Smithfield Workers Score Big Win!

    it looks like a few of the unions in America are on a roll. the latest union to score a big win is the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, who won the right, after a 16 year battle, to organize at Smithfield Foods in North Carolina.

   Employees at Smithfield Foods’ Bladen County plant voted 2,041 to 1,879 to be represented by a union. The vote was counted tonight by federal officials.

A union victory is considered a coup in North Carolina, which has the lowest rate of unionization in the nation. It is part of a larger struggle to organize meat-packing plants that have moved to the Southeast in the past few decades hoping to escape the reach of unions.

   A good deal for these workers at Smithfield as they work at some very crappy and grueling tasks in a slaughterhouse. It's about time that Smithfield got smacked down a notch or two. They've been scaring their workers into avoiding unions for years.

I.S.S.

Virginia-based Smithfield had earned a national reputation for its hostility to organized labor: A 2005 report by Human Rights Watch had singled out Smithfield for creating a "climate of fear" among workers, including intimidation, harassment and even beatings of suspected activists.
Indeed, such tactics are what caused the two previous union elections at Smithfield to be dismissed:

The results of two previous elections at the plant in the 1990s were thrown out after federal officials declared that the company had harassed and fired union supporters, even forcing an employee to stamp the words "Vote No" on dead hogs.

Technorati Tags: United Food and Commercial Workers Union,Smithfield Foods,Workers,North Carolina,Wages