Justice at Smithfield

Justice at Smithfield

The meat of the matter

The labor movement's future might hang on what happens at this
giant packing plant near the tiny town of Tar Heel.
By Frank Maley


With union membership continuing its long decline and representation of the U.S. work force dwindling — from 23% in 1983 to 13% in 2007 — the labor movement needs a big win. There would be no sweeter place to get it than North Carolina, the least unionized state in the nation. “This is one of the largest industrial plants in the South,” says Robert Korstad, associate professor of public policy studies and history at Duke University. “It’s symbolic to the union movement. If they’re able to win there, it sends a real signal to other workers in other industries.”

For Smithfield, a union in Tar Heel could expose the Achilles’ heel of the business model that made the company the world’s largest hog producer and pork processor. “They figure if they can get that done, it will be a catapult into other industry in North Carolina and South Carolina,” says Joe Luter IV, president of The Smithfield Packing Co., the subsidiary that runs the plant. “Then they’ll move on down the Southeast into Georgia, Alabama, etcetera.”

“If the labor movement can’t win the South, we can’t succeed,” Gene Bruskin, director of the union campaign, told Labor Notes magazine, adding: “The Tar Heel plant is big enough and important enough and close enough to other places that it has the possibility of moving other people. The possibilities of organizing packinghouse workers would be transformative to the labor movement, for immigrants, for African American workers, for the South.”

The UFCW has been trying to organize the Tar Heel plant since 1992, the year it opened. There have been longer campaigns in North Carolina and a few that involved more workers, says James Andrews, president of the state AFL-CIO in Raleigh. “But at least in recent history, I can’t think of a worse situation.” Hourly employees twice have voted on whether the union would represent them, and twice the union has lost. It claims the company won by coercion — charges backed by a court decision and the National Labor Relations Board, which has ordered a new election.

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