Smithfield: More room for pigs, less room for immigrants

This week brought two big pieces of news at the embattled Smithfield Foods plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina -- the largest hog processing plant in the world.

On Wednesday, Smithfield announced it had cooperated with Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) officers in a raid that snagged 21 undocumented workers, as part of a plan to fire up to 600 workers at the massive facility. About 48% of the workers are Latino, and 37% African-American.

The company's sudden interest in immigration reform comes after a massive walk-out at the plant last November, and 300 workers taking Martin Luther King, Jr. day off this year against company wishes. Organizers for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union don't think this is accidental:

Gene Bruskin, an organizer for the union, said the company had started to cooperate closely with immigration authorities after a walkout by immigrant workers last summer. "My concern is the company is using the immigration issue to manipulate this long fight over workers' rights," Mr. Bruskin said ... Mr. Bruskin said Smithfield had a history of threatening immigrants with deportation if they tried to unionize.

In an official statement, the UFCW reported the consequences of the raid:

This is yet another attempt on the part of Smithfield to terrorize the workers who have been struggling for a collective voice on the job for over a decade. As we speak, families are torn apart; children coming home from school do not know where their parents are and workers are afraid to show up to work. Today, the day after the arrests, Smithfield's production was cut in half as workers did not report to work, fearing they would be next.

The very next day, Smithfield found a way to salvage its public image. In a move hailed by the Humane Society as "the most important moment in animal welfare in the agribusiness sector in 50 years," Smithfield announced it would phase out confinement of pigs in individual gestation crates over the next decade. The New York Times described the situation:

The Humane Society and others have long criticized the use of gestation crates. The sows spend up to three years continuously reproducing - much of the time confined in stalls where they cannot turn around - before being slaughtered.

Smithfield has been under fire from animal rights advocates and others for years for the miserably cramped quarters the sows are kept in. Why the change now? As the Times notes,

Smithfield had been studying the issue for more than two years and decided to phase out the stalls after customers like McDonald's began asking questions about the confinement practices.

Any chance McDonald's will "ask questions" about whether Smithfield's new-found zeal for deporting immigrants is an effort to punish workers for trying to organize a union?