FACING SOUTH REPORT: At Smithfield, work hurts

Joined by scholars, politicians and workers' rights advocates, the events organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers aimed to highlight a surge of injuries at the plant, which at 973,000 square feet is the largest pork processing facility in the world.

Speaking in Fayetteville and Raleigh, workers and their allies painted a picture of a company that routinely attempts to deny workers' compensation after accidents, where workers are occasionally fired after being injured and the company-run health clinic fails to adequately care for workers hurt on the job.

Where is OSHA

At the Raleigh event, Libby Manly, a spokesman for the UFCW, which has been organizing workers at the plant, showed reporters a bar chart of injury rates documented by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The OSHA data showed a 32 percent increase in injuries from 2003 to 2005, followed by an even steeper jump in 2006. During the first seven months of this year, 463 injuries had been reported, which surpassed the total for the entire year of 2005 at the Tar Heel plant, where 5,500 employees slaughter 32,000 hogs a day.

Lenora Bailey spoke at the Fayetteville event about being fired for missing work after suffering an injury to her hand requiring surgery. She said that she was fired, despite having a doctor's excuse saying she was not ready to resume work.

"I need to feed my family. They stopped my insurance. I lost my home," said Bailey. "We need someone to speak out for us because we are afraid to speak up."

Another Smithfield worker, Guadalupe Valdez, described being unable to do basic tasks such as picking up a gallon of milk after suffering work-related injuries to her hand that required two surgeries. She recounted months of struggling to get plant personnel and the company clinic to acknowledge and treat her pain. Eventually, Valdez also was fired.

A tarnished record

The testimonies come in the wake of a 2005 Human Rights Watch report called "Blood, Sweat, and Fear," which found systematic violations of worker safety rules in U.S. meatpacking plants, including Smithfield's North Carolina operations. The report found that dangerous working conditions and underreporting of injuries is widespread in the industry.

Thirty years ago, meatpacking plants were located in the North, and were largely unionized, but in the 1980s companies began relocating plants to states with laws that were hostile to unions and recruiting large numbers of immigrants into their workforces. Faster production lines were one outcome of this industry-wide restructuring.

Several politicians and academic experts on a panel at the Fayetteville event called on the state and community groups to put pressure on Smithfield for increased corporate accountability for plant conditions.

Catherine Fisk, who teaches at Duke University School of Law, blamed OSHA, the federal agency charged with enforcing worker safety laws, with failing to address the problem. She said that it is difficult for workers to provide sufficient proof of injuries under the current law, and that fines for serious violations are too low to deter corporations from future safety violations.

Marion Crain, of the University of North Carolina (UNC) Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, called the workers' situation a public problem.

"It costs all of us when workers are hurt," she said. "The company's lack of respect for workers scares and worries me."

Workers won't wait for government

Crain called on Cherie Berry, the N.C. Commissioner of Labor, to appoint an independent committee to investigate health and safety in the plant. She also said that more state and federal inspectors need to be hired to enforce safety and health laws.

After the Human Rights Watch report came out in early 2005, the N.C. Dept of Labor commissioned a study of conditions at Smithfield. The state found 45 serious violations, but fined the plant only $23,514 - a penalty that "pleased the state and Smithfield Foods, but concerned others," according to an Aug. 24, 2005 report in the Raleigh News and Observer. In 2003, a worker died at the plant when he was overcome with toxic fumes while cleaning a tank; Smithfield was fined only $4,323.

N.C. state Rep. Rick Glazier agreed with the call for a state investigation. He pointed to increases in production line speed as a major cause of worker injury, and said he had asked Smithfield for data on how the company's practices compared with other plants in the industry.

"Why the increase from 24,000 to 28,000 to 32,000 hogs per day?" asked Glazier, who said he is still waiting for more data from Smithfield. "Is it not worth a cut in the production level to prevent workers from being injured?"

Other experts expressed doubt about the regulatory process. Steve Wing, a professor at the UNC School of Public Health, noted that one of the problems in looking to the government is the history of generous campaign contributions from Smithfield that have corrupted the political system. Several of the injured workers who spoke seemed also to have given up hope for regulatory reform: They said they had come to believe that struggling to win union recognition was the only way to make changes at the plant.

Crain also spoke of government failures, noting that in North Carolina "the hogs have better representation than the workers." She called the state's labor laws "a disgrace," and spoke out in favor of "card check" agreements. These are less contentious alternatives to union elections, which have tended to be disputed and end up in drawn out hearings before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Two previous UFCW elections at Smithfield, in 1994 and 1997, were disputed for years and eventually thrown out by the NLRB, which found the company guilty of intimidating workers and interfering with the vote.

In a card check agreement, a company recognizes a union and allows it to organize, in return for assurances from the union that workers will avoid major job actions such as strikes. The UFCW is currently seeking such an agreement with Smithfield. The company has offered to cooperate with the UFCW in holding a new election, but has not agreed to a card check.

Representatives from Smithfield Foods attended the Fayetteville event, but the company declined an invitation to send a representative to speak on the panel.