Smithfield enlists government to do its dirty work

It seems like every time the UFCW organizing drive at Smithfield gains traction, Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons magically show up to terrorize the company's immigrant workers:

Federal immigration officials conducted a raid Wednesday -- the second this year -- at Smithfield Foods' giant pork slaughterhouse in Bladen County.

Twenty-eight people stand accused of entering the country illegally and committing identity theft, said Richard Rocha, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Twenty-five were from Mexico, two were from Guatemala and one from Honduras.

Rocha said that the arrests were the result of an investigation and that the suspects were targeted, not part of a random sweep of illegal immigrants.

As this American Prospect article noted, these raids have had a chilling effect on the organizing efforts at the Tar Heel plant:

"To keep people from guessing what was up," says Keith Ludlum, one of the few white workers on the production floor, "they also called up African Americans and whites, and told them they had to take drug tests. If they'd only called Latinos, people would have known what was happening." If word had gotten out, hundreds of workers would undoubtedly have run from the lines. Valuable meat would have been left to spoil -- a day's production lost. In a plant where 5,500 people slaughter and cut apart 32,000 hogs a day, that's a lot of money. Keeping the raid secret meant workers worked to the end of their shift and Smithfield got its product out.

...

Indeed, according to many workers, those organizing efforts, and not the 21 detained workers, were the real target of the raid. Mark Lauritsen, packinghouse director for the United Food and Commercial Workers, says the Department of Homeland Security and the company "were worried about people organizing a union, and the government said, 'here are the tools to take care of them.'"

To his credit, in June John Edwards called attention to the systematic barriers preventing the Smithfield workers from formally organizing a union. That's a major part of the problem.

The immediate problem, however, is that we have a corporation enlisting the power of the government to bust the workers' union and keep its workforce scared and docile. Such corporate/state alliances cannot be tolerated in a democracy. We should, of course, demand that our elected representatives put an end to these practices, but we should also explore ways to directly support the immigrant community in our state to help them stand up to government and corporate thuggery.