Is Fighting for Justice at Smithfield Racketeering?

[Omaha Steve]

http://labornotes.org/node/1559

— Jane Slaughter

Is it illegal for an activist group or union to criticize a company’s business practices? Is it a “conspiracy” if advocates call for boycotts, organize rallies, or press for resolutions from elected bodies?

Smithfield Foods, the largest producer of pork products in the world, is hoping so, after a lawsuit it filed last October passed an initial court challenge. The suit aims to halt the United Food and Commercial Workers’ campaign to unionize 4,600 workers in its Tar Heel, North Carolina, slaughterhouse. The company is using a 1970 statute originally designed to battle gangsters’ extortion schemes—the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).


Since the UFCW’s Justice at Smithfield campaign began in 2006, the union has asked city councils to pass resolutions and boycott Smithfield products, and demonstrated at stockholder meetings (above). The company cites these actions as evidence of a racketeering conspiracy. Photo: Metro Washington Council, AFL-CIO.


“This is a terrible menace to rights of free speech and protest, and constitutional rights and freedom of expression,” said Lance Compa, Cornell University labor relations professor and an expert on the meatpacking industry. “It’s a really dangerous new offensive that employers have seized on to try to snuff out legitimate protest about abusive employer conduct.”

Jobs with Justice, which is named as a defendant in the suit, is launching a campaign against corporations’ use of the RICO act, which has surfced intermittently as one legal tactic among an arsenal to silence corporate critics. The act has been used to file suits in recent months against campaigns by the Service Employees (SEIU) at the Wackenhut security firm, and the UFCW at an Arizona-based grocery chain.

JWJ expects to work with unions, central labor councils, and city councils to pass fresh resolutions condemning the lawsuit.

“Our goal is to protect the right of not only unions to engage in these activities, but everybody fighting corporate abuses,” said Russ Davis, director of Massachusetts JWJ. “Hopefully we can deter corporations from going down this road. But if these things occur again we want to be ready.”

FULL story at link.

[angstlessk]

1. So, basically, the more people you commit an injustice against

the better off you are, legally? since 50 people who march and complain and try to convince others of the injustice are really SOL, but, 5,000 people can stir up a fuss BECAUSE OF THE INJUSTICE!!!, but the employers then get to say it was a conspiracy to what defraud? it indeed is a conspiracy to get FREEKING JUSTICE...Hell the Constitution was a conspiracy against the King of England!