Mar 13, 2008 11:36 AM
Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork-products producer, is acting swinish. It’s fighting a union organizing drive the old fashioned way: going to the courts to stop the United Food and Commercial Workers’ effort to organize the company’s 4,600 workers in its Tar Heel, N.C., slaughterhouse. Threatened by an aggressive union campaign that includes protests at stockholder meetings, consumer boycotts, rallies and resolutions in city councils, the company is responding by using the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) against the union. RICO was designed to battle organized crime by labeling any association of lawbreakers a criminal conspiracy, and the company claims the legitimate organizing drive is instead a criminal conspiracy. At least one court agreed to hear the charges on the merits.
Along with the UFCW, Jobs with Justice, the 21-year-old national workers rights group, is named as a defendant in the suit. In return, it is launching a campaign against further corporate misuse of the RICO act. Jobs with Justice says unions have free speech rights, and that educating the public about a predatory employer does not constitute RICO’s prohibited “formation of the conspiracy,” and the “delivery of the threat.” Court-watchers doubt the suit will survive, though it could hamstring the union in a tedious court battle. A similar RICO suit brought by Detroit’s newspapers in the 90s against striking newspaper workers ultimately failed.
Labor Notes, March 2008