U.S. meat and poultry companies often use illegal tactics to quash workers’ efforts to gain a union voice on the job to improve unsafe working conditions that lead to injury and death, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch (HRW).
“Meatpacking is the most dangerous factory job in America,” says Lance Compa, author of Blood, Sweat and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants. Dangerous conditions are cheaper for companies, he says, “and the government does next to nothing.”
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The increasing volume and speed of production, close quarters, poor training and insufficient safeguards combine to create working conditions that violate international labor standards, the report finds.
The report also finds the meat processing industry—dominated by such giants as Tyson Foods Inc., Smithfield Foods Inc. and Nebraska Beef Ltd.—frequently denies workers’ compensation to injured employees and threatens their immigrant status to keep them quiet about abuses. In fact, one worker every 23 minutes is fired or harassed on the job for union organizing activity, according to an analysis of statistics from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by American Rights at Work, a research and advocacy group aimed at improving workers’ ability to exercise their legal rights in the workplace.
“The meatpacking companies hire immigrant workers because they are often the only ones who will work under such terrible conditions,” says Jamie Fellner, director of HRW’s U.S. Program.
Smithfield: Among the Worst Abusers of Workers’ Rights
At the world’s largest hog processing facility in Tar Heel, N.C., Smithfield workers have sought a voice at work with the United Food and Commercial Workers since shortly after the plant opened in the early 1990s. Some 60 percent of the 5,000-strong workforce is Latino and approximately 30 percent is African American.
The company’s anti-union consultants have crushed two union elections with tactics that included telling Latinos and African Americans that the union’s organizing drive was an effort by the other to take their jobs. After charging Smithfield with massive labor law violations in connection with the 1994 and 1997 elections—including assaulting and wrongly terminating workers—the NLRB ordered another vote, an order Smithfield is appealing.
Smithfield is the only North Carolina manufacturing plant employing its own private police force, which uses its state-granted public powers to intimidate union supporters, according to HRW. The HRW report describes a January 2004 incident in which deputies took Lorena Ramos and her husband Jorge Vela off the production line in Tar Heel, threw them in an on-site jail cell and accused them of trying to start a fire at the plant, according to the UFCW.
Before the district attorney of Bladen County dismissed all charges against them last September, the district attorney repeatedly offered to reduce the charges if the couple would plead guilty to a lesser crime. They refused. "I would rather go to jail than admit to something I didn't do," Ramos says.
Employers in a range of industries routinely obstruct workers’ efforts to gain a voice at work with a union through threats and harassment. Some employers even fire workers for trying to form unions, which is against the law, according to Cornell University scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner. Bronfenbrenner found 75 percent of private-sector employers hire outside consultants to run anti-union campaigns, often based on mass psychology and distorting the law. Half of employers threaten to shut down partially or totally if employees join together in a union.
Based on the report’s findings, HRW recommends industry-wide rules to protect basic workplace health, safety and compensation benefits, as well as passage of the Employee Free Choice Act — bipartisan federal legislation that would ensure when a majority of employees in a workplace decide to form a union, they can do so without the debilitating obstacles employers now use to block their workers’ free choice. It also urges Congress to strengthen governmental agencies so they enforce existing labor laws that would help the meat and poultry workers.
“Workers shouldn’t have to form unions and secure basic workplace protections despite the law,” says AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney. “We need stronger enforcement mechanisms within the law to ensure that workers’ fundamental human rights are upheld and respected.”
