After worker raids, Smithfield union OK'd

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/local/story/446306.html

African Americans now make up 54 percent of workers.
By Kristin Collins
[e-mail]
Posted: Thursday, Jan. 01, 2009

RALEIGH Organizers fought for 16 years to unionize workers at the world's largest pork plant.

But immigration raids may have finally sealed the union's victory last month, when the approximately 5,000 workers at Smithfield Foods' Tar Heel plant voted in a union election. The 2007 raids purged the Bladen County plant of illegal Hispanic workers, and left behind a majority of native workers more likely to support unionization.

According to the company, the share of Hispanic workers has shrunk from about half in early 2007 to one quarter today. Black people now make up 54 percent of the plant's work force.

Lidia Victoria, a 13-year employee who is a U.S citizen born in the Dominican Republic, said she worked for years to persuade Latino workers of the union's benefits. But she said the immigration crackdown left many, even those in the country legally, too frightened to speak up for unionization.

“At the end, they turned their back to the union,” Victoria said this week. “The union won because black people went to vote yes.”

FULL story at link.

[pop goes the weasel]

1. it's more evidence of the truth

The entire immigration issue is manufactured by business interests in order to undermine labor. Want to keep workers fragmented while inflating the labor pool? Use lots of foreign workers, just make sure that they are in the country illegally or are subject to arbitrary revocation of status. Not only will the foreign workers be easily cowed, the more legally privileged workers will turn their resentment toward the foreigners instead of the owners. It's a pattern that has been working out for the propertied class at least since the aftermath of Bacon's Rebellion.