Latinos walk out amid firings
Hundreds of workers picketed the world’s largest pork plant Friday after walking off the job to protest the company’s firing of about 50 employees, all Latino, who were suspected of being illegal immigrants.
Officials at Smithfield Foods Inc. in Tar Heel, N.C., said they were forced to fire the workers because of stepped-up scrutiny by the Homeland Security agency responsible for work site enforcement.
But union organizers said the dismissals were part of a company campaign to intimidate workers agitating for better conditions. And Latino workers rallying outside the sprawling gray-and-white industrial complex complained that they had long suffered abusive treatment at the nonunion plant.
“Hispanics are being targeted,” said Jessica Silva, 26, as hundreds of men and women in the background chanted, “We want justice!” in Spanish. Silva, whose job requires yanking stomachs from thousands of pig carcasses for eight hours a day, said there was clear discrimination.
“I’m tired of having to ask to go to the bathroom and having them time me,” Silva said, adding that supervisors did not time the bathroom breaks of non-Latino employees.
The clash at Smithfield highlights the widespread reliance of some U.S. industries on illegal labor and the challenges that creates as Immigration and Customs Enforcement dramatically increases work site crackdowns, and while Congress has not passed legislation allowing firms to bring more workers to the U.S. legally.
Dennis Pittman, spokesman for Smithfield’s Tar Heel plant, said the company was simply responding to requirements set by the immigration and customs agency. In July, the agency asked Smithfield and other firms to participate in a new program designed to reduce unlawful employment. The program requires firms to agree to an audit of their employment forms, use an Internet-based worker screening program and check worker information with the Social Security Administration.
“You and I both know if we don’t cooperate, what could be down the road,” Pittman said of the agency, which made seven times the work site enforcement arrests in fiscal 2006 than immigration authorities did in 2002. “They don’t make any threats, they just let you know it would be a bad idea if you didn’t,” he said.
Pittman said 48% of the plant’s 5,000 workers are Latino and that about 375 employees, “pretty much all Hispanic,” were taking part in the walkout. Union observers said the figure was much higher.
The dismissals began after Social Security sent the company “no-match” letters alerting it that some employees’ data did not match government records. Pittman said Smithfield had dismissed about 50 people so far and that up to 500 of the plant’s employees could be fired.
“We have managers sitting in the employee room crying. These are some of our high-skilled employees we have had to fire,” Pittman said. “It’s tough being an employer today.”
But union officials point out that a no-match letter does not mean a company has to automatically fire employees. Agency officials confirmed that it does not require firms to dismiss workers after a no-match letter.
Gene Bruskin, the Smithfield campaign director for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which has been trying for years to organize the plant’s workforce, noted that the dismissals came after the union launched an effort in June to improve plant conditions. In August, he said, workers circulated a petition in Spanish asking for a second knife, as dull knives are a common source of injury.
Bruskin and others said the workers’ spontaneous walkout was as much a reaction to the perceived abuse of immigrants as it was to years of conflict with the company. They cited employees who were fired after injuries and for protesting what they deemed filthy working conditions.
Smithfield Foods recently lost a case in the U.S. Court of Appeals, which upheld National Labor Relations Board findings that managers at the Tar Heel facility had threatened, harassed and fired workers trying to organize. In another case, Smithfield was found to have used its security force to threaten workers with arrest by immigration authorities.
