Black/Brown Coalition Fueled Big Union Win

By David Bacon, New America Media. Posted December 22, 2008.

Packinghouse laborers then had to learn to make management listen to those demands by circulating petitions and forming delegations to demand changes.

In 2007 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and company managers cooperated in two immigration raids that produced a climate of terror that organizer Eduardo Peña likened to "a nuclear bomb." Immigrant workers left the plant in droves. The Smithfield raids were two of many in recent years, used to punish workers when they've tried to improve conditions.

The plant's U.S. citizen-workers felt the effects along with the immigrants. For months afterwards, the organizing campaign was effectively dead, with many leaders deported and union activity halted by fear. It was only when African-American workers who'd fought to win the King holiday became the core of a new generation of leaders that the struggle to build the union could continue.

If black and Latino immigrant workers hadn't found a way to work together, the union drive would have ended with the raids. And if the company and ICE had succeeded in convincing half the plant that the other half really had no right to work because they lacked legal immigration status, workers would have been unwilling and unable to defend each other.

In the end, both groups found a common interest in better wages and working conditions. But they also had to agree to defend the right of each worker to her or his job, and treat any unfair firing as an attack on the union -- whether the victim was black, Mexican, or Puerto Rican.

The Smithfield firings were made possible by employer sanctions, the federal law that prohibits employers from hiring undocumented workers. The law makes working a crime for people without papers, and became the pretext for firing immigrant union leaders. That's why the AFL-CIO voted in 1999 to call for the law's repeal. The Smithfield raids show that changing immigration law is as necessary for organizing unions as passing reforms like EFCA.

Outside the Tar Heel plant, the union grew roots in working-class communities, and became part of workers' lives. They took English classes in its office and marched in demonstrations for civil rights. That coalition turned the company's anti-labor actions against it, exposing its record in the place where Smithfield was most vulnerable – in the eyes of its consumers. When store customers discovered the conditions in the plant and the company's history of fighting its workers' efforts to organize, many lost their appetite for Smithfield meats.

The election result was the product of a long-term organizing effort. With a similar commitment, other unions can do the same, no matter how big the plant or how anti-union the employer. But it takes a strategy based on building a real union in the workplace and community. That's what workers did at Smithfield.

And with changes in labor and immigration law, workers won't have to fight a 15-year war to accomplish the same goal.

See more stories tagged with: immigrants, unions, african-americans, labor rights, efca

David Bacon is the author of several books, the most recent of which is Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants.

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