Signs of cooperation at Smithfield foods

After elections involving much chicanery at Smithfield Packing Co.'s mammoth plant in Tar Heel, N.C., and after a union was finally approved last year, few observers thought a contract was going to be easy.

"This is going to be a long, drawn-out and somewhat tedious process," a labor researcher at Clark University said, shortly after employees at the meatpacker approved representation by the United Food and Commercial Workers.

Instead, just six months after that December vote, workers at the Smithfield Foods Inc. subsidiary have a new deal, negotiated in bargaining between the union and management and ratified last week.

The contract should mean more conciliatory relations between the parties. It could also mean better pay, benefits and working conditions for the plant's 4,500 employees.

The Tar Heel plant, about 80 miles south of Raleigh, is the largest pork-processing plant in the world; more than 30,000 hogs are slaughtered there every day.

This new contract is no minor feat, and it took years of persistence by union officials.

The UFCW lost organizing elections in 1994 and 1997. A federal court later ruled that Smithfield had fired, intimidated and harassed workers before those votes. In 2006, the court ordered Smithfield to pay $1.1 million in back pay and interest to employees who had been fired during the organizing drives. The allegations included a company threat to close the plant if a union was established there.

For the December 2008 vote, held by secret ballot, the National Labor Relations Board monitored the polling area and counted the votes. Now, because the process eventually worked, Smithfield's employees have the union they wanted. And everyone - employees, management and shareholders - has a stake in helping turn years of acrimony into success.