
After a 15-year struggle to fend off unionization of Smithfield's giant Bladen County plant - the world's largest pork slaughterhouse - the company is alleging that the union amounts to a criminal organization.
Smithfield is one of a handful of corporations fighting unions with a federal law often used in mob prosecutions. As a result, the suit has taken one of the Southeast's largest union fights into new territory.
The threat of complex and expensive federal lawsuits, which can target not just unions but the community groups that support them, "is certainly going to have a powerful impact on free speech," said Marion Crain, a UNC-Chapel Hill law professor and the director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity.
The suit, filed in Richmond, Va., last month, accuses the United Food and Commercial Workers union of engaging in extortion and asks for about $5 million in damages. It says that union members orchestrated a public smear campaign designed to hurt the Smithfield, Va.-based company's business. Union members offered to stop only if the company agreed to bargain with the union.
The suit uses a federal law known as the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which was designed to target organized crime. In the past few years, companies have used it against unions in rare instances -- but there is still little legal precedent for such a use of the law.
"Our company has been under attack," Joe Luter IV, head of the division that runs the company's slaughterhouses, said Tuesday in a meeting at The News & Observer. "This lawsuit was a last resort, and it's not something that we wanted to do."
Luter said the intent is not to set legal precedent on how unions can operate but to end the union's harassment of Smithfield.
Corporate campaigns
In the past year, the Washington D.C.-based union has waged a national campaign to pressure Smithfield to recognize a union at the Bladen County plant, which employs more than 5,000 people and slaughters about 32,000 hogs a day. Religious and civil rights groups in cities around the country have joined the union in protesting outside stores that sell Smithfield products, threatening boycotts and heckling celebrity chef Paula Deen, who promotes Smithfield products. Protesters crashed the company's shareholder meeting this summer.
In addition, the union has brought more than a dozen complaints of unfair labor practices against the company in the past 18 months, many of which federal regulators have dismissed.
The company has agreed to a union election, which would allow employees to choose whether they want union representation. But the two sides cannot agree on how the election would be conducted, so it has not been scheduled.
A few months ago, Smithfield enlisted G. Robert Blakey, a University of Notre Dame law professor who is a leading expert in the use of organized crime law. He helped the company file the suit two days after Smithfield broke off talks with the union about holding an election.
Blakey said this week that unions nationwide have launched more aggressive campaigns against companies, pressuring their customers and trying to hurt their share prices. He said those tactics are unfair and have forced corporations to look for new weapons.
"Basically what [the unions] have said is, 'Either recognize us or we're going to put you out of business,' " Blakey said. "A company has a right to conduct its business without external pressure."
Crain agreed that unions are using more antagonistic strategies than in the past, a tactic they refer to as "corporate campaigns." But she said unions have been forced down that path by ever-weakening labor laws that allow companies to break laws with impunity and use appeals to hang up the results of union elections for years.
At the Smithfield plant, two union elections in the 1990s failed, and both times the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the company unfairly harassed and fired union supporters. However, the federal board's rulings took years to come down. Just this year, the company agreed to pay more than $1 million to employees it fired during union elections in 1994 and 1997.
Crain said that if the courts set a precedent that forces unions to stop corporate campaigns, they will be left with few options to recruit new members.
"This may not be the best way for employees to select unions," Crain said of the corporate campaigns. "On the other hand, it may be the only way."
She also said the federal suits open the possibility that any group that criticizes a corporation could become the target of legal action.
Reactions to the suit
Union representatives say the suit is a legally baseless act of retaliation. Gene Bruskin, who heads the Smithfield campaign, said the suit is "fundamentally an attack on democracy and free speech and the right of any citizen in America to question the conduct of a corporation."
Plant employee Lois Burns, a union supporter, said he is disappointed that the company has chosen to spend its time and money to file a lawsuit rather than negotiate the terms of a union election. He said he is still hopeful that the plant will one day be unionized.
"If people pull together, we'll have a union," said Burns, who lives in Fayetteville.
The union has filed a motion to dismiss the suit, which is expected to be heard this winter.
(newsobserver.com)