AR HEEL, N.C. -- It must have been 1 o'clock.
That's when the white man usually comes out of his
glass office and stands on the scaffolding above the
factory floor. He stood with his palms on the rails,
his elbows out. He looked like a tower guard up
there or a border patrol agent. He stood with his
head cocked.
One o'clock means it is getting near the end of the
workday. Quota has to be met and the workload
doubles. The conveyor belt always overflows with
meat around 1 o'clock. So the workers double their
pace, hacking pork from shoulder bones with a
driven single-mindedness. They stare blankly, like
mules in wooden blinders, as the butchered slabs
pass by.
It is called the picnic line: 18 workers lined up on
both sides of a belt, carving meat from bone. Up to
16 million shoulders a year come down that line
here at the Smithfield Packing Co., the largest pork
production plant in the world. That works out to
about 32,000 a shift, 63 a minute, one every 17
seconds for each worker for eight and a half hours a
day. The first time you stare down at that belt you
know your body is going to give in way before the
machine ever will.
On this day the boss saw something he didn't like.
He climbed down and approached the picnic line
from behind. He leaned into the ear of a broad-shouldered black man. He had been riding him all
day, and the day before. The boss bawled him out
good this time, but no one heard what was said. The
roar of the machinery was too ferocious for that.
Still, everyone knew what was expected. They
worked harder.
The white man stood and watched for the next
two hours as the blacks worked in their groups and
the Mexicans in theirs. He stood there with his head
cocked.
At shift change the black man walked away,
hosed himself down and turned in his knives. Then
he let go. He threatened to murder the boss. He
promised to quit. He said he was losing his mind,
which made for good comedy since he was standing
near a conveyor chain of severed hogs' heads, their
mouths yoked open.
"Who that cracker think he is?" the black man
wanted to know. There were enough hogs, he said,
"not to worry about no fleck of meat being left on
the bone. Keep treating me like a Mexican
and I'll beat him."
The boss walked by just then and the
black man lowered his head.
Who Gets the Dirty Jobs
The first thing you learn in the hog plant is
the value of a sharp knife. The second thing
you learn is that you don't want to work with
a knife. Finally you learn that not everyone
has to work with a knife. Whites, blacks,
American Indians and Mexicans, they all
have their separate stations.
The few whites on the payroll tend to be
mechanics or supervisors. As for the Indians, a handful are supervisors; others tend
to get clean menial jobs like warehouse
work. With few exceptions, that leaves the
blacks and Mexicans with the dirty jobs at
the factory, one of the only places within a
50-mile radius in this muddy corner of North
Carolina where a person might make more
than $8 an hour.
While Smithfield's profits nearly doubled
in the past year, wages have remained flat.
So a lot of Americans here have quit and a
lot of Mexicans have been hired to take their
places. But more than management, the
workers see one another as the problem,
and they see the competition in skin tones.
The locker rooms are self-segregated and
so is the cafeteria. The enmity spills out into
the towns. The races generally keep to
themselves. Along Interstate 95 there are
four tumbledown bars, one for each color:
white, black, red and brown.
Language is also a divider. There are
English and Spanish lines at the Social
Security office and in the waiting rooms of
the county health clinics. This means different groups don't really understand one another and tend to be suspicious of what they
do know.
You begin to understand these things the
minute you apply for the job.
Blood and Burnout
"Treat the meat like you going to eat it
yourself," the hiring manager told the 30
applicants, most of them down on their luck
and hungry for work. The Smithfield plant
will take just about any man or woman with
a pulse and a sparkling urine sample, with
few questions asked. This reporter was
hired using his own name and acknowledged
that he was currently employed, but was not
asked where and did not say.
Slaughtering swine is repetitive, brutish
work, so grueling that three weeks on the
factory floor leave no doubt in your mind
about why the turnover is 100 percent. Five
thousand quit and five thousand are hired
every year. You hear people say, They don't
kill pigs in the plant, they kill people. So
desperate is the company for workers, its
recruiters comb the streets of New York's
immigrant communities, personnel staff
members say, and word of mouth has
reached Mexico and beyond.
The company even procures criminals.
Several at the morning orientation were
inmates on work release in green uniforms,
bused in from the county prison.
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Edward Keating/ The New York
Times
|
Bill Smith at Lumberton Middle School.
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The new workers were given a safety
speech and tax papers, shown a promotional
video and informed that there was enough
methane, ammonia and chlorine at the plant
to kill every living thing here in Bladen
County. Of the 30 new employees, the black
women were assigned to the chitterlings
room, where they would scrape feces and
worms from intestines. The black men were
sent to the butchering floor. Two free white
men and the Indian were given jobs making
boxes. This reporter declined a box job and
ended up with most of the Mexicans, doing
knife work, cutting sides of pork into smaller and smaller products.
Standing in the hiring hall that morning,
two women chatted in Spanish about their
pregnancies. A young black man had heard
enough. His small town the next county over
was crowded with Mexicans. They just
started showing up three years ago --
drawn to rural Robeson County by the plant
-- and never left. They stood in groups on
the street corners, and the young black man
never knew what they were saying. They
took the jobs and did them for less. Some
had houses in Mexico, while he lived in a
trailer with his mother.
Now here he was, trying for the only job
around, and he had to listen to Spanish, had
to compete with peasants. The world was
going to hell.
"This is America and I want to start
hearing some English, now!" he screamed.
One of the women told him where to stick
his head and listen for the echo. "Then you'll
hear some English," she said.
An old white man with a face as pinched
and lined as a pot roast complained, "The
tacos are worse than the niggers," and the
Indian leaned against the wall and laughed.
In the doorway, the prisoners shifted from
foot to foot, watching the spectacle unfold
from behind a cloud of cigarette smoke.
The hiring manager came out of his office
and broke it up just before things degenerated into a brawl. Then he handed out the
employment stubs. "I don't want no problems," he warned. He told them to report to
the plant on Monday morning to collect their
carving knives.
$7.70 an Hour, Pain All Day
Monday. The mist rose from the swamps
and by 4:45 a.m. thousands of headlamps
snaked along the old country roads. Cars
carried people from the backwoods, from
the single and doublewide trailers, from the
cinder-block houses and wooden shacks:
whites from Lumberton and Elizabethtown;
blacks from Fairmont and Fayetteville;
Indians from Pembroke; the Mexicans
from Red Springs and St. Pauls.
They converge at the Smithfield plant, a
973,000-square-foot leviathan of pipe and
steel near the Cape Fear River. The factory
towers over the tobacco and cotton fields,
surrounded by pine trees and a few of the
old whitewashed plantation houses. Built
seven years ago, it is by far the biggest
employer in this region, 75 miles west of the
Atlantic and 90 miles south of the booming
Research Triangle around Chapel Hill.
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Edward Keating/ The New York
Times
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Wade Baker, a plant worker, with his mother, Eveyln. "We're going backwards as black people economically," he says, and attributes the decline to the Mexicans.
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The workers filed in, their faces stiffened
by sleep and the cold, like saucers of milk
gone hard. They punched the clock at 5 a.m.,
waiting for the knives to be handed out, the
chlorine freshly applied by the cleaning
crew burning their eyes and throats. Nobody spoke.
The hallway was a river of brown-skinned
Mexicans. The six prisoners who were starting that day looked confused.
"What the hell's going on?" the only white
inmate, Billy Harwood, asked an older black
worker named Wade Baker.
"Oh," Mr. Baker said, seeing that the
prisoner was talking about the Mexicans. "I
see you been away for a while."
Billy Harwood had been away -- nearly
seven years, for writing phony payroll
checks from the family pizza business to
buy crack. He was Rip Van Winkle standing
there. Everywhere he looked there were
Mexicans. What he didn't know was that one
out of three newborns at the nearby Robeson County health clinic was a Latino; that
the county's Roman Catholic church had a
special Sunday Mass for Mexicans said by a
Honduran priest; that the schools needed
Spanish speakers to teach English.
With less than a month to go on his
sentence, Mr. Harwood took the pork job to
save a few dollars. The word in jail was that
the job was a cakewalk for a white man.
But this wasn't looking like any cakewalk.
He wasn't going to get a boxing job like a lot
of other whites. Apparently inmates were on
the bottom rung, just like Mexicans.
Billy Harwood and the other prisoners
were put on the picnic line. Knife work pays
$7.70 an hour to start. It is money unimaginable in Mexico, where the average wage is
$4 a day. But the American money comes at
a price. The work burns your muscles and
dulls your mind. Staring down into the meat
for hours strains your neck. After thousands
of cuts a day your fingers no longer open
freely. Standing in the damp 42-degree air
causes your knees to lock, your nose to run,
your teeth to throb.
The whistle blows at 3, you get home by 4,
pour peroxide on your nicks by 5. You take
pills for your pains and stand in a hot
shower trying to wash it all away. You hurt.
And by 8 o'clock you're in bed, exhausted,
thinking of work.
The convict said he felt cheated. He wasn't supposed to be doing Mexican work.
After his second day he was already talking
of quitting. "Man, this can't be for real," he
said, rubbing his wrists as if they'd been in
handcuffs. "This job's for an ass. They treat
you like an animal."
He just might have quit after the third
day had it not been for Mercedes Fernández, a Mexican. He took a place next to her
by the conveyor belt. She smiled at him,
showed him how to make incisions. That
was the extent of his on-the-job training. He
was peep-eyed, missing a tooth and squat
from the starchy prison food, but he acted as
if this tiny woman had taken a fancy to him.
In truth, she was more fascinated than
infatuated, she later confided. In her year at
the plant, he was the first white person she
had ever worked with.
The other workers noticed her helping the
white man, so unusual was it for a Mexican
and a white to work shoulder to shoulder, to
try to talk or even to make eye contact.
As for blacks, she avoided them. She was
scared of them. "Blacks don't want to
work," Mrs. Fernández said when the new
batch of prisoners came to work on the line.
"They're lazy."
|
Edward Keating/ The New York
Times
|
Mexicans, who work for lower pay at the plant, gather for a saint's festival.
The work force at the Smithfield plant is 60 percent
Latino, compared to 30 percent 5 years ago.
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MORE PHOTOS |
Everything about the factory cuts people
off from one another. If it's not the language
barrier, it's the noise -- the hammering of
compressors, the screeching of pulleys, the
grinding of the lines. You can hardly make
your voice heard. To get another's attention
on the cut line, you bang the butt of your
knife on the steel railings, or you lob a chunk
of meat. Mrs. Fernández would sometimes
throw a piece of shoulder at a friend across
the conveyor and wave good morning.
The Kill Floor
The kill floor sets the pace of the work,
and for those jobs they pick strong men and
pay a top wage, as high as $12 an hour. If the
men fail to make quota, plenty of others are
willing to try. It is mostly the blacks who
work the kill floor, the stone-hearted jobs
that pay more and appear out of bounds for
all but a few Mexicans.
Plant workers gave
various reasons for this: The Mexicans are
too small; they don't like blood; they don't
like heavy lifting; or just plain "We built
this country and we ain't going to hand them
everything," as one black man put it.
Kill-floor work is hot, quick and bloody.
The hog is herded in from the stockyard,
then stunned with an electric gun. It is lifted
onto a conveyor belt, dazed but not dead,
and passed to a waiting group of men wearing bloodstained smocks and blank faces.
They slit the neck, shackle the hind legs and
watch a machine lift the carcass into the air,
letting its life flow out in a purple gush, into
a steaming collection trough.
The carcass is run through a scalding
bath, trolleyed over the factory floor and
then dumped onto a table with all the force
of a quarter-ton water balloon. In the misty-red room, men slit along its hind tendons
and skewer the beast with hooks. It is again
lifted and shot across the room on a pulley
and bar, where it hangs with hundreds of
others as if in some kind of horrific dry-cleaning shop. It is then pulled through a
wall of flames and met on the other side by
more black men who, stripped to the waist
beneath their smocks, scrape away any
straggling bristles.
The place reeks of sweat and scared
animal, steam and blood. Nothing is wasted
from these beasts, not the plasma, not the
glands, not the bones. Everything is used,
and the kill men, repeating slaughterhouse
lore, say that even the squeal is sold.
The carcasses sit in the freezer overnight
and are then rolled out to the cut floor. The
cut floor is opposite to the kill floor in nearly
every way. The workers are mostly brown
-- Mexicans -- not black; the lighting yellow, not red. The vapor comes from cold
breath, not hot water. It is here that the hog
is quartered. The pieces are parceled out
and sent along the disassembly lines to be
cut into ribs, hams, bellies, loins and chops.
People on the cut lines work with a mindless fury. There is tremendous pressure to
keep the conveyor belts moving, to pack
orders, to put bacon and ham and sausage
on the public's breakfast table. There is no
clock, no window, no fragment of the world
outside. Everything is pork. If the line fails
to keep pace, the kill men must slow down,
backing up the slaughter. The boxing line
will have little to do, costing the company
payroll hours. The blacks who kill will become angry with the Mexicans who cut, who
in turn will become angry with the white
superintendents who push them.
10,000 Unwelcome Mexicans
The Mexicans never push back. They cannot. Some have legitimate work papers, but
more, like Mercedes Fernández, do not.
Even worse, Mrs. Fernández was several
thousand dollars in debt to the smugglers
who had sneaked her and her family into the
United States and owed a thousand more for
the authentic-looking birth certificate and
Social Security card that are needed to get
hired. She and her husband, Armando, expected to be in debt for years. They had
mouths to feed back home.
The Mexicans are so frightened about
being singled out that they do not even tell
one another their real names. They have
their given names, their work-paper names
and "Hey you," as their American supervisors call them. In the telling of their stories,
Mercedes and Armando Fernández insisted
that their real names be used, to protect
their identities. It was their work names
they did not want used, names bought in a
back alley in Barstow, Tex.
Rarely are the newcomers welcomed
with open arms. Long before the Mexicans
arrived, Robeson County, one of the poorest
in North Carolina, was an uneasy racial
mix. In the 1990 census, of the 100,000 people
living in Robeson, nearly 40 percent were
Lumbee Indian, 35 percent white and 25
percent black. Until a dozen years ago the
county schools were de facto segregated,
and no person of color held any meaningful
county job from sheriff to court clerk to
judge.
At one point in 1988, two armed Indian
men occupied the local newspaper office,
taking hostages and demanding that the
sheriff's department be investigated for
corruption and its treatment of minorities.
A prominent Indian lawyer, Julian Pierce,
was killed that same year, and the suspect
turned up dead in a broom closet before he
could be charged. The hierarchy of power
was summed up on a plaque that hangs in
the courthouse commemorating the dead of
World War I. It lists the veterans by color:
"white" on top, "Indian" in the middle and
"colored" on the bottom.
That hierarchy mirrors the pecking order
at the hog plant. The Lumbees -- who have
fought their way up in the county apparatus
and have built their own construction businesses -- are fond of saying they are too
smart to work in the factory. And the few
who do work there seem to end up with the
cleaner jobs.
But as reds and blacks began to make
progress in the 1990's -- for the first time an
Indian sheriff was elected, and a black man
is now the public defender -- the Latinos
began arriving. The United States Census
Bureau estimated that 1,000 Latinos were
living in Robeson County last year. People
only laugh at that number.
"A thousand? Hell, there's more than that
in the Wal-Mart on a Saturday afternoon,"
said Bill Smith, director of county health
services. He and other officials guess that
there are at least 10,000 Latinos in Robeson,
most having arrived in the past three years.
"When they built that factory in Bladen,
they promised a trickledown effect," Mr.
Smith said. "But the money ain't trickling
down this way. Bladen got the money and
Robeson got the social problems."
In Robeson there is the strain on public
resources. There is the substandard housing. There is the violence. Last year 27
killings were committed in Robeson, mostly
in the countryside, giving it a higher murder
rate than Detroit or Newark. Three Mexicans were robbed and killed last fall. Latinos have also been the victims of highway
stickups.
In the yellow-walled break room at the
plant, Mexicans talked among themselves
about their three slain men, about the midnight visitors with obscured faces and guns,
men who knew that the illegal workers used
mattresses rather than banks. Mercedes
Fernández, like many Mexicans, would not
venture out at night. "Blacks have a problem," she said. "They live in the past. They
are angry about slavery, so instead of working, they steal from us."
She and her husband never lingered in the
parking lot at shift change. That is when the
anger of a long day comes seeping out. Cars
get kicked and faces slapped over parking
spots or fender benders. The traffic is a
serpent. Cars jockey for a spot in line to
make the quarter-mile crawl along the
plant's one-lane exit road to the highway.
Usually no one will let you in. A lot of the
scuffling is between black and Mexican.
Black and Bleak
The meat was backing up on the conveyor
and spilling onto the floor. The supervisor
climbed down off the scaffolding and
chewed out a group of black women. Something about skin being left on the meat.
There was a new skinner on the job, and the
cutting line was expected to take up his
slack. The whole line groaned. First looks
flew, then people began hurling slurs at one
another in Spanish and English, words they
could hardly hear over the factory's roar.
The black women started waving their
knives at the Mexicans. The Mexicans
waved theirs back. The blades got close. One
Mexican spit at the blacks and was fired.
After watching the knife scene, Wade
Baker went home and sagged in his recliner.
CNN played. Good news on Wall Street, the
television said. Wages remained stable.
"Since when is the fact that a man doesn't
get paid good news?" he asked the TV. The
TV told him that money was everywhere --
everywhere but here.
Still lean at 51, Mr. Baker has seen life
improve since his youth in the Jim Crow
South. You can say things. You can ride in a
car with a white woman. You can stay in the
motels, eat in the restaurants. The black
man got off the white man's field.
"Socially, things are much better," Mr.
Baker said wearily over the droning television. "But we're going backwards as black
people economically. For every one of us
doing better, there's two of us doing worse."
His town, Chad Bourne, is a dreary strip
of peeling paint and warped porches and
houses as run-down as rotting teeth. Young
men drift from the cinder-block pool hall to
the empty streets and back. In the center of
town is a bank, a gas station, a chicken
shack and a motel. As you drive out, the
lights get dimmer and the homes older until
eventually you're in a flat void of tobacco
fields.
Mr. Baker was standing on the main
street with his grandson Monte watching the
Christmas parade march by when a scruffy
man approached. It was Mr. Baker's cousin,
and he smelled of kerosene and had dust in
his hair as if he lived in a vacant building
and warmed himself with a portable heater.
He asked for $2.
"It's ironic isn't it?" Mr. Baker said as his
cousin walked away only eight bits richer.
"He was asking me the same thing 10 years
ago."
A group of Mexicans stood across the
street hanging around the gas station
watching them.
"People around here always want to
blame the system," he said. "And it is true
that the system is antiblack and antipoor.
It's true that things are run by the whites.
But being angry only means you failed in
life. Instead of complaining, you got to work
twice as hard and make do."
He stood quietly with his hands in his
pockets watching the parade go by. He
watched the Mexicans across the street,
laughing in their new clothes. Then he said,
almost as an afterthought, "There's a day
coming soon where the Mexicans are going
to catch hell from the blacks, the way the
blacks caught it from the whites."
Wade Baker used to work in the post
office, until he lost his job over drugs. When
he came out of his haze a few years ago,
there wasn't much else for him but the
plant. He took the job, he said, "because I
don't have a 401K." He took it because he
had learned from his mother that you don't
stand around with your head down and your
hand out waiting for another man to drop
you a dime.
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Edward Keating/ The New York
Times
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Billy Harwood, former Smithfield worker, in Lenoir, N.C.
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Evelyn Baker, bent and gray now, grew
up a sharecropper, the granddaughter of
slaves. She was raised up in a tar-paper
shack, picked cotton and hoed tobacco for a
white family. She supported her three boys
alone by cleaning white people's homes.
In the late 60's something good started
happening. There was a labor shortage, just
as there is now. The managers at the textile
plants started giving machine jobs to black
people.
Mrs. Baker was 40 then. "I started at a
dollar and 60 cents an hour, and honey, that
was a lot of money then," she said.
The work was plentiful through the 70's
and 80's, and she was able to save money
and add on to her home. By the early 90's the
textile factories started moving away, to
Mexico. Robeson County has lost about a
quarter of its jobs since that time.
Unemployment in Robeson hovers around
8 percent, twice the national average. In
neighboring Columbus County it is 10.8 percent. In Bladen County it is 5 percent, and
Bladen has the pork factory.
Still, Mr. Baker believes that people who
want to work can find work. As far as he's
concerned, there are too many shiftless
young men who ought to be working, even if
it's in the pork plant. His son-in-law once
worked there, quit and now hangs around
the gas station where other young men sell
dope.
The son-in-law came over one day last fall
and threatened to cause trouble if the Bakers didn't let him borrow the car. This could
have turned messy; the 71-year-old Mrs.
Baker keeps a .38 tucked in her bosom.
When Wade Baker got home from the
plant and heard from his mother what had
happened, he took up his pistol and went
down to the corner, looking for his son-in-law. He chased a couple of the young men
around the dark dusty lot, waving the gun.
"Hold still so I can shoot one of you!" he
recalled having bellowed. "That would
make the world a better place!"
He scattered the men without firing. Later, sitting in his car with his pistol on the
seat and his hands between his knees, he
said, staring into the night: "There's got to
be more than this. White people drive by and
look at this and laugh."
Living It, Hating It
Billy Harwood had been working at the
plant 10 days when he was released from the
Robeson County Correctional Facility. He
stood at the prison gates in his work clothes
with his belongings in a plastic bag, waiting.
A friend dropped him at the Salvation Army
shelter, but he decided it was too much like
prison. Full of black people. No leaving after
10 p.m. No smoking indoors. "What you
doing here, white boy?" they asked him.
He fumbled with a cigarette outside the
shelter. He wanted to quit the plant. The
work stinks, he said, "but at least I ain't a
nigger. I'll find other work soon. I'm a white
man." He had hopes of landing a roofing job
through a friend. The way he saw it, white
society looks out for itself.
On the cut line he worked slowly and
allowed Mercedes Fernández and the others
to pick up his slack. He would cut only the
left shoulders; it was easier on his hands.
Sometimes it would be three minutes before
a left shoulder came down the line. When he
did cut, he didn't clean the bone; he left
chunks of meat on it.
Mrs. Fernández was disappointed by her
first experience with a white person. After a
week she tried to avoid standing by Billy
Harwood. She decided it wasn't just the
blacks who were lazy, she said.
Even so, the supervisor came by one
morning, took a look at one of Mr. Harwood's badly cut shoulders and threw it at
Mrs. Fernández, blaming her. He said obscene things about her family. She didn't
understand exactly what he said, but it
scared her. She couldn't wipe the tears from
her eyes because her gloves were covered
with greasy shreds of swine. The other
cutters kept their heads down, embarrassed.
Her life was falling apart. She and her
husband both worked the cut floor. They
never saw their daughter. They were 26 but
rarely made love anymore. All they wanted
was to save enough money to put plumbing
in their house in Mexico and start a business
there. They come from the town of Tehuacán, in a rural area about 150 miles southeast of Mexico City. His mother owns a bar
there and a home but gives nothing to them.
Mother must look out for her old age.
"We came here to work so we have a
chance to grow old in Mexico," Mrs. Fernández said one evening while cooking pork
and potatoes. Now they were into a smuggler for thousands. Her hands swelled into
claws in the evenings and stung while she
worked. She felt trapped. But she kept at it
for the money, for the $9.60 an hour. The
smuggler still had to be paid.
They explained their story this way: The
coyote drove her and her family from Barstow a year ago and left them in Robeson.
They knew no one. They did not even know
they were in the state of North Carolina.
They found shelter in a trailer park that had
once been exclusively black but was rapidly
filling with Mexicans. There was a lot of
drug dealing there and a lot of tension. One
evening, Mr. Fernández said, he asked a
black neighbor to move his business inside
and the man pulled a pistol on him.
"I hate the blacks," Mr. Fernández said
in Spanish, sitting in the break room not 10
feet from Mr. Baker and his black friends.
Mr. Harwood was sitting two tables away
with the whites and Indians.
After the gun incident, Mr. Fernández
packed up his family and moved out into the
country, to a prefabricated number sitting
on a brick foundation off in the woods alone.
Their only contact with people is through the
satellite dish. Except for the coyote. The
coyote knows where they live and comes for
his money every other month.
Their 5-year-old daughter has no playmates in the back country and few at school.
That is the way her parents want it. "We
don't want her to be American," her mother
said.
'We Need a Union'
The steel bars holding a row of hogs gave
way as a woman stood below them. Hog
after hog fell around her with a sickening
thud, knocking her senseless, the connecting
bars barely missing her face. As co-workers
rushed to help the woman, the supervisor
spun his hands in the air, a signal to keep
working. Wade Baker saw this and shook his
head in disgust. Nothing stops the disassembly lines.
"We need a union," he said later in the
break room. It was payday and he stared at
his check: $288. He spoke softly to the black
workers sitting near him. Everyone is convinced that talk of a union will get you fired.
After two years at the factory, Mr. Baker
makes slightly more than $9 an hour toting
meat away from the cut line, slightly less
than $20,000 a year, 45 cents an hour less
than Mrs. Fernández.
"I don't want to get racial about the
Mexicans," he whispered to the black workers. "But they're dragging down the pay.
It's pure economics. They say Americans
don't want to do the job. That ain't exactly
true. We don't want to do it for $8. Pay $15
and we'll do it."
These men knew that in the late 70's,
when the meatpacking industry was centered in northern cities like Chicago and
Omaha, people had a union getting them $18
an hour. But by the mid-80's, to cut costs,
many of the packing houses had moved to
small towns where they could pay a lower,
nonunion wage.
The black men sitting around the table
also felt sure that the Mexicans pay almost
nothing in income tax, claiming 8, 9, even 10
exemptions. The men believed that the illegal workers should be rooted out of the
factory. "It's all about money," Mr. Baker
said.
His co-workers shook their heads. "A
plantation with a roof on it," one said.
For their part, many of the Mexicans in
Tar Heel fear that a union would place their
illegal status under scrutiny and force them
out. The United Food and Commercial
Workers Union last tried organizing the
plant in 1997, but the idea was voted down
nearly two to one.
One reason Americans refused to vote for
the union was because it refuses to take a
stand on illegal laborers. Another reason
was the intimidation. When workers arrived
at the plant the morning of the vote, they
were met by Bladen County deputy sheriffs
in riot gear. "Nigger Lover" had been
scrawled on the union trailer.
Five years ago the work force at the plant
was 50 percent black, 20 percent white and
Indian, and 30 percent Latino, according to
union statistics. Company officials say those
numbers are about the same today. But
from inside the plant, the breakdown appears to be more like 60 percent Latino, 30
percent black, 10 percent white and red.
Sherri Buffkin, a white woman and the
former director of purchasing who testified
before the National Labor Relations Board
in an unfair-labor-practice suit brought by
the union in 1998, said in an interview that
the company assigns workers by race. She
also said that management had kept lists of
union sympathizers during the '97 election,
firing blacks and replacing them with Latinos. "I know because I fired at least 15 of
them myself," she said.
The company denies those accusations.
Michael H. Cole, a lawyer for Smithfield
who would respond to questions about the
company's labor practices only in writing,
said that jobs at the Tar Heel plant were
awarded through a bidding process and not
assigned by race. The company also denies
ever having kept lists of union sympathizers
or singled out blacks to be fired.
The hog business is important to North
Carolina. It is a multibillion-dollar-a-year
industry in the state, with nearly two pigs
for every one of its 7.5 million people. And
Smithfield Foods, a publicly traded company based in Smithfield, Va., has become the
No. 1 producer and processor of pork in the
world. It slaughters more than 20 percent of
the nation's swine, more than 19 million
animals a year.
The company, which has acquired a network of factory farms and slaughterhouses,
worries federal agriculture officials and legislators, who see it siphoning business from
smaller farmers. And environmentalists
contend that Smithfield's operations contaminate local water supplies. (The Environmental Protection Agency fined the
company $12.6 million in 1996 after its processing plants in Virginia discharged pollutants into the Pagan River.) The chairman
and chief executive, Joseph W. Luter III,
declined to be interviewed.
Smithfield's employment practices have
not been so closely scrutinized. And so every
year, more Mexicans get hired. "An illegal
alien isn't going to complain all that much,"
said Ed Tomlinson, acting supervisor of the
Immigration and Naturalization Service bureau in Charlotte.
But the company says it does not knowingly hire illegal aliens. Smithfield's lawyer,
Mr. Cole, said all new employees must
present papers showing that they can legally work in the United States. "If any
employee's documentation appears to be
genuine and to belong to the person presenting it," he said in his written response,
"Smithfield is required by law to take it at
face value."
The naturalization service -- which has
only 18 agents in North Carolina -- has not
investigated Smithfield because no one has
filed a complaint, Mr. Tomlinson said.
"There are more jobs than people," he said,
"and a lot of Americans will do the dirty
work for a while and then return to their
couches and eat bonbons and watch Oprah."
Not Fit for a Convict
| About This Series |
|
Two generations after the end of legal discrimination, race still ignites
political debates -- over Civil War flags, for example, or police profiling.
But the wider public discussion of race relations seems muted by a
full-employment economy and by a sense, particularly among many whites,
that the time of large social remedies is past. Race relations are being
defined less by political action than by daily experience, in schools, in
sports arenas, in pop culture and at worship, and especially in the
workplace. These encounters -- race relations in the most literal, everyday
sense -- make up this series of reports, the outcome of a yearlong
examination by a team of Times reporters.
|
When Billy Harwood was in solitary confinement, he liked a book to get him through.
A guard would come around with a cartful.
But when the prisoner asked for a new book,
the guard, before handing it to him, liked to
tear out the last 50 pages. The guard was a
real funny guy.
"I got good at making up my own endings," Billy Harwood said during a break.
"And my book don't end standing here. I
ought to be on that roof any day now."
But a few days later, he found out that the
white contractor he was counting on already
had a full roofing crew. They were Mexicans
who were working for less than he was
making at the plant.
During his third week cutting hogs, he got
a new supervisor -- a black woman. Right
away she didn't like his work ethic. He went
too slow. He cut out to the bathroom too
much.
"Got a bladder infection?" she asked,
standing in his spot when he returned. She
forbade him to use the toilet.
He boiled. Mercedes Fernández kept her
head down. She was certain of it, she said:
he was the laziest man she had ever met.
She stood next to a black man now, a prisoner from the north. They called him K. T.
and he was nice to her. He tried Spanish, and
he worked hard.
When the paychecks were brought around
at lunch time on Friday, Billy Harwood got
paid for five hours less than everyone else,
even though everyone punched out on the
same clock. The supervisor had docked him.
The prisoners mocked him. "You might
be white," K. T. said, "but you came in
wearing prison greens and that makes you
good as a nigger."
The ending wasn't turning out the way
Billy Harwood had written it: no place to
live and a job not fit for a donkey. He quit
and took the Greyhound back to his parents'
trailer in the hills.
When Mrs. Fernández came to work the
next day, a Mexican guy going by the name
of Alfredo was standing in Billy Harwood's
spot.
