The election was a decisive win for UFCW, with 649 of the Hyrum plant’s approximately 1,100 workers voting for representation and 290 against. Significantly, said Mark Lauritsen, an international vice president at UFCW, the Hyrum plant was the only non-union facility among JBS-Swift’s plants at the time of the huge raid conducted Dec. 12, 2006, by agents of the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), which was intended to round up workers who were in the U.S. illegally. The effects of the raid disrupted JBS-Swift operations for weeks, and the raid itself galvanized industry opposition to such overt federal action.

Lauritsen, who directs UFCW’s food processing, meatpacking and manufacturing division, told MEATPOULTRY.com that the Hyrum workers saw how UFCW helped JBS-Swift employees in company towns such as Greeley, Colo., and Marshalltown, Iowa, deal with the legal ramifications and aftermath of the raid. "We have been saying all along that legal as well as illegal workers get caught up in these raids, and that they don’t have any voice when it happens" except, if they’re union members, the union.

The Hyrum plant, one of the oldest in the industry, was built 70 years ago and was operated for decades by the Miller family as E.A. Miller & Sons. Its course since the late 1980s reflects the changes in the beef industry as a whole: the Millers sold the plant to ConAgra, which later spun off its beef division into Swift & Co. In a dramatic entry into the U.S. meat industry, JBS S.A., the largest meat company in South America and owned by the Batista family, bought Swift, including the old Hyrum operation, last year. The plant is still the centerpiece of tiny Hyrum, a picturesque hamlet nestled in the foothills of Utah’s scenic Wasatch Mountains. It is an important buyer of cattle raised on ranches throughout the northern Intermountain West.

The campaign at the plant was unusually rapid. UFCW contacted JBS-Swift workers after the December ’06 raid, but organizing efforts for the plant’s workforce did not begin in earnest until late this past summer. He said company management "made their preferences known" to the employees, "but they didn’t engage in any hostile activity."

While U.S. union membership has been in a long, slow decline from its glory days in the 1950s, with the meat industry among the industries with less union membership than in the past, UFCW still represents about 40 percent of the U.S. meatpacking and processing workforce, and thus continues to have huge influence on the state of labor relations in the industry. Lauritsen thinks the relationship between UFCW and JBS-Swift could be a bellwether for a new labor-management attitude in the industry. He hopes to build on that relationship, he told MEATPOULTRY.com, "to go back to when a meatpacking job was one of the most prized jobs in industry and when a meat plant was a prized employer in the community."