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Union Tries to Unite Blacks, Latinos
Workers at Meatpacking Plant Must First Overcome Distrust

By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 24, 2006; A04



RED SPRINGS, N.C. -- When she finished eating dinner at the party, Lenora Bruce Bailey sat for a spell on a little wood porch facing Main Street. Two years ago, she had one of the best jobs around: boxing scraps of hog meat at the nearby packing plant. Then she got sick. "They terminated me," she said. "Took away my health insurance."

In a nearby room, Raphael Abrego held up his purple and swollen right hand and wondered whether the same might happen to him. He was one of the better cutters on the fast-moving butcher line, but he slipped one day and injured his hand. "I can't close it," he said in Spanish, trying to clench bloated fingers.

Bailey is a black, native-born American. Abrego is a Latino immigrant. At Smithfield Packing Co., the largest meat-processing facility in the world, the two think of themselves as being in the same boat.

Recently, they attended a potluck to try to do something that is rare for African Americans and Latino immigrants: come together to fight for workers' rights.

Union officials hope their combined forces could be a power in North Carolina's Cape Fear region, where tens of thousands of illegal Central American immigrants seeking meatpacking jobs have joined hundreds of thousands of poor and working-class black people who struggle to get by. But the United Food and Commercial Workers union is finding it hard to overcome the deep wariness and suspicion between the groups in its quest to unite them.

The union's difficulties are part of a larger story of distrust between black and Latino workers, a vast cultural divide between immigrants who illegally enter the country seeking work and African Americans who worry that immigrants will take over their jobs, communities and local political power.

In Tifton, Ga., where immigrants replaced poor black and white farmworkers, five black men were arrested last year in connection with the slayings of six Mexican immigrants.

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who is black, asked, "How do I make sure New Orleans is not overrun with Mexican workers?" He was concerned because immigrants poured into the city to work low-wage construction jobs.

And in Dallas, black school-board members have charged that their Latino colleagues hire job candidates primarily because of ethnicity.

"The tension is as old as the hills," said Marshall Ganz, a lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "Who were the most violently anti-Chinese in San Francisco? The Irish. They felt their jobs were threatened."

Ganz said it is no surprise that workers complained of Smithfield playing blacks and Latino against each other. In congressional testimony, court records and interviews, black employees said they were told that Latino hires were cheaper, while Latinos claimed they were told black people would replace them if they were deported.

"Employers have played that game forever," Ganz said. "It's kind of what unions have to overcome."

Smithfield is a formidable adversary for labor organizers. North Carolina, a right-to-work state, has the second-lowest union membership rate (2.9 percent of workers) in the nation. And the company stirs the economy in a region with high unemployment, employing 5,000 and paying out $120 million a year. Its taxes amount to 10 percent of Bladen County's budget.

So far, Goliath has trounced David in every battle. Smithfield has aggressively thwarted two union elections since 1994, according to the National Labor Relations Board, an administrative law judge, federal court documents and congressional testimony by its workers. But black and Latino workers think they have just found their slingshot.

"There has to be a bonding that's taught," said the Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler, pastor of the Plymouth Congregational Church of Christ in the District and president of a ministerial alliance that is helping the workers. "The plant is a giant. It threatens a lot of people's livelihood. To organize this way becomes an equalizer."

Once upon a time, most Smithfield employees were black. But as the new century dawned, that changed. Now 47 percent of workers are Latino, compared with about 38 percent black, Smithfield officials said.

Nearly all of the top supervisors are white. The kill floor is mostly filled with black employees, and the staff on the cutting line is mostly Latinos.

The ethnic divide goes beyond the plant. At the potluck, Latinos dominated. There were no white or Native American workers present, even though they make up nearly one-sixth of the staff.

More black people turned out earlier, at a meeting at an NAACP building. Many Latinos left that meeting before the speeches were done. Farther down the road, where workers gather at a gas station to get rides to the plant, nearly all faces were black. Latinos, said a black union organizer, mostly carpool among themselves.

Andreas Smith, a black worker, grabbed extra protest T-shirts at the station to give to other workers who clamor for them. "We need to organize, because Smithfield cheats every time," he said, adding that workers need better conditions.

Company executives denied that they treat workers poorly and said there is no need for a union. Smithfield Packing's president, Joseph W. Luter IV, said the union is waging a smear campaign. "A lot of accusations that we don't believe are accurate are tainting our organization in a way that's unfair," he said in an interview at the plant.

Smithfield pays $7.50 to $12 an hour -- more than most jobs here pay. Even in Fayetteville, the region's economic engine, there are signs of a weakened economy. Stores at the local mall have closed, and several adjoining lots are empty.

But not all plant workers are eager for a union.

"A union speaks on your behalf," said Barbara Lee, who weighs meat at Smithfield. "I can speak for myself."

Amelia Hernandez, a Guatemalan immigrant on the cutting line, said most Latinos would agree. "That's how we think," she said.

At the potluck, Mauricio Lopez dismissed that view. "They're a little scared," he said. "Some don't think we can win, but a majority do."

"A lot of accidents are happening," said Carlos Acosta, a meat cutter who, like most workers, works a 7 1/2 -hour shift with two, 30-minute breaks. "They treat the workers badly."

Edward Morrison's knee gave out one day when he was pushing 300-pound dead hogs to the slaughter, his feet slipping on blood and excrement. "That day, I was exhausted," he said.

Surgery was needed. A doctor's letter went out, and the company responded. "It said that if I didn't return to work in 30 days, I would be terminated," Morrison said.

Do not believe everything workers say, said company spokesman Dennis Pittman. Smithfield has treatment facilities, and it contracts with a health firm to provide a clinic that takes care of cuts and to monitor the health of workers and their families for a small fee.

The labor relations board and courts saw Smithfield differently. They agreed with union organizers and workers who said the company fought to undermine union elections in 1994 and 1997, intimidated workers who were pro-union, pitted black and Latino employees against each other, had union organizers arrested by an in-house police squad and threatened to close the plant.

An administrative law judge ordered the company to comply with federal labor laws. After the company appealed, the ruling was upheld by a panel of federal judges. Now, without admitting to wrongdoing, the company sent a letter to United Food and Commercial Workers saying the company is now open to elections.

"We are anxious to let our employees make the decision," said Pittman, who is spearheading a campaign to polish Smithfield's image.

But Gene Buskin, the union's campaign director for Smithfield, said the marketing plan is a trick that feels like deja vu.

After the 1994 election, "they said they had changed and invited us to hold the '97 election," he said. "What followed were 150 unfair labor violations, according to the NLRB, and 10 more years of intimidating workers."

"If this company had done what's in those reports, I never would have come back here to work," said Smithfield's Pittman, who grew up in North Carolina. "If we had a failure, it was not to do more training with our frontline managers. Now we teach civil treatment, dispute resolution, better communication with employees."

Sitting on the porch at the potluck, Bailey stared into the distance with sad eyes, uncertain about her future. If the company had not worked against a union in 1994 and 1997, Bailey said, she might still have her job.

"What we're saying is, when we're out there working, helping to bring you money, don't abandon us," she said. "Don't fire us. Don't take our benefits from us."