http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/spe ... 70810.html

Nov. 30, 2006, 11:01PM
Immigrant crackdown may aid union drive
Slaughterhouse workers walk out after recent firings


By ERIN GARTNER
Associated Press

TAR HEEL, N.C. - For Hector Pizzaro, it wasn't the rigors of a bloody workday spent slicing freshly killed hogs along an assembly line that led him to walk off the job. It was the chance he might lose that job.

The Mexican immigrant was among about 1,000 mostly Hispanic employees who staged a two-day walkout in November, upset that Smithfield Foods fired 50 or so people in a crackdown on undocumented workers at the world's biggest hog slaughterhouse.

Pizzaro, speaking in Spanish, warned that if Smithfield fires any more workers, "we'll go again."


Opportunity for union
Union officials who have struggled without success for more than a decade to organize the plant quickly threw their support to the Hispanic workers, recognizing that the crackdown and others like it around the country represent a new opportunity for the labor movement to boost membership.

"It is interesting that they're taking this on and doing it in such a way, sort of out there as the defender of the undocumented worker," said Richard Herd, a professor of labor studies at Cornell University. "They're looking for a way to get more members, and this may be a way for them to make an effective challenge."

Much of the recent immigration boom in North Carolina and other states is driven by jobs like those at Smithfield.

In 2003, the latest year for which numbers are available, 42 percent of meat and poultry workers in the U.S. were Hispanic, and about a quarter of those were non-citizens, according to a government report.

The slaughterhouse jobs are demanding and can appear brutal to an outsider.

Dashawn Johnson said he gets paid $12 an hour to stun hogs. Another worker stabs the animals in the neck to kill them and sends them down an assembly line where co-workers hook, de-hair, slice, refrigerate and package 32,000 hogs a day.


'Blood on my face'
"I didn't expect all the blood, getting on my face and stuff," said Johnson, pointing to dried blood spots on the chest of his heavy jacket and above his calf-high rubber boots.

The workers are bunched tightly, 25 to a side around the assembly line, working with both regular and electric knives, said Gene Bruskin, an organizer with the Food and Commercial Workers union.

The speed of the line demands hundreds of cuts per hour, made with same precise motion, he said.

For years, the union has called those conditions unsafe. But the more than 5,000 workers at the plant in this little town about 85 miles southeast of Raleigh twice voted against forming a union in the 1990s.

On Thursday, the company said it would help pay for an outside observer to monitor a new union election at the plant — an offer it has made before.


Success in Houston
Unions have had recent success organizing immigrants elsewhere.

In November, the Service Employees International Union reached an agreement with five major cleaning companies in Houston, ending a monthlong strike. The union organized the 5,300 janitors last year, and the recent agreement guarantees higher wages, medical benefits and more work hours.