I've written in this space before about the Justice at Smithfield campaign, which is working to help thousands of working people at the Smithfield Foods meatpacking plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina achieve the American Dream.
Yesterday, Smithfield held a shareholders meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia, and hundreds of people turned out to support the workers in Tar Heel:
More than 700 critics of Smithfield Foods Inc. marched across Colonial Williamsburg on Wednesday, demanding negotiations to find a process to gauge worker support for a union at the pork producer's largest plant.
The protest seeped into the company's shareholders meeting, with emotional exchanges between Smithfield's CEO and supporters of the workers...
"A union is better for the people," Oliver Hunt, a worker at the Tar Heel, N.C., plant, who makes $11 an hour, said at the rally. "You're looking at better pay, better benefits. The future is what you're looking at."
Smithfield and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union have been battling for more than a decade over the Tar Heel plant, which has about 5,000 workers.
The union lost two certification votes at the plant, in 1994 and 1997. But the National Labor Relations Board found that the company intimidated and harassed employees to vote against the union. Smithfield agreed to pay $1.1 million to employees who said they were fired in retaliation for supporting the union.
The marchers brought with them a petition signed by 3,000 Tar Heel workers, expressing their desire to join together in a union, as well as a letter of support signed by more than 30 celebrities.
