RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- Employees at the world's largest pork slaughterhouse in rural North Carolina agreed Wednesday to a four-year contract with a Smithfield Foods Inc. subsidiary, concluding a labor-organizing fight in the country's least unionized state.
The contract, which took effect immediately, affects about 5,000 workers at the Smithfield Packing Co. plant about 80 miles south of Raleigh in Tar Heel. Workers accepted the company's contract offer after two days of voting that ended Wednesday.
Smithfield Packing's Tar Heel contract with the United Food and Commercial Workers includes across-the-board wage increases of 40 cents an hour for each of the next three years and 30 cents an hour in the fourth year. Starting pay at the plant is about $10 an hour and the average is about $11.60 an hour, Smithfield Packing spokesman Dennis Pittman said.
"You're not going to find too many companies around here that pay what they pay," said Verdell Drayton, a member of the union's 12-member bargaining committee who commutes about 50 miles from Bennetsville, S.C., to her job as a pork membrane skinner on a ham production line. "It truly was a blessing."
Workers also can earn up to 26 hours of sick time a year and could cash in the unpaid time off at the end of the year. Employees are eligible for a third week of paid vacation after 10 years, down from the previous 13.
Workers also will be guaranteed at least 30 hours of paid work per week, an improvement important to Pam Norris, 46, of Clarkton, who has worked at the plant for 20 months. She said she worked 57 hours in the week following the Memorial Day weekend to catch up on production, then worked just 24 hours one week last month.
"We never knew what our paycheck was going to be," said Norris, a bargaining committee member and machine operator in a department that packages pork chops for grocery stores.
Norris said about 90 percent of the contract's language was similar to agreements the UFCW had negotiated with Smithfield Foods subsidiaries in more than a dozen plants around the country. That allowed the two sides to conclude their first contract in just four months, labor professors said last week.
Nearly 24,000 of the 35,300 employees in Smithfield Foods' pork segment were covered by a collective bargaining agreement as of April 2008, according to the company's 2008 annual report. Pittman said a current union membership figure was not available.
Smithfield, Va.-based Smithfield Foods, the nation's largest hog producer and pork processor, began negotiating the contract with UFCW Local 1208 in February after workers narrowly voted in December to back a union. The two sides had been locked since the plant opened in 1992 in a bitter dispute over the UFCW's efforts to organize the work force in one of North Carolina's poorest regions.
North Carolina had the lowest rate of union membership in 2008 at 3.5 percent, compared to 12.4 percent nationally.
Smithfield reported last month that it lost $190.3 million in the fiscal year ended May 3, compared with a profit of $129 million the previous year.
