 |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
Subscribe - Get email updates
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Welcome to SmithfieldFacts.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
This website is designed to give you the facts about our company and the working conditions at Tar Heel.
The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) has been trying to unionize our Tar Heel plant for more than a decade. Already, plant employees have voted against the union twice.
Smithfield believes that employees should decide what is best for them. We have invited the UFCW to schedule a new secret-ballot election at Tar Heel. To ensure a fair election process, Smithfield has offered to share the cost of a neutral, third party observer to oversee the election.
Rather than accept our offer to schedule a union vote, the UFCW is circulating false information about our plant. It has called on customers to stop buying Smithfield products — a move that will ultimately hurt the very employees it wants to represent.
Spend some time on this site and learn the facts about our company:
• Smithfield is not anti-union. More than half our workforce is represented by a union.
• The Tar Heel, NC plant is among the safest in the industry.
• Smithfield provides fair wages and outstanding employee benefits.
• Smithfield follows all federal laws to ensure its workforce is legal.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
At Smithfield: Safety is #1
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Latest News
|
|
|
|
|
|
| < March 4, 2008
Union Misstates the Facts – Again
Once again the United Food and Commercial Workers Union is giving false and misleading information to the media and the public. Once again, Smithfield calls on the UFCW to stop blocking a secret-ballot election at the Tar Heel plant. Let the employees vote.
The UFCW’s news release of Monday, March 3, makes three allegations that are not factual.
| | MORE | | < Businesses for the Bay honors 11 for preventing pollution
By Karl Blankenship
The Bay Program's Businesses for the Bay initiative has presented 10 regional businesses with esteemed Environmental Excellence Awards and one individual with the Mentor of the Year award for their efforts in reducing nutrient and chemical pollution in the Bay and its tributaries.
Winners of this year's Businesses for the Bay Environmental Excellence Awards are:
- Outstanding Achievement for Pollution Prevention / Large Facility: Anheuser-Busch, Inc., Williamsburg, VA; and Smithfield Packing Company, Landover, MD.
| | MORE | <
Firms Use RICO to Fight Union Tactics
By KRIS MAHER
December 10, 2007; Page A15
Employers are using laws originally aimed at organized crime to combat aggressive union organizing efforts that they claim amount to extortion.
Two lawsuits filed by employers in the past two months invoked the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, to claim unions have tried to damage their reputations and businesses through public-relations campaigns and other tactics. In both suits, the companies claim the unions are spreading false and damaging information through flyers and the Internet and at demonstrations.
The suits, which the unions say are baseless, mark escalating tensions over organizing methods. Unions want to organize workers by approaching them off company grounds and having them sign cards in favor of a union while the company remains neutral, a process companies say subjects employees to intense pressure. Companies generally favor a secret-ballot election, which is held on company property and usually follows months or years of expensive, time-consuming and negative campaigning by both sides.
RICO was passed in 1970 to make it easier to prosecute organized-crime leaders when they couldn't be directly tied to murders or other crimes but when a pattern of racketeering existed. Civil RICO claims became common in the 1980s and have been filed in a variety of contexts, often against corporations, alleging fraud or illegal competition. The law allows for the recovery of triple damages.
While unusual, union-related suits filed under RICO laws instead of labor laws have precedent. In 1995, Food Lion LLC sued the United Food and Commercial Workers, claiming the union planted damaging reports in the media and filed frivolous regulatory claims. The case was settled in 2004.
In October, Smithfield Foods Inc. filed suit against the United Food and Commercial Workers, which has been trying for more than a decade to organize 4,600 hourly workers at the company's Tar Heel, N.C., plant. | | MORE |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|