[Pen-l] Smithfield workers

[Alejandro Valle Baeza <valle@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

When immigration agents raided Smithfield Food's huge North Carolina 
slaughterhouse two years ago, union organizer Eduardo Peña compared the 
impact to a "nuclear bomb." The day after, people were so scared that 
most of the plant's 5,000 employees didn't show up for work. The lines 
where they kill and cut apart 32,000 hogs every day were motionless. 
"Workers think it's happening because people were getting organized," 
said Vargas at the time.



Yet on Dec. 11, 2008, when the votes were counted in the same packing 
plant, 2,041 workers had voted to join the United Food and Commercial 
Workers (UFCW), while just 1,879 had voted against it. That stunning 
reversal set off celebrations in house trailers and ramshackle homes in 
Tarheel, Red Springs, St. Pauls, and all the tiny working-class towns 
spread from Fayetteville down to the South Carolina border.



Relief and happiness are understandable in North Carolina, where union 
membership is the lowest in the country. But Smithfield workers were not 
just celebrating a vote count. They'd just defeated one of the longest, 
most bitter anti-union campaigns in modern U.S. labor history. Their 
victory was the product of an organizing strategy that accomplished what 
many have said that U.S. unions can no longer do -- organize huge, 
privately owned factories.
Full article: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/20024

Saludos
Alejandro Valle Baeza
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l