http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01364.html

Union Rally Targets Smithfield Foods
Labor Recruiting Immigrant Worker

By Kari Lydersen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 21, 2006; A05


CHICAGO, June 20 -- Playing off the increased activism of immigrant rights groups, labor leaders said Tuesday that they are renewing efforts to organize some the nation's largest meatpacking plants where many immigrants work.

At a rally here that organizers said was the beginning of a series of demonstrations nationwide, labor leaders said they are targeting Smithfield Foods, one of the nation's largest meatpackers. A rally is scheduled in Washington on Thursday.

This city was once the center of the U.S. meatpacking industry, which has since shifted much of its operations to the South. Speaking at a rally in Chicago's largely defunct stockyards, North Carolina meatpackers said their working conditions have not improved in generations.

"The story is the same," said Rigo Valdez, an organizer with the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which has been trying for more than a decade to organize a Smithfield subsidiary, Smithfield Packing in Tar Heel, N.C. That facility is the world's largest pork processing plant, slaughtering about 32,000 hogs a day and employing about 5,500 workers. It has been cited for numerous violations by the National Labor Relations Board and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and was highlighted in a 2005 report by Human Rights Watch about abuses in the meat industry.

Former Smithfield worker Quincy Harvey described being denied workers' compensation and eventually fired after suffering three serious injuries on the job. He displayed a scar running down his hand and wrist where another worker's knife missed a hog's throat and hit him instead.

"There's less than a foot between workers, they're making fast movements with knives, so people are getting cut all the time," said Emma Herrera, director of the Eastern North Carolina Workers Center near the Smithfield plant.

In a statement in response to the rally, the company said that "there is no doubt that these are demanding jobs." But it noted that Smithfield has logged a downward trend in worker injuries. The company called the rally a politically motivated move by the union, which has been voted down in two elections at the Tar Heel plant.

The union organized the Chicago rally in conjunction with the same immigrants' rights groups responsible for the March 10 and May 1 marches attended by hundreds of thousands. Meatpacking jobs are a chief reason Mexican and Central American immigrants have flocked to the South in the past decade -- North Carolina had the country's largest increase in immigrant population between 1990 and 2000. More than half of Smithfield's workforce are immigrants, and about 40 percent are African American.