Workers demonstrating against Smithfield Foods in August 2007 during a shareholders’ meeting in Williamsburg, Va.
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Posted on 12/13/2008 5:21:17 PM PST by Abathar
After an expensive and emotional 15-year organizing battle, workers at the world’s largest hog-killing plant, the Smithfield Packing slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, N.C., have voted to unionize.
The United Food and Commercial Workers, which had lost unionization elections at the 5,000-worker plant in 1994 and 1997, announced late Thursday that it had finally won. The victory was significant in a region known for hostility toward organized labor.
The vote was one of the biggest private-sector union successes in years, and officials from the United Food and Commercial Workers said it was the largest in that union’s history.
The union won by 2,041 votes to 1,879 after two years of turmoil at the plant. As a result of a federal crackdown on illegal immigrants, more than 1,500 Hispanic workers have left the plant. Its work force is now 60 percent black, up from around 20 percent two years ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Workers demonstrating against Smithfield Foods in August 2007 during a shareholders’ meeting in Williamsburg, Va.
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Hawg Stickers Local 102...
Looks like they’re eating up the corporate profit.
Its work force is now 60 percent black, up from around 20 percent two years ago.
think that made a difference?? I do...
Well, they just signed their own death warrant.
Some people can be bought for the price of a t-shirt and a beer.
Note to self: no more Smithfield ham, cc: Paula Deen.
Hope the company moves to SC and fires all their a$$es.
I’d sell the whole dang plant off to whatever sucker would buy it. Or just liquidate the dang thing.
Countdown for Smithfield leaving NC begins in..5..4..3..
Smithfield already offered the employees the vast majority of what the UFCW had offered to bargain for to begin with, this is just adding Union Dues to their paychecks.
INOW, this is plain old stupid.
Smithfield should close the facility and move it somewhere else.
Let’s not wait and bail them out now.
No, move the whole operation to China, The Chinese have raised hogs for centuries. It would be a profitable move for Smithfield.
no more Smithfield hams for me
The Japanese are the big buyers of the top quality pork. Get Toyota to open a new pig killing floor.
This reminds me of the short recession we had back in the early 1990s. There was a small plant that I had to drive by on the way to a nearby job. And they went on strike at the worst possible time. The plant just replaced the union workers... and as weeks and weeks went by... there were less and less workers striking. Eventually, ONE YEAR LATER, there was one solitary guy sitting in a lawn chair... pathetic.
Gawd. My father fought this for YEARS. He obtained ‘union cards’ for our workers just so they could do jobs in certain areas.
getting workers to vote in a Union is easier then getting them to join, people want the cake and eat it too without buying the cake. Eventually a bunch of those that joined will drop out of the union because they will find it isn’t worth it, by then the company will have either moved down the road or just went out of business.
Idiots. Pay a bunch of white boys for the right to get up in the morning and go to work. LOL! Only an idiot would agree to union thugs taking money out of their paycheck that wasn’t being taken out before.
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