By DAVID SCOTT
RALEIGH, N.C.--Smithfield Foods Inc. filed a civil racketeering lawsuit
Wednesday against the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which
for more than a decade has waged an outspoken campaign to organize
workers at the company's massive hog slaughterhouse in rural North
Carolina.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Richmond, Va., accuses the union
of engaging in a public smear campaign that included seeking frivolous
regulatory investigations and providing false statement to analysts
aimed at depressing the company's stock price.
The union, Smithfield said in the lawsuit, conspired to force the
company to recognize it as the "exclusive bargaining representatives of
hourly employees ... regardless of the degree of actual employee support
for such representation, by injuring Smithfield economically until
Smithfield either agreed to defendant's demands or was run out of
business."
The lawsuit was filed two days after the Smithfield, Va.-based company
called off talks aimed at holding an organizing election at the plant,
which the union has tried to organize since it opened in 1992. The talks
broke down over whether Smithfield's complaint that the union wanted to
right to lobby workers, but refused to allow the company to do the same.
"We went to the table in good faith," Smithfield spokesman Dennis
Pittman said. "The demands they made were just impossible."
In rejecting the demand, the union cited Smithfield's history of
harassing union supporters during organizing elections held in 1993 and
1997. A federal appeals court ruled in 2006 that Smithfield improperly
influenced the elections. Earlier this year, Smithfield reached a
settlement with the National Labor Relations Board and agreed to pay
$1.1 million in back wages, plus interest, to employees that the company
fired during union elections.
Gene Bruskin, who oversees the union's efforts to organize the
Smithfield plant and is named as a defendant, declined to address the
lawsuit's specific allegations because the union hadn't yet read it
carefully. But he said the timing of the action proves Smithfield never
had any intention of working with the union.
"This is a hundred-page lawsuit. This has been worked on for weeks and
weeks," he said. "It really shows the entire conversation with us was
done in bad faith."
Pittman said the lawsuit had nothing to do with the negotiations, adding
that Smithfield would welcome the union contacting the NLRB to ask for a
organizing election.
Both sides have waged an often public and bitter campaign during the
union's effort to organize the world's largest hog processing plant,
located about 80 miles south of Raleigh in the tiny town of Tar Heel,
where about 4,650 employees process up to 32,000 hogs a day.
Union leaders have cited the plant as a rallying cry for organizing via
majority sign-up, a process in which a company must recognize a union if
more than half of the eligible employees sign a union card. The company
has consistently opposed such a system, saying it would allow the union
to badger its employees.
Throughout its "Justice at Smithfield" campaign, the union has
highlighted both what it says are unsafe working conditions in the plant
and the company's indifference to the medical needs of workers hurt on
the job. Smithfield has acknowledged the jobs are tough, but denied it
runs an unsafe workplace.
Tensions between the two sides had appeared to calm recently. At the
company's annual meeting in August, chief executive Larry Pope told
union organizers in the crowd that Smithfield was "tired, too" of the
fight. Encouraged by signs the company might be willing to deal, the
union called off protests, entered talks with Smithfield and even agreed
to consider a secret-ballot election.
"Rather than take care of this problem, the company has decided to hire
some of the most high-priced lawyers in the country and go to court and
try to stop the union from helping these workers," Bruskin said.
