Organize the South!

Smithfield Plant: Smash Anti-Union RICO Suit!

In an ominous move to break the contentious 14-year struggle by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) to organize the Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, the company brought a wide-ranging lawsuit against the union last October. In late January, a federal district court judge rejected a motion to dismiss the case, filed under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. If the company gets its way, it will set a dangerous precedent, equating union efforts to win public support for its organizing campaigns with attempted extortion. The RICO suit is a dagger pointed at the entire labor movement—it must be smashed by mobilizing workers in hard class struggle.

RICO was the main lever by which the capitalist state assumed sweeping powers in the 1990s over the Teamsters, the HERE hotel and restaurant workers and the Laborers unions, as well as a number of union district councils. Enacted in 1970 supposedly to fight gangland crime, RICO, as we described in “Hands Off the Teamsters!” (WV No. 474, 31 March 1989), “was designed to be a prime weapon against labor and the left.” Companies have invoked RICO in suits against numerous striking unions, including the United Mine Workers at Canterbury Coal and the Teamsters at Overnite Trucking, for confronting scabs and defending their picket lines. To pull together its suit against the UFCW, Smithfield hired one of the lawyers who helped write the RICO law. It has run daily TV ads on English and Spanish stations comparing UFCW organizers to Mafia thugs. For the bosses and their flunkies, unions are “criminal enterprises.”

The UFCW’s organizing campaign in Tar Heel has run up against the cops and courts—the core components of the capitalist state, which exists to defend the bourgeoisie’s rule and profits. Shotgun-wielding deputy sheriffs were present at the plant during the last union representation election in 1997. At the end of the vote count, amid a chorus of anti-black slurs, two union supporters were dragged out of the plant, beaten up and arrested by deputy sheriffs doubling as plant security. The goons were later rewarded with positions on the company’s police force, which was authorized by local authorities to patrol the plant from 2000 to 2005. They carried concealed weapons on and off duty and arrested and detained union activists in a jail cell in the plant. These goons remain at the plant as private security to terrorize the heavily black and Latino immigrant workforce.

Smithfield has been conspiring with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) to get rid of longtime workers and strong union supporters, many of them undocumented workers. Around the time that Smithfield workers joined national immigrant rights protests, idling the Tar Heel plant on May Day 2006, the company enrolled in the IMAGE program—the I.C.E. Mutual Agreement between Government and Employers—to purge militant “illegal” workers. In November 2006, it fired 75 workers and threatened to fire hundreds more, claiming that their identity information did not match government records. A two-day walkout that included black and white workers as well as Latinos forced the company to rehire everyone (see “Smithfield Walkout Saves Immigrants’ Jobs,” WV No. 881, 24 November 2006). As part of the nationwide anti-immigrant crackdown, I.C.E. agents raided the plant and workers’ homes in January and August 2007, arresting and hauling off dozens.

The raids sent shockwaves throughout surrounding Bladen County and the rest of eastern North Carolina. Fearing reprisals from la migra immigration authorities, at least 1,100 immigrant workers, most from Mexico, have left Smithfield since the start of last year, when Latinos comprised over half of the plant’s 5,200 employees. Three of the 28 workers arrested in the August raid were sentenced to 18 months in prison for using “fraudulent documents” to get their jobs, after which I.C.E. plans to deport them. Fifteen of the remaining workers are also being prosecuted.

In recent months, union organizers have been rushing to the trailers of immigrant workers facing arrest to ensure that someone can care for their children. Indeed, the union has a responsibility to defend the workers it is fighting to organize. What’s needed above all is to mobilize the social power of the union movement in defense of immigrant workers, fighting for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. This could be crucial for revitalizing the labor movement, as many immigrant workers bring with them a history of militant union struggle. Free the detainees! No deportations!

The struggle for immigrant rights must be linked with the fight against black oppression. This is key to organizing the open shop South, where “right to work” laws have historically been backed up by Klan terror. An organizing campaign at a Perdue poultry plant in Dothan, Alabama, failed in 1995 after a KKK-style cross-burning at the plant, with the cross bearing a union T-shirt. At Tar Heel, shortly before the 1997 vote, workers arrived at work and saw “N----r go home” painted on the side of the union trailer. Some 120 miles from Tar Heel, five union organizers and leftists—supporters of the Communist Workers Party—were gunned down at an anti-Klan rally in broad daylight on 3 November 1979. They were killed by Klansmen aided and abetted by the government, from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent who helped train the killers to the “former” FBI informant who rode with the Klansmen and the Greensboro cop who brought up the rear of their motorcade of death.

Smithfield managers have taken every opportunity to inflame racial and ethnic divisions. While blacks and Latinos work the dirty jobs, they are kept segregated from each other on the killing floor and processing lines. Soon after the 1997 vote, Smithfield began hiring immigrant workers in larger numbers, viewing them as vulnerable, to replace pro-union black workers. The fighting unity of black, Latino and white workers is key to organizing the Smithfield plant.

Smithfield has aggressively gobbled up dozens of competitors over the last decade. It is the number one producer and processor of pork in the world, controlling nearly one-third of the U.S. market. It operates plants across North America and Europe with sales of $12 billion last year. The largest is the one million square foot facility in Tar Heel, where 32,000 hogs are slaughtered every day. To meet company goals, the processing lines at the Tar Heel plant are kept moving dangerously fast. The punishing work leaves muscles burning and hands cramped from thousands of cutting motions every day. Despite incentive bonuses for managers to keep injury report rates low, the number of injuries on record has doubled in recent years, as workers suffer debilitating hand and repetitive-motion injuries, gashes, stab and cut wounds, even death. The company has an enormous annual turnover rate, a testament to the brutal working conditions.

Workers at the Tar Heel plant have repeatedly exhibited courage and combativity in the face of an enemy looking to chew them up and spit them out. When workers on the plant sanitation crew walked out one night in 2003 in protest over wages and working conditions, company cops assaulted them, arresting one and threatening to turn the others over to la migra. In 2005, another group of workers walked off understaffed lines, demanding management bring in more people for the production lines. Last summer, livestock workers carried out a sit-in protest to get regular access to clean drinking water. The protest occurred after state OSHA inspectors came in to investigate—by interrogating workers about their union sympathies. The walkout in defense of the immigrant workers in November 2006 was followed by a walkout of several hundred workers on Martin Luther King’s birthday. For the first time, the company this year recognized MLK Day as a paid holiday.

Yet this militancy is kept in check by UFCW officials committed to an impotent and diversionary “corporate campaign.” This losing strategy seeks to pressure the bosses and stockholders by building a public outcry based on moral indignation at the company’s anti-labor practices. America’s labor tops have by and large renounced the very means that built this country’s mass industrial unions: sit-down strikes to occupy the plants and keep out the scabs, mass picket lines that defy injunctions, and secondary labor boycotts. No amount of protest outside events for “celebrity chef” and Smithfield spokeswoman Paula Deen, resolutions condemning Smithfield from bourgeois politicians on city councils or consumer boycotts of Smithfield ham can replace getting Smithfield where it hurts: by shutting down production.

Smithfield is actually unionized in most locations outside of North Carolina; half of the more than 30,000 workers at its pork plants are organized. The Tar Heel plant is the only one of its large hog slaughterhouses that is non-union. In addition to the UFCW, there are unions representing Smithfield workers in France, Poland and Spain. A union leadership worth its salt would fight for union recognition by mobilizing joint actions by all Smithfield workers and coordinating international labor solidarity. A successful organizing drive in Tar Heel could serve as a springboard to organize the South and the meatpacking industry. It could also render the RICO lawsuit a dead letter.

That the UFCW’s “corporate campaign” could attract the support of then Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards last year underlines how toothless it is. Edwards was elected as a U.S. Senator from North Carolina in 1998 with the endorsement of the state AFL-CIO—while supporting the state’s “right to work” law, which has helped make North Carolina the least unionized state. Other bourgeois politicians, including the state Democratic Party executive committee and the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, have contacted Smithfield urging the company to talk to the union.

Tailing behind the union bureaucrats are the reformists in Workers World Party. They have uncritically pushed the corporate campaign, whose main goal is to secure a pledge of “neutrality” from Smithfield in the union organizing effort. Fat chance! Backed up by the capitalist state, time and again Smithfield has resorted to threats, confiscation of union material, racist intimidation, spying, physical assaults, arrests and firings to get its way. The RICO lawsuit is only the latest chapter.

Taking aim at the UFCW’s corporate campaign, the suit seeks $17 million in damages and court orders barring most of its activities. The union is cited for issuing press releases about the working conditions at Tar Heel, contacting civil rights and environmental groups for support, organizing protests, lobbying city governments and calling for boycotts. For decades, the labor tops have pointed to anti-labor laws like RICO as an excuse to not engage in hard class struggle and instead pursue legalistic corporate campaigns. Increasingly, the bosses have used these same laws to undercut the bureaucrats’ corporate campaigns. In 2006, Sutter Health hospitals won a $17 million verdict against UNITE-HERE for mailings sent out during the union’s corporate campaign against a vendor, Angelica Textile Services.

The starting point for any serious union organizing drive must be the understanding that this capitalist society is divided fundamentally between two hostile classes—the workers who have to sell their labor power and the capitalists who own the means of production. The interests of these classes are irreconcilably opposed. The labor tops are tied to the capitalist order, especially through their “friends” in the capitalist Democratic Party. They stand for collaboration with the bosses, not class struggle against them.

Playing by the bosses’ rules is a strategy for defeat. In 1985-86, hundreds of thousands of workers across the country were inspired by striking UFCW Local P-9 workers at Hormel in Austin, Minnesota, who defied the scabherding UFCW International and dispatched roving pickets. But the strike was sold out, as the local leadership put its faith in civil disobedience and consumer boycotts orchestrated by Ray Rogers, the pioneer of the corporate campaign. Instead of sitting down in the plant, workers were sitting down in the streets. In the end, 900 members of Local P-9 lost their jobs to scabs.

In the fall of 2003, the UFCW launched what was to become a bitter five-month-long strike by 60,000 grocery workers in Southern California. Over 280,000 other UFCW members in eleven states had contracts coming up while tens of thousands were working under expired contracts. But the UFCW tops isolated the Southern California workers by refusing to extend the strike nationally, and both they and Teamsters officials betrayed it by allowing the supermarkets’ distribution centers to re-open. The union officials instead pushed consumer boycotts, and the strike was defeated (see “UFCW Strike: A Battle for All Labor,” WV No. 819, 6 February 2004).

The ongoing battle to organize Smithfield’s Tar Heel plant is a key struggle for workers in the U.S. today. It cries out for a determined fight against the deep racial oppression and pervasive anti-black racism that exist in this country and for an active defense of immigrant rights. For this perspective to become a reality will require a sharp political struggle against the politics of class collaboration and to oust the sellout labor bureaucrats who tie the unions to the Democratic Party. It is necessary to forge a class-struggle leadership within the unions as part of the fight to build a revolutionary workers party. Capitalist exploitation and racist oppression will be ended only once the capitalist class is expropriated through socialist revolution.