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Industrial animal farms confine as many as 100,000 pigs which can generate as much waste as a midsize city.

Lack of Administration Action Leaves Workers in Limbo

Elena Cardona left Honduras four years ago - walking and hitching rides until she reached the US border five months later. "I left my five children with my mother in Honduras and came here to give them a future," she says.

Elena (not her real name) hoped her dream of a better future would come true in Tar Heel, North Carolina, at a Smithfield Foods slaughterhouse.

Instead, Elena remembers, "I worked at least 10 hours a day, into the early morning hours. They give you only three minutes to go to the bathroom and hardly 10 to eat. They used to take advantage of us because we did not have work permits, and they always cheated us. Sometimes they'd only pay us half of our wage."

Elena worked at the slaughterhouse for 20 months, until January 2003, when she injured her arm trying to lift a heavy load. Her foreman said not to come back until she healed. Almost a year later, she is still "useless," living with help from her former co-workers.

Workers at Smithfield slaughter as many as 36,000 hogs per day, more than 2000 hogs an hour.1 When workers are injured they often don't receive worker's compensation and are frequently fired after being injured. Over 50 percent of the plant's workers are Hispanic,2 and fear of being fired or deported keeps most of them from coming forward to protest their treatment.

In many cases, this industry tries to prevent employees from forming or joining unions. And under the Bush administration, the National Labor Relations Board has failed to enforce a Clinton-era decision by an administrative judge to hold a free and fair election at the slaughterhouse so that workers can decide if they want a union and to reinstate, with back pay, wrongfully terminated employees.3

Workers are at risk and so are local communities - not just from slaughterhouses, but from industrial animal farms that, in some states, confine as many as 100,000 pigs, which can generate as much waste as a midsize city.4 This waste is stored in large open cesspools where it can seep into and contaminate groundwater. In some extreme cases, fumes have asphyxiated and killed farm workers in pits used to store liquefied manure.5

Criminal counts of bribes, fraud, record destruction, animal cruelty and distribution of tainted meat plague this industry. And now the Bush administration is finalizing a back-room deal with the meat industry to let corporate polluters violate basic environmental safeguards by paying a mere $500 one-time fine.6

We can do better. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) is trying to organize slaughterhouse workers to improve wages and working conditions for employees like Elena. But we all have to call on the Bush administration to enforce and strengthen labor and environmental laws that protect workers and communities as well as our air, land and water.

For more information contact:

Sierra Club
Courtney Washburn
919.833.8467
courtney.washburn@sierraclub-nc.org

Tom Clark
United Food and Commercial Workers
910.843.1631
tclarke@ufcw.org

1. United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) worker interviews.
2. United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) estimates.
3. NBLR decision, available at, http://www.ufcw.org/issues_and_actions/justice_at_smithfield/ documented_abuse/smithworkerabuse.cfm.
4. "Environmental Assessment of Proposed Revisions to the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System Regulation and the Effluent Guidelines for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation," 2001, available at http://epa.gov/ost/guide/cafo/envir.html.
5. Horrigan, Leo, Roberst S. Lawrence and Polly Walker, "How Sustainable Agriculture Can Address the Environmental and Human Health Harms of Industrial Agriculture" Environmental Health Perspectives, 110 (5): 445-456.
6. Martin, Andrew, "Livestock industry finds friends in EPA," Chicago Tribune, May 16, 2004.