. They didn’t even let them take anything or get dressed.”
Lopez, a construction worker, says the agents took away two of his sons, Evijoel and Avimail, and his son-in law, Alvaro Juarez. As of now, there is no word where the men are being held, but the family has received a phone call saying that they are in good condition.
The day after the raid in the largely immigrant neighborhood of Bensonhurst, people were concerned for the fate of the detainees, and for their own safety. ICE officials say the raids are designed to detain “criminals,” or those who have ignored final deportation notices. But the May 20 raid isn’t an isolated one.
“This is the third time there’s been a raid in this neighborhood,” Benny Hernandez, who owns a small deli across the street from the apartment where the Guatemalan immigrants were detained, said in an interview. “The raid before this, they left children behind and deported one of the parents.
“They’re attempting to scare the community...People who just want to work will be terrified to do that.”
Others in the community know firsthand what it is like to have their lives disrupted. A mother of two said she remembered vividly a raid four months ago, in which the husband of a close friend was detained. Once again, ICE agents were looking for someone who either didn’t exist or no longer lived in the apartment. But five people in total were detained and deported back to Ecuador.
“Her husband is in Ecuador now, and they don’t know what to do,” the woman said. “I’m undocumented too, and I think it’s unjust to separate families. I live very close by, and I’m worried about my children. I don’t have any family here, so what happens if they take me? Who will take care of my children?”
Stories like these will only multiply as federal immigration authorities attempt to reach their goal of deporting 75,000 immigrants by the end of this year.
“The government has to be responsible for its actions,” says Maribel Lopez, an immigrant mother of two who also lives near the site of the Brooklyn raid. “I’ve seen people die of hunger in my native country. People come here to seek a better life and to see their children succeed, but this [proposed immigration legislation under consideration in the Senate] is unjust and doesn’t allow for us to settle.”
Currently, Obispo Lopez and Brooklyn Pastor Erick Salgado are working with the ACLU in New York to get legal services for the workers detained in Brooklyn and their families back in Guatemala. We need to continue building a grassroots response to the ICE raids, and demand an end to the deportations and a just immigration policy.
Luisa Gallego contributed to this report