Should Illegal Workers Be Unionized?

A walkout of meatpacking workers in North Carolina could provide another opening for unions seeking to organize immigrant workers.

Julio Vargas sits quietly in a small gray house in Red Springs, North Carolina, making notes in his native Spanish before another day of working to organize Smithfield Foods meatpacking workers. Vargas, originally from Mexico, was fired from his sanitation contractor job for Smithfield, in nearby Tar Heel, N.C., in 2003 after protesting working conditions. Now, an organizer for the United Food Commercial Workers Union, he is part of a growing nationwide effort to organize what was once considered a no-win labor population: Latino immigrant workers.

The Latino immigrant workers at Smithfield, the world's largest hog-processing plant, are not union members. But a month ago nearly 1,000 of them walked off the job for two days, protesting hundreds of recent firings in a crackdown on undocumented workers. The company quickly capitulated and agreed to rehire the workers, and made other concessions, like meeting with the workers' representatives and agreeing that no one would be disciplined for the walkout.