‘I Served My Nation to Protect the Law, Not Companies Like Smithfield’

Paul Pimentel from the Sheet Metal Workers, otherwise known as Paul VA, is blogging live today on the Employee Free Choice Act hearings now under way on Capitol Hill. The Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 800), supported by a bipartisan coalition in Congress, would level the playing field for workers and employers and help rebuild America’s middle class.

Keith Ludlum, a North Carolina worker who worked in the Livestock Department at Smithfield Foods was the first witness to speak.  He talked of his service in desert storm:

I served my nation to protect the laws of our land, not companies like Smithfield that deprive us of those laws.

Ludlum worked in the Livestock Department unloading a total of 16,000 hogs per day along with his co-workers.  In December 1993, he started working with organizing a union.

The next year he was fired for organizing when management found out. A sheriff was brought in to escort him out to create an impression of fear amongst his co-workers. At that time his wife was pregnant with their first child.

A National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election vote soon followed and he and his co-workers were cheated out of representation. 

Things didn’t end there, according to Ludlum. 

The NLRB issued violations after the union protested. The company CEO sent every employee a letter promising in writing the next election would be fair. 

Instead, he adds, they faced intimidation, arrests, threats and fines. 

He noted the experience was nothing like an election to public office. Sheriff’s deputies lined the entrance to the plant while workers were voting.  hen Congressman Robert Andrews from New Jersey asked about this incident later, Ludlum added that the deputies were armed with shotguns and rifles. Many of them were holding police dogs. The heads of management were on hand and stood side by side with the sheriff.

Ludlum illustrated what impression someone would receive from an incident like this during an election by asking, “Imagine armed sheriffs in front of voting precincts.”

Even after all of this, Smithfield was not criminally indicted for breaking the law. All that happened was the company was forced to only offer fired workers their jobs back and paid back wages for only the time the fired workers were unemployed.

Later, the workers held another election. Smithfield’s CEO responded to the workers during a captive audience meeting by saying, “If anybody thinks we will have a free and fair election, you never heard a thing I said.”

Ludlum concluded by stating “nothing changed in the 12 years since I was first fired.”

Before departing, he had a message for the assembled congressmen, “You have the duty to protect the rights of American workers. People’s lives and jobs are on the line. These elections are neither free nor fair. I will always work hard, but it is up to you to do so too.”

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