HOGGING THE PROFITS - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 111

that have been tracking the industry for years note that, despite the moratorium, these existing lagoons con-
tinue to expand. 49
And Smithfield's slaughterhouses are no better for the environment than its factory farms. The com-
pany's plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, is the second largest in the world, slaughtering some 34,000 hogs
each day. 50 It pulls 2 million gallons of water from the local aquifer daily and returns about 3 million gal-
lons of wastewater to the Cape Fear River. 51 Like Smithfield's plants elsewhere, the facility has been cited
for several environmental violations. 52
In 1997 the company received one of the largest Clean Water Act fines in U.S. history after officials
found that Smithfield and two of its subsidiaries in Virginia failed to install decent pollution equipment and
to treat its waste, resulting in five thousand violations of the company's permitted limits for phosphorus,
fecal coliform, and other pollutants. The pollutants flowed into the Pagan River, the James River, and the
Chesapeake Bay for more than five years. 53 Judge Rebecca Beach Smith stated that Smithfield's violations
“had a significant impact on the environment and the public, and thus in total their violations of the efflu-
ent limits were extremely serious.” 54

The company was fined $12.6 million, 55

which amounted to 0.035

percent of its annual sales. 56
But it is not just the plant's environmental record that makes it so infamous. It's also Smithfield's labor
practices.
According to “Packaged with Abuse: Safety and Health Conditions at Smithfield Packing's Tar Heel
Plant,” a report commissioned by the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW), Smithfield
has engaged in abusive labor practices in several ways. The report alleges that Smithfield employee
Vanessa McCloud's job for seven years was to cut the skin off of frozen pork as it came down the line at
breakneck speeds. One day, Vanessa slipped a disk in her back while on the job. She was not able to return
to work immediately and was fired, according to the report. She received no worker's compensation and
has since applied to Medicaid in hopes of paying her medical bills. She has no idea how she will support
herself and her children because of her debilitating injury. 57
The report discloses that Vanessa's experience is typical of workers at the plant. To meet production
goals, the processing lines move extremely fast, and workers who fall behind have reported being verbally
abused or even fired. Others do their best to keep up, but very few work in the plant for more than a few
months before experiencing an injury from the grueling work. 58 The list of injuries reported at the plant
is lengthy—the report claims that repetitive motion disorders, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, contusions,
blunt traumas from slipping and falling on wet floors, cuts and punctures, infections causing the fingernail
to separate from the finger, fractures, amputations, burns, hernias, rashes, and swelling are all potential
dangers to workers—and injuries are on the rise. From January to July 2006, 463 injuries were reported at
the Tar Heel plant, up from 421 during the same period the previous year. 59
The report goes on to say that instead of helping the wounded workers, Smithfield uses intimidation to
prevent them from reporting their injuries. Even when they do report them, they are often denied workers'
compensation. Then, because of their disabilities, they frequently cannot find gainful employment again. 60
Smithfield is engaging in a legal vendetta; it is suing the UFCW, the research group that wrote the re-
port, and others—no surprise, given the company's resources and access to top-notch law firms. The law-
suit argues that

as part of the Defendants' ongoing scheme to extort money and property from Smithfield, Defendants' inten-
tionally and maliciously caused to be published in the Report false, misleading and baseless information about
the working conditions at Smithfield's Tar Heel plant. . . . [T]he entire basis for the Report was to facilitate the
Defendants' collective desire to portray Smithfield's Tar Heel plant as an unsafe workplace in which safety laws
and standards were habitually and intentionally violated, as part of their effort to damage Smithfield's business
reputation. 61